The institutional dashboards will provide international recruitment teams with data revealing a clearer picture of current visa processing by source market and identify visa refusal hotspots.

Universities can also compare their own visa trends against benchmarked data from the UniQuest partner group, the company noted.

“Students’ abilities to get study visas plays a huge role in international enrolment outcomes, yet universities have so little in-cycle data around visa refusal rates and factors,” Rachel Fletcher, CEO and co-founder of UniQuest said. “It makes enrolment forecasting difficult.”

By monitoring visa refusal rates and reasons across markets, institutions will be able to pivot international recruitment strategies in time to “make an impact on their upcoming intakes”, UniQuest continued.

“At UniQuest, we’re committed to investing in insights that help our partners deliver the best possible service to students and enrol ahead of the curve,” Fletcher added.

“[The] extra layer of data intelligence will sharpen our university partners’ competitive edge”

“Our new visa refusal dashboards will provide that extra layer of data intelligence that will sharpen our university partners’ competitive edge.”

In 2018, UniQuest sought to address another ‘blind spot’ for university admissions and marketing teams via its analysis of “stealth applicants”.

“We’re committed to equipping our partners with insights to better inform their strategic planning and this stealth research is a significant part of that given how prevalent international stealth applicants are,” UniQuest’s director of behavioural insights Jennifer Parsons said at the time.

To date, UniQuest has engaged 1.2m students and managed over 20m student communications resulting in 80,000 enrolments for higher education institutions across the UK and US.