Education Agents as Competitiveness Enhancers of Australian Universities by Internationalisation Facilitation

Agent use is common across Canada's international education systems (which are defined here to mean Canada's public and private elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions over which the provinces and territories have jurisdiction).Use is concentrated in the postsecondary system and in jurisdictions that are top destinations for international students (Appendix A illustrates agent use by jurisdiction).• A notable exception is Quebec: administrators surveyed for this report reported minimal use of agents.Participants there described a very different recruitment environment and noted that they were unable to tap into the global demand for English-language instruction.Instead, some institutions promote "solidarity" or cultural exchange with other countries in la Francophonie and arrange scholarships for many international students.This philosophy is reminiscent of an earlier era in Canadian internationalization, when the emphasis was on educational opportunity as aid, not trade.• The multi-jurisdictional nature of the agent phenomenon, coupled with the competitive recruitment environment, has slowed efforts to develop regulatory frameworks in many destination countries.Not surprisingly, most efforts have involved persuading agents and jurisdictions to voluntarily comply with codes of practice and conduct.While concerns about immigration-agent misconduct initially preoccupied Canadian policy-makers, attention has pivoted to international student recruitment.Proposed new regulations at the federal and provincial/territorial levels would require educational institutions to obtain government approval in order to recruit and enrol international students.Manitoba is the first jurisdiction in Canada to have introduced regulations requiring institutions to make public which agents represent them and obliging agents to abide by a code of conduct and practice.• Most interview participants outside Quebec described agents as indispensable partners in recruitment activities.They illustrated an intensely competitive recruitment environment and suggested that agents were necessary to expanding their reach and helping them achieve a scale that would be unattainable otherwise.Institutions often use agents to compensate for the lack of name recognition overseas that might otherwise have drawn students to them.• Agent recruitment and management practices vary significantly within Canada's education systems.In most provinces and territories, educational institutions that employ agents are responsible for their oversight.Many make use of best practices and codes of conduct developed by educational organizations like the British Council and the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE).Some institutions have developed robust agent-management protocols, including ongoing training opportunities and provisions for purging unproductive or non-compliant agents.Others do minimal screening and rely on complaints from students and parents or information from colleagues at other institutions.This range is interesting, given that a majority of survey respondents reported feeling confident that their agents provided accurate information.It may be that for some administrators, "no news is good news" -implying that a lack of complaints means that agents are performing well.• One hundred and forty-five respondents completed a survey that was distributed in both French and English.Most respondents from the education sector -about 78 per centreported that their institution used agents.The top countries in which agents are working to recruit students to Canadian institutions are as follows (in descending order): China, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, India, France, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Russia.• Interviews with 12 education officials and government administrators provided additional means for data collection and offered richer detail than could be obtained through the survey alone.

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