If you are an international university looking to recruit Chinese students. Firstly it is important to deeply understand the Chinese students, the market, and your university’s advantages compared to other options. See the 4 reasons they study abroad here.
The international recruitment market in China is basically made of two pillars:
– Agents
– Internet
It is important that universities use a dual strategy in recruitment. They work with agents and they also work to develop their branding power online.
Chinese Agents
China is typically an agent market for studying abroad. Due to the language issues, perceived difficulty and also some cultural reasons, most students would go to an agent to get help in studying abroad. The quoted perceived usages of agents (from informal interviews) is 80% of students going to agents. Even those that said they wanted to apply directly said they had consulted with an agent to ask some questions. It is more likely that every student or as much as 95% will consult an agent when they are looking to study abroad.
Their reasons to use an agent is that the agents can help increase their chances, they can help to review the documents, write the letters and prepare everything, and also follow up to make sure that the student doesn’t miss any important dates. Because the student . There are some perceived questions about the qualities and incentives of agents so some Chinese students don’t know whether to trust some agents. Agents will often charge 20,000 – 100,000 RMB for this process. A higher price is also an indication of quality and there is a sense of being “reassuringly expensive”. As the price of the agent is not so much compared to the tuition and other expenses of studying abroad it is seen as a valuable investment.
How to work with agents is quite tricky and is quite murky for international universities because of the language differences many agents do not really know how the agents are representing them. It is a largely individual 1 on 1 service so it is also hard to know. It is really important to understand this because the agents are a key part of the recruitment process. It is important to understand the market, and get feedback from students, agents. Commission is one important factor, success rates and how easy it is to convince students is another important factor, and training of the agents is important. It would be important to get mystery shoppers – getting students to try different agents and see how they are representing your university.
The internet
The internet is playing an increasingly important role for students when they decide on the university. It is important to have a proper, effective strategy for the China market. Students will typically use agents and also do their own research through asking other people and online on social media such a Baidu, wechat account and wechat groups, weibo, Zhihu (chinese quora) and the university’s website directly. Unlike in the west where google and facebook are so dominant the digital ecosystem is quite diverse and different in China with many different platforms for different purposes. One of the main differences to the west is that search is unimportant. Baidu is used far less frequently than google. Other platforms such as those mentioned above are more community / p2p based.
Influencers (KOLs) and word of mouth is very important in China for trust of prospective students. Having a strong community of Chinese students in China, frequent alumni events, or their presence online is a powerful way of doing this. Also a focus on making the university degree better, rank higher, and existing students happier, and more successful in China, is also important because that will inevitably feed back into the prospective students through the internet. Harvard doesn’t have a weibo account and they don’t need to “because they’re Harvard”, said one student.
