How universities can survive the ‘Great Policy Backlash’

Global universities need to be agile and adaptable if they want to survive the ‘Great Policy Backlash’ that has seen governments switch from strategies to grow international student numbers to suddenly slamming on the brakes in a panicked response to rising anti-immigration sentiment, according to international higher education experts.

From the ban on foreign masters students bringing their dependants when coming to study in the United Kingdom to caps on international student numbers, first in Canada – and then proposed caps in the Netherlands and Australia – higher education is under attack from government flip-flopping despite the financial damage losing foreign student fees will cause universities.

Dr David Pilsbury, chief development officer at Oxford International Education Group in the UK, told an international online audience on 9 September: “It has never been this political in all of my 40 years in higher education.

“I have never seen the intensity of focus, and it’s only going to get worse across all dimensions of our activity. Immigration, funding and academic freedom issues are just the beginning.”

He was speaking during a webinar hosted by Studyportals, the Dutch-based global study choice platform used by around 50 million international students to find English-language study programmes abroad.

The subject was: ‘Who wins when everybody seems to be losing? Strategies for surviving the Great Policy Backlash’.

It brought together experts from the UK, United States and the Netherlands, and an international audience of hundreds working in international student recruitment.

Adaptable and agile

Edwin van Rest, a co-founder and current chief executive officer of Studyportals, said there was no one strategy to help international student recruiters overcome the challenges caused by sudden changes in governmental policy-making.

“It’s much more dependent on which environment you’re in, what you’re offering, which segments you are serving.

“There are institutions that are doing well. It’s all about being adaptable,” he explained.

Van Rest suggested the quotation often (wrongly) attributed to the English naturalist Charles Darwin for guidance: “It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

As with the Australian government cap on foreign students, which looks to hit the Group of Eight institutions – “the most reputable universities in the country” – the hardest, Van Rest warned: “Governments are making interventions in the market that really change the game from one day to the other.”

Whether surviving or winning, Van Rest said: “It is about seeing the change, spotting it earlier than others, knowing what it means in the new market situation, what will work, and where the opportunities are, and then being agile to capture those opportunities.

“Having a real tap on real real-time market data is even more important when the market is dynamic.”

Beyond enrolments

He urged universities around the world to learn from successful rivals who are focusing on “a sustainable end goal to optimise towards, rather than in-between goals”, such as enrolments or demand or student numbers.

Van Rest called this the “beyond enrolment” approach.

For international student recruitment, or student recruitment in the digital space, this used to be marketing-based with institutions “optimising towards marketing key performance indicators (KPIs), like clicks and leads and applications. But that’s only the starting point”.

Van Rest said the first step beyond enrolment is “onboarding these students well” and ensuring “you import a diverse student cohort” to become less dependent on certain source markets.

But even that is not enough!

“Retaining those students with high satisfaction is the next optimisation step, and we’ve done quite a lot of innovative work with some of those winning institutions where we optimise speed to graduate and graduation rate and graduation grades, because ultimately that’s where the education journey ends,” said Van Rest.

Relevant employment

However, while that can mean success for the student and for the institution, with many “institutions getting a lot of their financial return at that graduation moment”, that shouldn’t be the end of the story.

Van Rest said: “With a couple of innovative institutions, we’re taking things to the next level, which is relevant employment as actual, real success.

“We know more and more students are ‘return on investment-driven’. And they are looking to education as a means, not as an end goal.

“Also, governments are increasingly seeing international education not only as a source of tuition incomes and local spending but as a way to attract talent.”

Studyportals is working, for example, with an institution to look at graduation rates of certain student cohorts, and the time students take to graduate from a masters programmes, and the average grade.

“This is just one example, and the segmentation here is by the citizenship of the student,” he said.

This can be broken down even further, said Van Rest, to the city, or even neighbourhood level when recruiting students from a country like India to help find students who will be the “best fit” for different institutions.

US: The ‘sleeping giant’

This point was taken up during the webinar by Jill Blondin, associate vice-provost for global initiatives at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, United States.

She said the US was still something of a “sleeping giant” despite recruiting over a million international students in 2022-23, according to Institute of International Education’s Open Doors’ data.

Blondin said the US offers “unparalleled opportunity for international students” with more than 4,000 higher education institutions and huge diversity – from colleges where students can get associate degrees in two years and doctoral institutions like Virginia, to masters-only universities and undergraduate-only institutions – all of varying sizes.

“We also have historically black colleges and schools focused on art and design just to name a few of the different types of institutions.

“So, it’s important to look at the individual students and not be monolithic and, as Edwin [Van Rest] said in his presentation, to grow our enrolments from India, for instance, in terms of good curricular fit [and] find the students who would really flourish at our institution,” she said.

Visa denial rates

Blondin said among the major challenges preventing US higher education from reaching its potential and waking up from its slumber was the high denial rate of visas for the Global South, particularly India.

“Not only visa denials, but also the difficulty in getting visa appointments in a country like India, which had seen a 35% increase in students coming to the US to study since last year,” she said.

Another major challenge was the cost of studying in the US.

Blondin said her university was looking at the spare capacity to grow student numbers, particularly on Virginia’s engineering and business masters programmes, and was offering significant discounts of more than US$10,000 to both international and ‘out-of-state’ students.

Blondin said her university was also taking on board Van Rest’s point about being more agile and flexible and looking at adapting masters degrees to shorter courses for students looking for professional development rather than pursuing study to the doctoral level.

Pilsbury told the webinar Canada was also looking at moving some of its masters degrees to the UK’s one-year model. “That will be a big cultural shift for them, but we know some of the institutions in Canada are looking at doing this,” he said.

Summing up, Van Rest said the key to not just surviving, but also winning is: “Be agile, be adaptable to change.”/universityworldnews.com