Regulating International Student Mobility – Agents and Markets in New Zealand

Memo #151

By Francis Leo Collins – f.collins [at] auckland.ac.nz

International student mobility is a huge industry. 3.3 million students studied outside of their country of citizenship in 2008. In some countries like Australia and New Zealand, international students represent about 15 per cent of total post-secondary enrolments. Student mobility is often conceived as a straightforward exercise in demand and supply. Students willing to pay the costs of overseas study represent the demand. Educational services provided by post-secondary institutions – many facing reduced state funding – represent the supply. This free market model ignores the multitude of mediating actors involved in student mobility.

International students are encouraged and directed by other actors including profit-oriented education agents. In New Zealand more than 50 per cent of international students utilize agents. Students from China, South Korea, and India are particularly likely to use them. Agents help students to enroll, assist with visa issues, find accommodation, and sometimes even provide study advice and counseling. Agents bridge the business world of education with the social world of students. Their involvement channels flows of students into particular places and institutions.

But the role of agents is controversial. They have been charged with deceiving students, giving inflated expectations of qualifications, and even fraud that creates negative press for education providers. New Zealand’s response has been to roll out forms of regulation that encourage self-governing behaviour by education providers, the exercise of responsibility by students as consumers, and the incorporation of agents into the activities of education providers and the state. Agents are now part of an industry, pressured to become licensed and monitored by education providers under a new “Code of Practice.”

The position of agents in student mobility is a complex one, requiring negotiation of student and family expectations, and business relationships with different education providers. As student mobility grows in importance, agents are likely to be subject to increased attention from the state and other industry actors. This formalization of student mobility is not likely to eradicate the role of agents but it will transform them from a problematic actor on the margins to a key facilitator of increasingly formal relationships between students, education providers, and the state.