The issues surrounding agency probity, quality assurance and compliance – and the ambivalent attitudes they evince from stakeholders – have persisted unresolved since the origins of global student mobility at scale, some 30 years ago.
The reason for that? Simply put, it’s a tough nut to crack.
How to monitor standards in another country? Who has jurisdiction globally? How can anything be enforced, and communicated legally? Who’s going to pay for it? These are the central questions that stop us from taking action.
But the stakes are now higher than ever before. The volume of students studying abroad is at its highest ever, at 6.4 million annually, and set to nearly double by the end of the decade.
And the reality is, well over 50% of those students will have begun their journey at a local agent’s office.
Our recruitment ecosystem was never designed with this future in mind. It evolved piecemeal and unregulated, almost unnoticed.
This evolution has vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the unscrupulous. At their worst, these can lead to grossly misleading claims, financial and document fraud, modern slavery and human trafficking.
It is no exaggeration to say that, at its absolute worst, this can culminate – and has done – in human tragedy. Students taking their lives because of their shattered dreams of being an international student.
This is in spite of excellent efforts in some destinations to define good practice; actual agency quality frameworks. But the limits of these are being exposed.
In the UK over the last fortnight, we have had a few wake-up calls about the status quo. The abuse of the student loan system as an ATM. Then, the recent government white paper on immigration policy highlighted asylum seekers who recently arrived in the UK on a study visa, and it bared its teeth on what it could do if the vulnerabilities in the recruitment system aren’t fixed.
Then, news subsequently broke that the University of Greater Manchester has suspended its vice-chancellor because of allegations of financial irregularity, including the alleged embezzlement of commission payments to third party agents.
These lay bare the vulnerability in the status quo, and challenges our reliance (and faith) in the unimpeachable integrity of public institutions.
The vulnerabilities of the recruitment ecosystem only adds fuel to the demonisation of international students in immigration debates. It only takes one small incident for the right to seize upon it as ‘the problem with foreign students’. And we have seen where that leads in all four of the major study destinations recently.
There are some institutions who believe that, by boycotting the agent interface, the agency ecosystem will wither and die
That, in turn, leads to another weakness in the current discussion.
There are some institutions that believe that, by boycotting the agent interface, the agency ecosystem will wither and die. I have heard that argument for 30 years, and it is showing more resilience than ever. What’s more, boycotting the system is not affirmative action. It helps no one, and is, arguably, enabling. And it publicly admits there’s a problem.
Yet the blowback from the immigration scandals stigmatise all international students on campus, however they made their way there. So even institutions which don’t engage with agents should engage with the solution, for the benefit of all international students and the international education sector as a whole, globally.
Where is this going? First, I think all stakeholders need to step back from the recruitment edifice we have built, objectively, and ask ourselves whether we would do things differently now. The answer to that has to be ‘yes’, for all of the reasons I have rehearsed. There are demonstrable vulnerabilities in the system that are being exploited.
Surely, that’s now not arguable, and to do so is actually irresponsible. So, too is inaction.
What we need to do is build on the good work that has already been done, such as the AQF and the ESOS frameworks. We need to share best practice globally, and devise and co-create an independent, non-aligned, market-neutral oversight and enforcement mechanism, which can join up policy and national initiatives in destination and source countries. Its job will be to help institutions fulfil their national AQF, more consistently, efficiently and securely, and thereby assure policy makers that the sector is effectively self-regulating.
There is precedent for such initiatives that have worked, but it requires a collective will. The World Gold Council was established by global stakeholders as a non-profit organisation, one of whose precepts was, and is, the elimination of exploitation and abuse in the gold mining industry. There are lots of precedents outside our sector that we should look to.
Reviewing these, it becomes clear that there are two ingredients for change that are necessary. A coming together of stakeholders, and a fully independent, non-profit agency both to unify them, and to make it their core mission to quality assure the ecosystem, engender trust in it, and constantly improve it – for the benefit of everyone, and, in international education specifically, to defuse the weaponisation of international students in domestic immigration debates.
If this thesis is accepted, then everything else – the finance, the governance, the people to do it – will fall into place. I know that from the many people and organisations, even Government Departments, that are contacting me on a daily basis to get behind GERSA.
This is not disruption; it is not revolution. It is a convocation to all stakeholders to do the right thing in international education.
Come together. Right now. Over GERSA.
GERSA aims to be the Global Education Recruitment Standards Authority. A fully independent, not‑for‑profit body dedicated to safeguarding and strengthening the movement of students across borders. Check out gersa.org for more details.
