A UK service centre will take contact with foreign applicants out of the hands of academics, writes John O'Leary
Six universities are planning to bring in a private company to handle sensitive admissions work to boost recruitment of overseas students.
Academics will continue to select students but, from October, all other contact, from initial inquiries through the application process, will be with staff employed by Hobsons, the student recruitment and marketing firm.
Applicants will assume that they are dealing with their chosen university, but calls and e-mails will be routed to a service centre in London.
The operation will be modelled on Hobsons' Australian equivalent, which serves 14 universities and has a waiting list of several more. The "foundation clients" in the UK will include Brunel, Central England and Robert Gordon universities. Westminster University is likely to join them and two others - both old universities - are at the draft contract stage.
Hobsons will not disclose how much it charges for the service, but universities will pay a commission on each student enrolled through the service centre. In Australia, member universities have seen conversion rates rise by up to 20 per cent, but most of their British counterparts do not know how many inquiries they receive because traffic is dispersed among academic departments.
Gavin Douglas, head of student recruitment at Robert Gordon, said the university hoped to see a 10 per cent increase initially. "There was an initial worry among many academics that somebody sitting in a call centre would not be able to deal with the level of detail required. But I was very impressed by the strong links between staff in the Australian service centre and their universities. I am reassured that they could handle at least 80 per cent of queries."
Jeremy Cooper, director of Hobsons' UK education business, said: "Effective inquiry management is vital if universities hope to stay competitive in international student recruitment. Hobsons conducted a mystery shopper survey that showed a real inconsistency in how international student inquiries are currently handled. We will provide a purpose-built outsourced contact centre, responding and managing relationships with prospective students using sophisticated e-business strategies."
In the Melbourne centre, this means responding to up to 200 e-mails a day for the biggest universities. Inquirers are classified as cold, warm or hot prospects, according to their subject and country of origin, reflecting previous success rates.
Outsourcing was resisted at several Australian universities because unions feared it would lead to job cuts. But Andrew Everett, director of international education at the University of Queensland, said international departments were continuing to grow.
Denise Bradley, vice-chancellor of the University of South Australia, said: "As one of the foundation institutions, we had to invest and wait for it to take off, but the UK centre will have our experience to build on."
Among the services will be benchmarking of activity among the client institutions. Because on average inquiries take almost a year to turn into enrolments, Alan Olsen, the Hong Kong-based academic who carries out the analysis, is able to predict international recruitment trends several months in advance.