Students are choosing to go elsewhere. Post-graduation work permit eligibility has been narrowed, rewritten, partly suspended and then frozen, all within two years. Whatever you make of any individual change, a student committing four years and a family’s savings is not going to put everything on the line for a country that is so unpredictable. Instability is its own deterrent, and it isn’t something a recruitment team can out-work.

That is an uncomfortable truth for many institutional leaders. The numbers are down, the pressure is real and immediate, and the largest single cause sits outside the institution entirely. Canadian institutions have gotten used to operating in the growth-era during which a typical response was to push harder at the top of the funnel: more leads, more applications, more fairs. That’s why most teams are exhausted and still short.

What changed underneath the funnel

During the good old days, when you had several applications for every seat, losing one at a departmental handoff was just noise. You had surplus, and surplus forgives a great deal. Now the surplus is gone. Every new inquiry has to survive the entire lifecycle, because there is nothing queued behind it. That same handoff loss that cost you nothing before costs you the seat today.

You already know applications and inquiries are down; you didn’t need a dashboard for that. A question worth asking now is what happens to the interest you are still generating.

The answer lies mostly at the handoffs between units. Each unit tends to report its own stage as healthy, and it’s not wrong because inside its own boundary it usually is. Recruitment followed up on the inquiries it received. Admissions assessed every application and got the offers out on time. The registrar’s office enrolled every student who showed up. All three can still be true in your worst enrolment year. Each unit owns a stage in the lifecycle, but nobody owns the space between the stages.

Earlier this year, Capilano University commissioned a strategic enrolment management (SEM) audit. Mike Henniger covered international recruitment, Jody Gordon student success and retention, and I marketing, communications and conversion. Through the audit we built a checklist of more than 150 best practices mapped across 16 stages of the student lifecycle, from first inquiry to alumni giving. While the audit findings are confidential, the pattern the audit exposed is not confined to one institution.

The six gaps to check in your own lifecycle

Who chases the student who goes quiet? Recruitment owns the relationship until an application is submitted and then admissions takes over. Admissions chases documents and recruitment chases people, and a student who suddenly goes quiet because they’re still considering a competitor needs more nurturing from recruitment. Instead, they get a reminder about uploading their transcript.

What happens to an applicant while they wait? Most institutions track decision turnaround and have a service standard for it. Almost none has a clear owner for the weeks on either side of that decision. Many institutions cannot see the stage at all: with no mechanism for a student to accept or decline an offer, yield stays invisible until registration, which is far too late to act. Meanwhile, the things that would win the decision – course planning sessions, demo classes, a conversation with a faculty member – run in the wrong weeks or not at all. Your agents feel this stage hardest. They are holding a student’s confidence while your institution is silent, and they have no way to tell you where the delay is.

Who owns the stretch from deposit to first day? This is a stage that tends to get crowded. Recruitment and marketing are often still in touch, student services has begun onboarding, the registrar is sending registration details and finance is chasing tuition fees. Every team is watching closely, but nobody owns the sequence. A student who has received dozens of messages from six departments since the start of the process learns to stop reading your emails unless you take control over frequency, relevance and repetitiveness of your content. All that seems harmless until the one email that requires action or contains important information arrives looking like the rest of them. Yet on each team’s report, the messaging was fine.

Who owns the message when a student withdraws? Withdrawal and refund communications sit between the registrar, finance and marketing, but they are rarely governed by any of the three. Students who have a bad experience with a withdrawal and refund write about it publicly, and those complaints are now being repeated back to your prospective students by the AI tools they use to research you. That’s how an administrative problem becomes a recruitment problem.

Who owns the students who already left? I am not talking about your alumni. The students who paused or withdrew without finishing are a mixed group. Some ran out of money, some couldn’t get their visa extension, some left unhappy, some had a family situation, some struggled academically. A few institutions run re-engagement campaigns for this audience. In most, nobody owns them, and the reason is structural: the registrar holds the records, recruitment is measured on new inquiries, and no team’s targets include a returning student. Somewhere in that group is the cheapest enrolment available to you, and nobody has been asked to go and find it.

What is the true cost of your enrolled student? Marketing knows what it spent, by channel, by campaign, by agent. Institutional research knows who enrolled. Almost nobody can tell you what an enrolled student cost you through each channel. Most institutions capture a lead source in the CRM, which answers where someone came from, not how much it took to get them. So when finance comes to cut recruitment and marketing spend in a year like this one, nobody knows which agents, fairs and campaigns to keep, and the decision gets made on seniority and instinct.

Plenty of institutions already track two or three of these gaps. Very few track all six, and almost nobody has one person responsible for all of them. The ones that try usually stop at the first obstacle, which is definitions. Most institutions don’t have a shared answer to what good looks like at any stage. So you can measure one of these gaps, get a number, and still not know whether it is a problem. Eighteen days between submission and decision is either perfectly fine or a disaster, depending on a target nobody has set.

There is also a reporting-line reason these gaps stay hidden. Recruitment, admissions, the registrar’s office and student services usually report to different executives. By the time their numbers and reports reach an executive table, they have been summarised into stage totals, measured inside one unit’s boundary. That is the one format that cannot show a gap.

Three tests you can run this week

Trace twenty-five student files by hand. Pull twenty-five applications from last recruitment cycle at random and write down the dates at every stage: inquiry, application, decision, offer, deposit, registration. You are looking for the dates with the biggest gap between them. That gap tells you which of the six is yours.

Ask each unit head for their one number. Ask yourself: what is the one metric you’re accountable for? Then lay the answers along your institution’s lifecycle. The stages nobody names tend to be the stages that leak. Whatever nobody claims is where you start.

Mystery-shop your own inquiry form, then go quiet. Submit it from a top source market with a question a real student would ask, reply once, and then go dark. Watch who follows up, whether anyone follows up twice. Note which department the second message comes from. If it never comes, or it comes from a different team than the first, you have your answer.

If it’s everyone’s job, it’s nobody’s job

The fix is not a fancy dashboard or new funding. Name one person accountable for each of the six gaps. Publish them in a single report on a set cadence. Review them with every unit in the room, so no unit sees its number in isolation. Without assigned owners, these gaps revert to nobody’s job by the next intake.

This may look different for institutions running one centralised enrolment division. My sense is the gaps would move rather than disappear.

Capilano’s President, Jason Dewling, framed the question this way: “In difficult times, we should be asking ourselves, ‘are we doing everything we know to do?’”

There is very little new demand to find this year. The institutions that come through this in decent shape will be the ones that stopped losing the students who were already coming.

–��Midya U runs , where she works with post-secondary institutions on marketing, branding, enrolment and AI strategy. She spent fifteen years inside Canadian higher ed marketing and recruitment, public and private – building award-winning teams, running eight-figure annual budgets through every regulatory curveball.

The post Recruiting under Canada’s international student cap: Six strategic enrolment gaps that matter appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

• Anxious, including about AI’s impact on their career;
• Considering a wider range of study abroad options, and carefully evaluating risk and reward.

The survey for the report was completed by 870 education agents across 64 countries in May 2026.

What are the issues?

The last time international students felt this stressed about their education was arguably during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study plans were disrupted; isolation was the norm; and worries about personal health and family members’ health was intense.

Students’ concerns are different today. Many of them stem from an uncertainty about how to make wise decisions about what to study and where to study.

Surveyed agents said that students are most concerned about (1) the risk of sudden changes to visa rules and (2) cost of living pressures. Agents have to advise students about whether a Big Four destination (i.e., Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US) has changed its immigration settings yet again.

The continued narrowing of visa and immigration rights – with new rules often announced without warning – provides ample evidence that there is more risk to choosing these destinations than in the past.

Significant proportions of agents also said that students are worried about safety and security, exchange rate volatility, risk of travel disruption, increased cost of air travel, breakdown in country-to-country relations, and rising fuel and energy costs.

Students need more support

More than half of agents said that compared with 12 months ago, students are more likely to face financial strain (54%), need more academic support (78%), and need more mental and social support (82%). All of these percentages increased markedly since the previous survey in 2025.

A growing body of US, UK, and global shows that large proportions of youth believe that AI is a threat to their job prospects. This is reinforced in the Navitas survey: 75% of agents said that students are concerned about the impact of AI on their careers.

Visa acceptance rates are deterring even the strongest students

In emerging markets, students are well aware that visa rejection rates are high in the Big Four. Agents said this awareness is reducing applications even from top students with a good chance of being approved (80%). Another 76% said that students with strong academic and financial profiles are more likely to choose alternative destinations with higher visa certainty.

Increased interest in alternative destinations, more questions about the value of study abroad

International students are reacting in a variety of ways to the more uncertain climate around study abroad and to affordability pressures:

• 82% of agents said applicants are applying to more destination countries than in the past;
• 85% said they are applying to more institutions within each destination country;
• 77% said they are increasingly applying to study in alternative destinations;
• 72% said they are more likely to have a back-up plan to study in their home country;
• And 68% said that they are more likely to give up on study abroad due to lack of affordability

Study at home is increasingly an option

Close to half of agents said that there is now a perception that universities or branch campuses in their country are providing an equal quality of education as institutions overseas. Among students who decide to stay home, affordability is by far the top reason (87%).

Destination trends

Perceptions of top anglophone destinations have stabilised for Australia, picked up for Canada, and are continuing to slide in the UK. New Zealand is by far outperforming the Big Four in terms of positive perceptions, while the US has the poorest image.

AI is not displacing agents

AI may be changing the nature of student–agent interactions, but it is not substituting for agents’ skills and human assistance. Students are consulting AI when researching study abroad and then going to agents to validate/interpret the information. Over 4 in 10 agents said that students are relying on them more despite AI, and 3 in 10 said there has been no change.

In the foreword to the survey report, Scott Jones, group CEO of Navitas, contextualised the findings and the importance of hearing from agents:

“Once again, the results offer compelling data that both confirms the behaviours we are seeing, and sheds light on how the international education landscape continues to evolve in the current economic and geopolitical environment.”

There is clearly a new competitive advantage for destinations and institutions that can access it: certainty. Communicating stable visa policies, strong student supports, programme strengths, and in-study and post-study work opportunities can go a long way toward emphasising this advantage.

For additional background, please see:

• “91ɬ��Podcast: Student flows are shifting. Are agencies following suit?”
• “Visa delays and policy uncertainty projected to reduce foreign enrolment in the US by more than 100,000 students this fall”

The post Global agent survey reveals international students’ top concerns are visa uncertainty and affordability appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

After that, says the whitepaper, there is a stage where students do everything they can to reduce uncertainty by searching for answers to the questions:

• “Can I make this work?”
• “Will I have community?”
• “Is this programme right for me?”
• “What will my life look like?”

Only once students find reassurance about these questions will they go on to enroll with an institution.

The whitepaper frames this point in the student’s journey to study abroad with this critical insight:

“Students do not apply because they have decided. They apply because they are still deciding.”

The whitepaper is based on an analysis of student-generated content across Uni-Life communities in March-October 2025, “capturing natural, unprompted interactions between students during the decision-making process.”

The dataset included posts from homepage feeds and structured groups in Uni-Life communities across 12 universities in the UK and Europe. Those posts were from both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Rethinking the funnel

The traditional linear enrolment funnel is structured like this:

• Awareness
• Application
• Admission
• Enrolment

The funnel’s progression suggests that once students apply or receive an offer, they are very close to making a final decision.

But the whitepaper says this funnel is reductive – and that student decision-making is much more fluid. Research shows that students tend to go back and forth in their thinking about where to go. UCAS, for example, has found that about one in four students goes back on their decision after receiving an offer and often switches institutions.

As a result, notes the whitepaper: “The most critical stage is not before application, but after admission” period in which students:

• Assess real-life feasibility;
• Seek reassurance from peers;
• Test whether their future life will actually work.

In an email exchange with 91ɬ��Monitor, Uni-Life’s director of university partnerships, Kasper Baars, said:

“What we see from the data is that student decision-making in the post-offer phase is far less linear and far less rational than is often assumed. We tend to frame the journey in neat stages, yet the data shows it’s actually quite fluid and iterative with students moving back and forth between multiple dimensions at once, gradually building (or losing) confidence over time.”

Top questions for students

The social listening analysis found that “feasibility” is the top concern for more than half (53%) of students, with housing the most pressing topic of posts and conversations.

“Belonging” was next at 31%, and this theme elicited the most activity in the Uni-Life community. Some engagements became so helpful that they deepened into real peer groups. The whitepaper notes:

“Belonging plays a crucial role in reducing perceived risk. When students feel socially anchored, uncertainty becomes more manageable.”

After that, students were most interested in being reassured about fit and whether a choice is right for them (“place confidence’).

Uncertainty throughout the process

Students tended to post about multiple concerns at once, gaining certainty about some questions and losing confidence about others. What’s more, they often went back and forth in terms of uncertainty and confidence about questions they initially thought they had resolved. The whitepaper notes:

“What changes over time is not what students are thinking about, but which uncertainties dominate their attention. It is better understood as a dynamic system of shifting priorities.”

This has a crucial implication for institutions:

“Institutions that align their approach with this dynamic [everchanging uncertainties] will be better positioned to support students effectively. Rather than structuring communication around internal milestones, they need to align with when different uncertainties emerge and intensify.”

What really matters in conversion

The paper’s conclusion makes an excellent point about the power of emotion to make or break a conversion: “Late-stage drop-off occurs not because interest disappears, but because one critical uncertainty remains.”

Mr Baars says:

“This raises a simple but important question: if post-offer support is still largely driven by ‘information-sharing’ – is it enough to address the emotional needs, such as reducing uncertainty, building belonging, and sustaining that initial excitement, so students have the confidence to make their decision? Especially as they navigate increasingly complex feasibility challenges around things like visas and housing.”

The full whitepaper explores the recruitment timeline and offers suggestions about what can be done to help students find the certainty they need to not just apply, but also to enrol.

The post Offering reassurance to international students after they apply is increasingly key to securing enrolments appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Any senior leader will understand that not paying attention to financial data will have dire consequences eventually. I would argue that marketing data deserves the same attention.

Why pay attention to marketing KPIs?

There are three reasons why marketing data deserves your attention, even if you do not have a background in marketing.

1. It’s a leading indicator for financial and academic performance

Your enrolment may be OK this year, but if admissions is receiving fewer applications than last year, next year’s intake is at risk.

Look further ahead and the pattern becomes even clearer. If you are receiving fewer student enquiries, seeing web traffic drop or your school becomes less visible across the web, all else being equal, you may have an enrolment problem building.

Marketing performance can also affect academic reputation in a qualitative way by making your institution more visible and attractive to the students you most want to reach. For example, QS includes an indicator, which looks at both the share of international students and the diversity of their nationalities.

2. Earlier, smarter, and less drastic course corrections

Early warning gives you time to make measured changes and give them a chance to work. Marketing data enables you to see farther ahead and this can help to avoid drastic measures such as layoffs and budget cuts.

When you are falling behind, a marketing fix may be all that’s needed. For example, raising your advertising budget or shifting priorities.

At other times, you will need action across the institution, backed by active senior sponsorship. Think of changes in course portfolio, fee structure, target markets, or scholarships. Underlying IT issues can also greatly hamper marketing performance.

3. Proactively support (and challenge!) the marketing team

Like all professionals, marketers can get bogged down in business as usual. They may have learned to live with certain facts of life. But to achieve genuinely better marketing and recruitment results often requires challenging the status quo.

Some examples:

• IT: No one makes the time or investment needed for systems that could save substantial time and money within two or three years.

• Compliance: Data protection, and if you’re in the EU, GDPR compliance is important, but sometimes data protection policies overreach and hamper effective marketing.

• Message: If your institution’s positioning is unclear, your marketing will struggle to pursuade.

If you’re a marketing manager or director, you have a duty to highlight these challenges, time and time again, in language that non-marketers can understand.

If you’re a leader without a marketing background, your duty is to make every effort to understand the overall and long-term impact on your institution.

Each of these examples represents a deadlock that needs senior involvement to break. One party, or perhaps both, will need to go out of their comfort zone. That usually only happens with pressure and support from leadership.

Which KPIs to track?

If you agree that keeping an eye on marketing performance is important, the next question is, what to track, and how often? If you are not looking at marketing data yet, quarterly is a good place to start.

Below are the key metrics to keep an eye on, working outwards from enrolment to discovery.

Admitted students and offer take-up rate. You’ll never have more new enrolments than the number of students you admitted. But admitted students may have applied at multiple institutions or decide not to enrol for different reasons. The admission-to-enrolment ratio (offer take-up rate) will tell you how often this happens.

If offer take-up rate is low or dropping compared to previous years, it can point to a communications issue, such as not reassuring offer holders enough or a shift in the competitive landscape.

The best way to find out what drives a low offer take-up rate is to contact admitted students, or a sample of them, soon after their offer and ask for feedback.

Website visits and website conversion rate. Any applicant is highly likely to have visited your website at some point, probably multiple times. As I argue in my book , your website is therefore a crucial link in the student recruitment chain.

But it’s not just about how many prospective students visit your website, it matters just as much what they do there. The website conversion rate is the ratio of website users that take an action divided by total web traffic. Low conversion can point to poorly executed campaigns or structural website issues. A common cause is offering too few low-touch ways to engage, perhaps only an “apply now” button.

Pre-website visibility. It is increasingly important to pay attention to what prospective students see, and do not see, about your institution before they ever visit your website.

The media landscape is changing: AI is changing how students search and people are less likely to click out from social media platforms. There isn’t one single place or number that can capture your visibility across the web, but you can keep an eye on this through a composite of:

• (GSC) impressions: Google reports how many times your webpages were featured in its search result pages, even if people didn’t click through
• Social media visibility: Social platforms such as Instagram and YouTube report on visibility and impressions of what you post. Social listening tools can also track visibility and sentiment in posts by others.
• AI mentions: AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t share stats on what people ask and what they mention in their answers. You can still identify the prompts that matter most, test them regularly and track whether and how your institution appears.

Taken together, online visibility level is often your earliest signal. Improving visibility will carry over to website visits, enquiries, applications, and enrolments.

What if you’re not capturing these KPIs?

It is not uncommon for education institutions to struggle with reporting marketing KPIs. But if this is the case, you are flying blind. The first order of the day should be to establish a basic way of measuring marketing performance – so you can benchmark performance year over year.

In short

Paying attention to these marketing KPIs can help you spot enrolment risk early. You will buy yourself valuable extra time and options to act, and by addressing inefficiencies such as low offer take-up rate or website conversion, you may improve recruitment outcomes without increasing your marketing spend.

For additional background, please see:

• “91ɬ��Podcast: Are you using the right digital channels to reach international students?”
• “Survey highlights a growing ‘engagement gap’ between international student expectations and institutional response”
• “AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment”

The post Beyond enrolment: The marketing signals education leaders should watch appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

Our hosts are then joined by Nicolas Chu, CEO & Founder of , and Jennifer Parsons, Executive Director of Partnerships with , for a featured discussion on how we can harness the power of people, process, and platforms in order to better engage with prospective students.

The context for this discussion is that international student recruitment has entered a new phase, one marked by changing student preferences and also by much more intense competition. The result is a widening gap between student expectations and institutional performance, especially in terms of responsiveness to student enquiries and the channels that institutions and schools use to engage prospective students.

As recruitment professionals, we must now consider even more carefully than ever: how can we best meet students where they are, with timely responses on the channels they prefer?

You can listen right now in the player below, and we encourage you to subscribe via your favourite podcast app in order to receive future episodes automatically.

For additional background, please see:

• “91ɬ��Podcast: Students are switching to AI for search. Are you ready?“
• “Survey highlights a growing ‘engagement gap’ between international student expectations and institutional response“

The post 91ɬ��Podcast: Are you using the right digital channels to reach international students? appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

A new whitepaper from outlines characteristics of the Mexican market and best practices for engaging with students and parents.

Political and economic context

Mexico’s economy is forecast to grow by just under 2% in 2026, which, while modest, would be a better rate than in 2025. However, like the vast majority of countries, Mexico is vulnerable to the current US government’s tariff measures, so the forecast may change more than it normally would over the course of the year.

A couple of trade developments will serve as stabilising elements amid this volatility. These include:

• The “nearshoring” phenomenon, which describes foreign and multinational companies – often from Asia – setting up shop in Mexico to be closer to North American markets. Nearshoring has created more employment in northern regions closer to the US, and it has also revealed pronounced skills gaps in niche occupations.

• A strengthening relationship with Canada, as both Mexico and Canada seek to reduce their reliance on the US market. A high-level Mexico-Canada “action plan” is expected in late 2026, and Mexico’s Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard says it will focus on “joint initiatives related to minerals, investment in ports, infrastructure and supply chain security.”

Both of these trends have accentuated skills gaps that Mexico needs to address for economic expansion. A two-million-position shortfall of engineers and technicians is limiting growth in sectors such as AI, manufacturing, and technology.

Nearshoring activity is mostly concentrated in northern regions such as Nuevo León, Jalisco, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Querétaro, Aguascalientes, and Baja California. While some of these areas pose security risks because of cartel activity, they are also home to many students who will be particularly interested in niche fields of study related to the skills needed by the industries around them.

High demand for study abroad

While there is higher education capacity in Mexico, very few Mexican universities place in the top tiers of the QS World University Rankings, and there isn’t a great range of niche programmes that serve new labour force opportunities. These opportunities can be found in a growing list of sectors, including:

• Automotive
• Aerospace
• Electronics and medical devices
• Food and beverage sector
• Renewable energy
• Oil and gas
• Tourism

The SME sector (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) generates about 70% of jobs in the country, so business-related fields of study are also popular.

A busier recruitment environment

Marcela Tintinago, Account Manager at EdCo LATAM Consulting, says that she is seeing more and more top-ranked universities from the UK, Ireland, Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia prioritising Mexico as a student market: “It’s become a very competitive market, particularly as more Mexican students look to study in destinations beyond the US.”

Several destinations have posted growth from Mexico lately:

• Spain: There are almost 10,000 Mexican students in Spain, and this number is on the rise.

• United Kingdom: Almost 1,800 Mexican students were enrolled at UK universities in 2024/25, up +8% over 2023/24, a much stronger pace of growth than in 2023/24 (+1%).

• Ireland: In 2024/25, the small Mexican representation in Irish universities (360) was up +27% y-o-y in 2024/25, reflecting demand in Mexico for degree-level studies abroad and the growing popularity of Ireland for higher education. Mexico is among the top 10 fastest growing source markets for Irish universities. Ms Tintinago adds: “Mexican students are particularly interested in Ireland because it is more affordable than other major study destinations, has many companies promising good job prospects, and offers a unique cultural experience.”

By contrast:

• United States: Mexican higher education enrolments grew by only +1% 2024/25 according to IIE Open Doors data, compared to the +6.5% increase the previous year.

• Canada: There were about 11,400 study permit-holding Mexicans in Canada in 2024/25, down -26% over the previous year.

• Australia: 91ɬ�� 3,900 Mexicans studied at all levels in 2025, stable from 2024. Only 900 Mexicans are enrolled in Australian universities, compared to about 2,400 in vocational education (VET) and 1,300 in English-language studies (ELICOS). The EdCo LATAM report notes that it is interesting that the number of Brazilian and Colombian students in Australia is significantly higher than that of Mexicans (26,000 and 20,000, respectively). The report suggests: “The presence of established Latin American student cohorts in Australia would be a major drawing card for prospective Mexican students and should be leveraged in marketing campaigns to this market, alongside other attractions such as Australia’s high-quality institutions.”

However, there is a high degree of price-sensitivity in Mexico regarding study abroad. VET and ELICOS enrolments are trending down given recent policy developments in Australia that make it far more expensive to apply to study there.

Study abroad decision factors

Affordability: EdCo LATAM’s Latin America Account Manager Scarlet Ramirez says that Mexicans try to steer clear of debt and are on the lookout for scholarship opportunities:

“Taking out a loan in Mexico is very rare, we tend to save up or obtain funding for our studies. Studying abroad is a huge investment for Mexican students, and they want to ensure they are getting the best value for money possible.”

Return on investment: There is also a wealthier market segment and the higher a family’s socio-economic status, the more they will look at a foreign university’s ranking.

Teachers: EdCo LATAM observes that Mexican high-school students are used to close relationships with their teachers:

“In Mexico, your teacher often becomes more than an educator, they become our mentors and someone we can rely on beyond the classroom. Mexicans are very warm people and always looking to create strong relationships, so when we go abroad, we really value it when lecturers are approachable and supportive.”

Family: The families of students want to be closely involved in discussions with institutional representatives, whether these are central staff, in-country representatives, or agents. Parents’ opinions are highly valued, and parents ideally want to see their children study at a highly ranked university, “especially when they are contributing financially.” Post-graduate work opportunities are similarly important.

Safety and community: Safety is naturally prioritised by parents. Knowing there are other Latin American students on campus goes a long way – and this should be communicated across all marketing channels. Examples of Latin American graduates achieving success after their studies are highly effective as well, especially using audio-visual.

All these motivating factors for study abroad from Mexico have implications for recruiters:

• Social media is important for awareness. The report says, “Instagram and TikTok are the go-to platforms for marketing undergraduate courses to Mexican prospects, while Facebook and LinkedIn are best suited for promoting postgraduate opportunities.”

• However, a committed in-person effort is required, including one-to-one meetings with parents and students. Account Manager Julián Nivia says: “This approach is much more effective than trying to market your institution in a crowded room with hundreds of other institutions.” Tailored recruitment facilitates “the effective representation of your university’s value proposition in the region.”

• Communication is everything – from quality and personalisation to speed. Universities should endeavour to make students feel special, and timely follow-ups are essential (no more than 2–3 days).

The report notes: “Pre-arrival communications should include how Mexican students will be supported on arrival, details about orientation week, available mentors, details about the international office and support systems and societies that may be of interest. Mexican students really appreciate it when universities have someone from the international office they can rely on.”

For additional background, please see:

• “International student recruitment in Mexico: Demand for language study still leading the way“

The post Mexico: A personalised, supportive approach is the key to success in this growing study abroad market appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

AI is not arriving into a clean, joined-up recruitment function. It is landing in environments where systems do not talk to each other, ownership is fragmented, and key information lives in a mix of CRM notes, web pages, PDFs, team inboxes and locally managed spreadsheets. That matters, because AI does not solve complexity. It scales it.

The sector is at risk of repeating a familiar pattern: investing in new tools while leaving the foundations untouched. AI then becomes another layer sitting on top of the same friction points – just with quicker outputs and higher expectations.

AI in recruitment is less “wow” than it sounds – and that’s a good thing

The public conversation often gravitates towards chatbots. They are visible, easy to demo and appealing for 24/7 coverage. But the most valuable AI use cases in recruitment are rarely headline-grabbing. They are operational.

AI earns its place when it does one of three things:

• reduces response time without losing quality
• improves relevance by matching students to the right information faster
• removes admin drag so staff spend more time on high-value conversations

That can mean intelligent enquiry triage, appointment scheduling, follow-up prompts, application workflow support, and content personalisation based on what a prospect has actually engaged with. In a competitive international environment, these are not “nice to haves”. They directly influence whether a student stays in the funnel.

And it is worth saying explicitly: the goal is not to replace people. The best-performing model is “human + machine” – AI provides speed and consistency; staff provide judgement, reassurance and nuance.

The uncomfortable truth: AI exposes what institutions have tolerated for years

Where AI is introduced, it tends to shine a light on issues that were previously manageable because humans quietly compensated for them.

• Inconsistent information: entry requirements differ by page; fees are updated in one place but not another; scholarship details live on in a PDF long after the policy has changed.
• Fragmented journeys: marketing owns one part, admissions owns another, faculties own programme content, student services owns “experience” messaging – and the student experiences it as one journey anyway.
• Siloed data: multiple CRMs, multiple lead sources, inconsistent definitions of “enquiry” and “qualified”, and limited integration between systems.

AI can help, but only if the institution is prepared to treat these issues as structural – not cosmetic.

This is where many implementations falter. AI tools are purchased as point solutions, deployed by one team, and expected to perform magic in an ecosystem that is not ready to support them. The result is predictable: patchy adoption, uneven quality, and a lingering sense that “AI didn’t work for us”.

Often, the tool is not the problem. The conditions are.

Readiness is not a slogan

Before investing further, institutions benefit from stepping back and asking four simple questions. They are simple to ask, harder to answer honestly:

• Will this improve outcomes that matter?
Response time, conversion, quality of guidance, staff workload – and how those will be measured.
• Is it easy enough to use in the real world?
During peak cycle, with staff turnover, shifting priorities, and competing demands.
• Is there clear support and ownership?
Not just “buy-in”, but named accountability across marketing, admissions, IT/data and governance.
• Are the foundations in place?
Clean data, accurate content, integration capability, and governance that is operational, not theoretical.

When AI adoption stalls, it is usually because the last question is answered with a quiet “not really”.

What changes when universities use AI (and students still use it too)

Two things happen at once.

First, student expectations rise. If AI can answer instantly, waiting two days for a response feels outdated. Prospects still want humans – but they want humans at the right moment, with continuity and context.

Second, measurement becomes harder. As more decisions happen inside AI tools, fewer people follow a neat trail from ad to website to enquiry form. That does not mean marketing is failing. It means the web is no longer the only (or even primary) interface between student and institution.

In this environment, accuracy becomes strategic. AI will surface what it can find, whether it is current or not. The institutions that win attention will often be those with fewer contradictions, clearer ownership of content, and consistent signals across the web – not necessarily those with the biggest budgets.

A pragmatic way forward: start small, fix foundations, scale carefully

A full “AI transformation” is not required to make progress. But a full commitment to foundations is.

Three moves tend to deliver genuine momentum:

1) Treat the data layer as recruitment infrastructure
Integration and data hygiene are not “IT projects”. They are recruitment capability. In practice, this means ensuring that core recruitment and admissions information — prospect records, programme data, entry requirements, fees, communications history, and application status — is accurate, up to date, and connected across systems. Where this is weak, staff compensate manually, and AI tools inherit and scale the same inconsistencies. Where it is strong, institutions can respond faster, personalise more effectively, reduce duplication, improve measurement, and give students more consistent guidance. Modest progress here often unlocks disproportionate benefits elsewhere.

2) Choose one high-impact journey point.
Enquiry response, programme matching, international applicant support during peak periods – pick one, do it properly, and learn fast. For example, Georgia State University’s “Pounce” chatbot focused on a single high-friction point – the pre-enrolment period between admission and arrival – helping admitted students complete required tasks and get answers quickly; Georgia State reports this contributed to a significant reduction in “”. A non-chatbot example can be seen in European qualification recognition workflows, where ENIC-NARIC centres in France and Norway have explored AI/RPA (Artificial Intelligence/Robotic Process Automation) ) for rather than broad front-end deployment. The common lesson is the same: define the bottleneck, improve it step by step and use the learning to build up capability.

3) Put governance in writing and into practice.
Define what AI can and cannot do, when humans must review, how escalation works, and how bias and data protection risks are handled. Governance should enable adoption – not suffocate it.

In short

Students using AI for search is only half the story. The other half is whether universities are ready to use AI to recruit responsibly and effectively.

The competitive advantage will not come from buying the newest tool. It will come from doing the basics exceptionally well: accurate content, joined-up data, clear ownership, and an operating model built around the student journey – with AI used to scale what already works.

For additional background, please see:

• “AI tools in action for international student recruitment“
• “AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment“
• “The ChatGPT Generation: How AI Is quietly rewriting the global student search experience”��
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It isn’t just computer sciences feeling the impact of students’ jitters about AI. Across the board, universities are moving to position their programmes as relevant to students intent on “future proofing” their study choices.

The disruptive effect of new technologies

Between 2005 and 2023, the number of students graduating with computer science degrees in the US quadrupled. These degrees remain very popular among international students: as we speak, 1 in 5 international students in the US is enrolled in computer sciences.

Enrolments in the field first spiked in tandem with rapid Internet adoption, driving a ballooning of job openings in tech companies in the US and around the world. Coders, programmers, designers, etc. enjoyed a heyday of intense competition for their skills. But now that AI can fulfill some coding tasks and lighten the workload of programmers and designers, there is deep concern among students and workers about whether they should begin or continue a career in computer sciences.

As Boston College Professor has written, of all study fields, computer science is “the most likely to be impacted by artificial intelligence, which uniquely targets high-wage cognitive tasks, unlike past technological revolutions that automated physical labor.”

Worries about the extent of AI’s erosion of computing-related jobs is already manifesting in enrolment data. According to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers annual data from about 200 US universities, 62% of computing programmes recorded . What’s more, 66% of respondents said that their students graduating with computing majors were struggling to land jobs.

Writing in about computer sciences enrolments declining at Duke, Stanford, and Princeton, Rose Horowitch said:

“If the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren’t waiting to find out whether that’s true.”

Reason for optimism

Rather than panic, says Tom Griffiths, director of the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, students should consider that technology jobs will not disappear, but rather change. He acknowledges that there will be a decrease in so-called cognitive jobs because of AI, but he predicts an increase in “metacognitive jobs, such as knowing enough about software engineering to instruct automated software engineers and systems.” In an interview with the , Mr Griffiths said:

“I can understand why students are trying to model out what the job market is going to look like in a few years when they finish their degrees. But I also think there’s going to be all sorts of things that surprise us in terms of the kinds of jobs that become possible with particular skill sets.”

Similarly, Harvard Business School Professor Suraj Srinivasan has that found that new jobs are emerging as well as becoming scarcer as a result of AI. He found that after the public launch of Chat GPT in 2022, job postings involving “structured and repetitive tasks, likely replaceable by generative AI,” decreased by -13%. At the same time, employer demand for jobs that require more analytical, technical, or creative work – potentially enhanced by AI – grew +20%.” Professor Srinivasan says: “Rather than solely eliminating jobs, generative AI creates new demand in augmentation-prone roles, suggesting that human-AI collaboration is a key driver of labour market transformation.”

Universities are beginning to create new programmes with this human–AI dynamic in mind. For example, in 2025, the University of South Florida in Tampa attracted more than 3,000 students to its new Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing College. The State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) received US$5 million in funding from New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to launch a standalone Department of AI and Society that offers seven interdisciplinary AI degrees.

The interdisciplinary structure has merit: asking for candidates with AI skills – and these listings span a multitude of sectors (e.g., tourism, communications, healthcare).

Future proofing

The spectre of AI disrupting the labour force was already on students’ minds in 2024, at a time when the use of generative AI had just hit the mainstream. In a survey conducted in 2024 among more than 1,000 college students , almost two-thirds (64%) of students belonging to the class of 2027 (i.e., graduating that year) said AI had at least somewhat impacted their academic plans.

Knowing how quickly AI is changing the workforce, students are considering the future as much as the present when considering course options. For example, Travis White, an AI and Responsible Communication major at UB, explained the rationale for his choice of programme on : “My thought was that adding this new major would set me apart from the competition and give me some skills that could get me a niche, higher-paying job that may not even exist yet.”

Students are also looking outside of computing and AI

Some students are considering “interpersonal and hands-on” jobs that seem less likely – at least in the near term – to be jeopardised by AI. This trend is underlined by labour market data, as noted in a February 2026 :

“While AI is still just one factor among many that are leading to layoffs, ADP, the largest payroll company in the US, found that professional and business services roles, alongside information services jobs in media, telecom and IT, collectively lost 41,000 jobs in December 2025. In that same month, employment grew in healthcare, education and hospitality, per the firm’s data.”

The Guardian interviewed Jasmine Escalera, a career development expert at professional development firm Zety. Ms Escalera spoke to research by the firm that found that “close to half (43%) of Gen Z workers who are anxious about AI are moving away from entry-level corporate and administrative roles and toward careers that rely on ‘human skills’ including creativity, interpersonal connection and hands-on expertise.”

Study after study shows that employers remain interested in hiring people with strong “soft skills” (e.g., empathy, teamwork, communication, and creative problem-solving) – and it may be that the rise of AI will increase this demand. Fields such as the humanities and social sciences – which have been losing enrolments for years – are the very ones that cultivate soft skills, and some universities in the US are leaning into this in their marketing and programme design. They are boldly countering the narrative that the humanities are useless with an assertion that the very reverse is true. As reported in in 2025:

“The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs.”

Similarly, notes the Report, “Georgia Institute of Technology has also started drawing a connection between the humanities and good jobs … which has helped boost undergraduate and graduate enrolment in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts by 58 percent since 2019.”

The Report cites a real-life example of a student who achieved the ROI she was looking for through a humanities programme: “Olivia Howe was hesitant at first to add French to her major in finance at the University of Arizona, fearing that it wouldn’t be very useful in the labor market. Then her language skills helped her land a job at the multinational technology company Siemens, which will be waiting for her when she graduates this spring.”

Ms Howe commented: “The reason I got the job is because of my French. I didn’t see it as a practical choice, but now I do. The humanities taught me I could do it.”

Quick thinking

The increasing use of AI in workplaces does not mean that human skills are becoming obsolete. Smart universities are setting their students up to work alongside AI and/or in jobs that remain high-touch and hands-on. They are reviewing programme design, positioning, and career services to align with the most important theme in higher education: career outcomes are the top driver of student choice and student satisfaction.

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