Oxford International Education Group has revealed a new backend business division aiming to streamline the application processing, conversion and student enrolment journey for education providers.
The Education Services business unit will also seek to help partner institutions with their “unique recruitment priorities”.
Among the services the new unit will offer is outsourced enquiry and application conversion for Universities from recruitment to compliance, TNE and recruitment services, new agent acquisition and training as well as agent management, service and support. Direct students will also be offered strategic support, advice, continuous service and support.
A conversion team will be dedicated to delivering a higher conversion rate than industry standard. Currently over 60 employees based across the UK, India and Hong Kong are part of the division, and OIEG continues to hire new staff and expand locations to deliver support across multiple time zones.
“With the launch of the Education Services Division we are delighted to be providing a unique solution to the higher education community,” said Lil Bremermann-Richard, Group CEO of Oxford International.
“We are offering a streamlined processing resource as a service to universities globally”
“We are offering a streamlined processing resource as a service to universities globally, allowing them to focus on their core offerings while Oxford International deals with the backend work of recruitment.”
The full-service backend operations product will sit alongside OIEG’s pathway provision activities, including embedded colleges and the Oxford International Digital Institute.
The provider added that the business unit was created in response to the “rapidly changing international context for universities and the changing nature of public-private sector partnerships in the sector”.
The service – which will be led by chief development officer David Pilsbury – will focus on an “increased” regulatory burden imposed by the UK Home Office to ensure institutions can remain fully compliant, with “robust quality control mechanisms and operational requirements”.
“We are delighted to launch Education Services and offer new and existing partners a truly seamless end-to-end solution that delivers a sustainable stream of converted and compliant students,” Pilsbury added.
“[We] look forward to developing into other areas where we can be of service to universities on a global basis.”
This is not the first time an education business has diversified into outsourced recruitment and processing for other educators: GUS Global operates InUni and lists a number of partners on its website.
OIEG has been offering a outsourced recruitment service for the last four years, which “has been extremely successful”.
“Universities have become incredibly complex, so we offer the opportunity to move some of those tasks that can be done more efficiently and effectively outside the university into a partner organisation freeing up resources that they can apply to the things they do best that only they can do,” the provider said.
Each client institution will have a dedicated team that receives and processes enquiries and applications.
“The operational model has been honed, fine-tuned & continuously upgraded over several years to create a framework that delivers best-in-class performance,” OIEG added.
“Through this, we will scale further without issue as we have built the infrastructure – human and IT – to work with large volumes, processed at pace, with low or zero error rates.”
