Statement of Principles of Good Practice, for Agents

IDP Education is actively working to advance the student recruitment field. We support the efforts of the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC) to develop professional standards and practices in international student recruitment. Please download their new white paper on this topic by visiting http://www.airc-education.org/_literature_75865/AIRC_White_Paper_-_Toward_Professional_Standards

What follows is an IDP opinion statement on the current state of international recruitment agents and why we believe individual agents should be accepted into the NACAC organization:

IDP's Position Statment on NACAC's SPGP

A goal of the National Association for College Admission Counseling is to ensure principled conduct among professionals in the recruitment of students. In support of this, and as more of their members enlist the services of international student recruiters, NACAC is currently considering a revision and update to their Statement of Principles of Good Practice (SPGP) in regard to agent use. IDP Education supports such a revision. Specifically, we call for the association to acknowledge the role of officially recognized and contracted agencies, to affirm that their form of compensation is legal, and to provide colleges and universities the opportunity to define the practice as “professional” versus “ethical.”

For prospective students, the primary function of an agent is to serve as a guidance counselor. Agents are typically university graduates who have built their reputations in the local markets by delivering good service. They are counselors in every sense and fill a market niche, as the admissions process overseas is often vastly different from the U.S. model, and public high schools overseas provide little or no college counseling. These types of agents should therefore be viewed like independent counselors and fall under NACAC’s SPGP.

Too often, a determinant for the professionalism and quality of overseas student recruitment support centers on the form of payment as opposed to what should truly matter: the service to the student and the institution.

Many agents accept a performance-based compensation model similar to those of other professional services used by universities, such as search firms for executives, real estate agents, endowment/investment/retirement fund managers, and pay-for-performance marketing channels such as online directories and website advertising. Every decision to use a vendor/contractor needs economic justification and comes with an expected outcome and thus a derived cost per student.

While it is common to trust an institution’s brand and reputation to a third-party website or marketing agency, foreign agent use is considered by some as unethical. Yet under a model where university employees are expected to deliver successful results or face possible termination, an overseas marketing representative hired on salary by an institution could be just as likely to resort to many of the same disreputable behaviors of which agents are often accused, in an attempt to meet goals and remain employed.

Therefore, IDP advocates that ethics has little to do with the form of payment and has everything to do with delivering professional services that best serve the students and institutions. Anyone who works with students – university employees, independent counselors, agents – can potentially follow unprofessional business practices. The key for any institution is to hire employees and work with recruitment partners who can be trusted. A good agent is often a foreign businessperson with a storefront location, local business licenses and a long history of representing universities worldwide, whose livelihood depends on continuing business operations. IDP believes it is more effective to sanction unprofessional agents to encourage best practice than it is to try to banish these proven businesspeople working in a widely accepted and effective field.

IDP is an international company that employs hundreds of professional counselors who work with students and their families to find the ideal higher education institution for their needs, goals and qualifications. These counselors are salaried employees (with nominal bonus compensation for satisfied students) and are well trained on the institutions they represent and the markets they serve. More than 40 years of successful student placement, with the majority of prospective students coming to IDP counseling centers through word of mouth, shows that the organization is an entity that can be trusted and respected. Following a business practice of collecting a placement fee for each successfully enrolled student, a practice akin to paying an online directory a lead fee for each successfully delivered hit to a website, should have no bearing on how the quality of the organization is defined. Instead, quality should be judged based on the level of service and satisfaction to students and university partners.

Agencies are now receiving certification from the American International Recruitment Council; a positive step forward. IDP has developed an in-house training program for its counselors and is looking to qualify them based on their knowledge of the U.S. market. Agent use is now firmly entrenched in the international recruitment process – what must come next is a call to develop standardized guidelines for what is considered acceptable practice. Then, if an agent does not provide adequate service and guidance to students and institutions, that should be the basis for what is considered inappropriate. If individual professionals are working in the best interests of students and institutions, and understand the mutual benefit of delivering success to their partners, and happen to be paid based directly on this success, that is simply good business, not unprofessional behavior.

With this in mind, we call on all the associations involved with international education to push professionalism, market knowledge and quality training as the measure of qualification, not how an individual or organization is compensated.