At this year’s International Higher Education Online Forum (IHEF), much of the conversation focused on the pressures facing international student recruitment: slowing demand in crucial markets, increasing competition from developed and emerging locations, and a more volatile and politicised policy environment in the UK.But focussing too greatly on external pressures risks hiding options that stay within institutions’ control. The more instant obstacle lies closer to home: how universities comprehend expense, rate their deal and specify worth.
The volume illusion
For many organizations, the default position has been to push for more volume– more trainees to satisfy higher income targets. That instinct significantly rests on a simple presumption that more trainees automatically equate into more value.
However that assumption is now breaking down. The cost of recruiting international trainees has increased significantly over the last few years: representative commission, marketing spend and in-market operations are all increasing, deteriorating the margin that extra trainee volume is supposed to provide.
In many cases, universities are now paying a third or more of overall tuition fee income simply in commission, before representing other recruitment costs, and before the costs of teaching and supporting those students.
The result is foreseeable: net revenue per trainee is under pressure.
In some cases, when costs are totally represented, institutions are left with less per international trainee than they get from domestic trainees, a level university leaders already argue is inadequate.
So we have reached a point where more volume does not always suggest more value. In reality sometimes, organizations are scaling activity that is only marginally successful– or even worse.
The problem isn’t employers– it’s the system
It is necessary to state that this is not a failure of recruitment teams. If anything, the opposite is true. Numerous groups are operating under a set of deeply conflicting signals:
- volume targets that continue to increase;
- pressure to discount rate through scholarships to remain competitive;
- competition on representative commission to secure pipeline;
- and expectations from senior management around margin, quality, diversity and ‘responsible recruitment’.
These goals are not naturally incompatible, but they are hardly ever aligned in practice. The outcome is a familiar pattern: a race to the bottom on in-year discounts; a race to the top on commission; and no clear structure for managing the trade-offs in between them.
The outcome is a familiar pattern: a race to the bottom on in-year discounts; a race to the top on commission; and no clear structure for handling the compromises between them
The expense of acquisition issue
At the heart of this concern is a more essential weak point: an absence of clarity about expense. Across the organizations I have actually dealt with recently, 3 patterns prevail:
- no single, integrated view of cost of acquisition;
- minimal attribution of costs by market or recruitment channel;
- rates choices made without a clear understanding of the underlying expense base.
Even where data exists, it is frequently fragmented across functions:
- marketing spend that is difficult to link to specific outcomes;
- uncoordinated scholarship budget plans spread across main and scholastic units;
- staffing deployed on set local plans;
- commission structures locked into agreements and only visible after enrolment
In other words, expenses are seldom integrated, coordinated or actively managed. And this has a direct repercussion: if you do not understand your cost of acquisition, you do not have a method however rather a series of activities.
The illusion of rates intricacy
If cost is inadequately comprehended, it is unsurprising that pricing is underdeveloped.
Despite the evident intricacy of global portfolios, most universities run with a relatively little number of cost points across numerous programs. Yet rates is still typically set through an annual committee regimen:
- benchmarking against last year’s rivals;
- applying an inflationary uplift;
- and rolling that forward throughout the portfolio.
This method presumes: stable need, stable competitors and consistent perceptions of value. None of which now hold.
As a result, rates is frequently:
- weakly connected to require;
- detached from expense of acquisition;
- and insufficiently aligned to institutional method.
To put it simply, we behave as pricing complex however in practice use it as blunt instrument.
The levy as a forcing function
The intro of a levy on global students in England includes a brand-new measurement to this conversation however it does not essentially alter it. Rather, it makes the issues harder to neglect.
By connecting an explicit additional cost to each global trainee, the levy forces institutions to believe more thoroughly about net profits after costs. And as soon as institutions start thinking in those terms, the need to align pricing, cost of acquisition and recruitment strategy becomes far more instant.
From volume to worth
So where does this leave us? The difficulties dealing with international recruitment are genuine. However reacting to them through ever-increasing volume is unlikely to supply a sustainable solution.
Instead, institutions need to make a more essential shift: from volume-driven recruitment to value-driven strategy. This implies:
- dealing with cost of acquisition as a core management metric, not a by-product;
- using prices deliberately to achieve tactical priorities, not as a yearly benchmarking exercise;
- making specific trade-offs in between volume, margin, variety and quality;
- lining up financial, academic and recruitment goals around a shared meaning of value.
Without that shift, institutions run the risk of continuing to chase after volume in manner ins which do not deliver value or sustainability.
Universities can not control need, policy or competitors, but they can control how they price, handle cost and define value.
< img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%200%200'%3E%3C/svg%3E"/ > < img src="https://thepienews.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/TheStayClub-600x500-copy-1.jpg"/ >