In a world where competition is fierce and rankings dominate, can the UK sector center the quality of international education?

The UK government has been very clear during its International Education Strategy about what it wants to see in international recruitment: a focus on quality.

We will work closely with the sector to ensure that our institutions can recruit international higher education students in a way that maintains quality and student experience. This includes considering factors such as skills and admissions requirements, appropriate infrastructure, local housing and support systems, while respecting the autonomy of the institution.

Quality is already a fairly complex concept in education. Applying this to international education gets even more complicated. This has a lot to do with the students themselves. That is, the path through which you receive the offer, the learning experience, and the results you achieve. But it’s also about the factors that contribute to making the UK one of the world’s leading destinations for international education. how the immigration system treats students; The world-renowned reputation of British universities for academic quality; and people’s impressionistic sense of what institutions “count” as proposal quality, regardless of whether it has any bearing on the details of the proposal.

Wonkhe and IDP are working together to produce a high-level “prospective look” into the government’s international education strategy against the backdrop of the political and economic environment that has made international education such an important issue. The concept of “proactive review” is not about assuming failure, but rather trying to identify and neutralize factors that could lead to strategy failure in the future in order to maximize the chances of success from the beginning. Our working assumption is that this strategy represents a proposal for the sector to take some of the heat off the student immigration debate, align around constructing a positive and optimistic narrative, and find ways to position international education as part of a larger global education ecosystem in which the UK plays a leading role.

The success of this strategy will depend on the tacit acceptance of the terms of the proposal by all parts of the education sector, especially the HE sector, despite ongoing anxiety over international levies and the future implications of tightening student visa rules. A possible alternative, especially given the pressures from the populist right, is to withdraw from international education, which would have a permanent impact on the UK’s ability to realize the value of its education system and benefit from the international exchanges and connections it enables.

So, if policymakers in two, three or five years’ time ask the HE sector to show what changes have occurred as a result of the strategy, what can institutional leaders point to and what should they put in place now to ensure they have their say? To help answer this question, we have hosted a private roundtable with sector experts on the topic of quality, and planned two more on the local and regional impact of international education and international student outcomes.

capture quality

Britain’s reputation for quality education is both long-standing and somewhat ambiguous. While powerful global rankings are used as shorthand for quality for students, families, governments and employers, they often tell us little about students’ specific educational experiences or prospects. In some key markets, including China, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rankings have a direct impact on government scholarship allocations, access to housing and job prospects. This hinders the building of a more consistent shared sector quality narrative as institutions compete to maximize ranking performance and creates a self-reinforcing cycle that is difficult to mitigate.

There are significant evidence gaps across sectors, most notably for international students. This is especially true for the quality of graduate and master’s level education, the largest market for qualifications for international education. Indicators of the international student experience can be extracted from broader data sets such as the NSS or PTES, but the sector does not regularly and systematically ask international students about their views on their experience as an international student. These data are typically kept only at the institutional level.

While it is not realistically possible to create rankings or introduce new major quality assessment tools, it may be worthwhile to explore ways to more easily combine existing data sources and make them more accessible and accessible to students. Ireland’s TrustEd Quality Mark is directly linked to immigration clearance and provides quality assurance designed explicitly for the international market.

Experts we interviewed pointed out that existing international benchmarking tends to focus on (Western) competing countries, rather than exploring quality aspects that are particularly salient in the target student market. Competitive countries do not stand still. Destinations in ASEAN, the Middle East and elsewhere are actively improving their international student offerings, including more flexible post-study career arrangements and culturally aligned support.

There may be opportunities to explore the quality of international education as part of sectoral work to design frameworks in collaboration with international students and graduates, rather than just through sectoral provision or regulatory perspectives. A framework that reflects what international students actually value (through tests rather than assumptions) will carry much greater weight in both domestic and global markets.

role of agent

The sector narrative about rogue agents is overly simplistic. The majority of agents operate ethically and provide a valuable service to students and institutions. However, a key gap is the lack of meaningful feedback loops between institutions and agents. Under the current plan, advisors typically support students up to the point of enrollment, but there is limited visibility into what happens afterward. Without data on completion rates, satisfaction, and outcomes, agents won’t be able to identify or resolve issues in their pipeline, and agencies will miss opportunities to strengthen recruiting quality at the source.

A more constructive model is starting to emerge from some organizations that treat agents as compliance partners. This includes sharing performance dashboards that track agent-specific BCA metrics and student outcomes, providing benchmarks to aim for, and evaluating the success of agent relationships not only in terms of enrollment numbers but also graduation outcomes. This kind of true partnership, based on data and shared responsibility, is much more productive than the current transactional model, which mostly ends at the time of registration.

There are also international examples of a more systematic focus on agent quality. In New Zealand, Immigration New Zealand has published data on the best performing agents based on number of applications and visa approval rates. The forthcoming Agent Quality Framework (AQF) is a step in the right direction to ensure agency accountability and partnerships, but it will be even stronger if integrated with broader measures to ensure and promote quality in international education.

Compliance and Management

Of concern is the tension between an increasingly regulated compliance environment and the quality of support provided to international students. Compliance monitoring, especially as it relates to visa conditions, attendance and participation, can easily transition from a supportive to a punitive function. The opposing view is that participatory data-driven efforts to support student retention that are routinely implemented at many institutions in the field suggest monitoring as the basis for demonstrating effective support and management rather than surveillance.

The concept of “compassionate compliance” may help resolve this tension. That is, a system designed with the student’s interests in mind, rather than simply flagging non-attendance for immigration action, but seeking to understand why a student may discontinue participation and provide support. This will require you to join our Immigration Compliance team, providing extensive academic support and student wellbeing. The problem is that regulatory burdens are already consuming significant capacity from educational institutions, and if institutions rapidly increase the number of international students, their support infrastructure may not be able to keep up. Addressing this gap was seen as one of the most immediate and practical steps the sector could take.

Although most accounts of quality are outside the sector’s control or subject to regulation, there remains scope for action to demonstrate greater consistency in thinking about how the various elements of quality work together. Pooling data, international comparisons, restructuring practice and exploring students’ perceptions of quality are all within the sector’s scope for action and will demonstrate its engagement with the challenge – and may even uncover some new ways of thinking about what the next iteration of the international education strategy can do to ensure the UK’s reputation for quality in the long term.

This article was published as part of a partnership with IDP Education. The authors would like to thank those who attended and contributed to the roundtable.

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