Dwindling staff teams lacking relevant experience could hold back UK universities’ efforts to recruit overseas students, experts have warned.

In particular, as universities’ finances have become strained, some have cut back on in-country representation. Such figures are typically responsible for recruitment and maintaining relationships with agents, while serving as linchpins for institutions that are looking to set up a branch campus. Typically, they are provided to universities by third parties, but while the representative remains formally employed by the third party, they work exclusively for the university in question.

Another problem, according to Giles Jacobs, former regional director (East Asia) at Aberystwyth University who is now working as a China-based consultant, is a “chronic lack of experience” within international offices at UK universities.

“When you look at the falling international [student] numbers in the UK, there’s so many elements you can blame. [You can blame] rising geopolitical tension, you can blame Brexit, you can blame Covid…No one has quite identified [an increasing] lack of experience as what is curtailing any chance a British university might have of turning its fortunes around,” he said.

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A regional manager in the UK typically leads a team of two to four staff in China, he said. But that manager often “isn’t that much more experienced than the staff on the ground”.

Sagar Bahadur, senior vice-president at Manifest Global and board member of Acumen, agreed that there has been a move towards “leaner” teams and “younger” in-country reps, which has led him to question whether “universities are building the right combination of capabilities and seniority for the strategic ambition they have for a market”.

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While Bahadur said there is a lot that a younger generation brings to the role, including “energy, digital fluency [and] new ideas”, he maintained that “experience brings something different”.

What is currently lacking is a broader understanding of how policy and government systems work, as well as judgement “that comes from having seen markets evolve through different cycles” and from knowledge of competitors. 

“That tension is increasingly coming through in conversations across the sector, and I think it deserves much more attention,” he said.

Suneet Singh Kochar, CEO of consultancy Fateh Education, endorsed Bahadur’s view that universities are making increasingly junior hires for TNE roles. His own primary concern is that some in-country representation in India has “never travelled outside of India”.

“And then they’re recommending the [host] country. [But they] haven’t seen the country. [They] haven’t seen the institution,” he said.

But Vincenzo Raimo, a higher education consultant who works with universities on their international strategies, was less sure that a university’s decision to reduce in-country staff was necessarily a false economy.

“It certainly can be, particularly if universities lose market knowledge, relationships and institutional memory in the process,” said Raimo, who was previously pro vice-chancellor for global engagement at the University of Reading and chair of its Malaysia campus.

“But, equally, maintaining an office or team simply because it has always been there isn’t necessarily sensible either. The important question is whether the resource is doing something distinctive and valuable, and whether the university understands its contribution and cost.”

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One of the major problems identified by Raimo is that universities are deploying a combination of international strategies – including agents, in-person representation and UK-based staff travelling to markets – without being “sufficiently clear about what each is there to do, where they overlap, and what return [the university is] getting from each”. 

“Universities have layered tools on top of each other, and potentially that’s where the problem is. That’s why people are now starting to assess the cost of each of those layers and the value of each of those.”

Jacobs shared Raimo’s view that understanding what a university “is trying to achieve” in a particular market should be clear.

He criticised a “scattergun” strategy of in-country reps “running around all over China, trying to cover as many bases as possible, but doing nothing at the end of the 12 months other than running themselves into the ground and blowing a huge hole in the budget because they’re trying to cover every blade of grass”.

He argued that “deeper engagement” and “committing to a smaller segment of the market” is what is needed.

Julian Fisher, cofounder of Venture Education, said the “narrative gap” between parent-facing representatives in China and the UK university leadership has “never been wider”.

While maintaining there are “highly capable representatives” in China, Fisher agreed that some “are a lot more junior”.

He was also critical of how their role had changed to focus mainly on “coordinat[ing] relationships with agents”.

“It means that there’s very little connection between the university – or anyone employed by the university – and the agents themselves,” he said.

Against the backdrop of a “looming demographic cliff in China”, Fisher cautioned that universities that have not “forged any meaningful relationships in the country through representation” risk being “left behind”.

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rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com