When former Prime Minster Malcolm Fraser borrowed a quote from George Bernard Shaw and said that “life was not meant to be easy”, he was probably referring to the international education sector in Australia at present.
At a time when international education providers are busy working out survival strategies in the brave new world of the student number caps, education agents are also busy re-positioning their services to ensure that they will not be at a loss under the new rules.
While agencies have their role and are established, bona fide ones do a great job in supporting students and institutions alike, it does not take unscrupulous ones long to establish new money-making patterns.
For instance, as reported by Koala News, now that several education providers are facing unavoidable closures or at least cuts to the course numbers they can deliver while breaking even, students may be in dire straits. Still, rather shamelessly, these (unscrupulous) agents approach students with recommendations of courses to switch to. Given that these students are already onshore and can be enrolled on top of the proposed commencement cap numbers. One must ask if they care about the students’ welfare.
While capping commencements from offshore may play its part, a number of unethical (towards both the students and the education providers) agency practices have been flourishing all along. There are seemingly never-ending cases of students being misled by the agencies about the courses and the providers, approached halfway through their degrees and lobbied to switch to other institutes for more agency fees to be collected by the greedy agents. This contributes to dropout rates and student dissatisfaction. Furthermore, institutions are not already troubled enough, cases of agent misconduct can result in further regulatory scrutiny to prove that compliance requirements are being met.
This ‘poaching’ is a practice that needs to end.
One of the reasons that the student fees have been growing as fast as we wish our economy would is that we are now seeing up to 30% of the student fees collected go directly to the study agencies in commission payments. It is rather transparent that the negative impact of the education agents’ malpractices extends way beyond students and training providers to the broader community.
Being a pracademic who specialises in the field of digital transformation, I often wonder how essential the study agency services are for the institutions to recruit sufficient numbers of students successfully without any 3rd party involvement.
What services can the education agencies deliver that the training providers cannot set up and manage directly to the point of the respective agencies acting as pivotal international student acquisition partners?
Many industries appreciate the digital age’s perks, alleviating the need for the middleman. Many international education providers remain dependent on education agencies.
Curiously, a quick scan of education providers’ websites suggests that the majority are already equipped with direct enquiry and sometimes even direct enrollment digital channels that could be deployed to process student applications from around the globe.
Given the competition for students, capping, and the agency fees, is now the time for us to see an increased effort in the direct recruitment of students?
