The growth of an organisation set up to help us institutions compete in the global market is a sign of the nation’s growing interest in overseas students. The American International Recruitment Council (AIRC) reached the milestone of 100 institutional members in May, two years after it was established. It is seeking to “develop standards of ethical practice pertaining to recruitment of international students”, and provide “best practices and training to assist overseas student recruitment agents and institutions themselves to better serve students seeking admission”.
According to official figures, the US had 623,800 overseas students in 2007-08, compared with 389,330 in the UK. However, a report published last year by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education warns that while the US remains the most popular destination globally, “other countries with more aggressive recruitment strategies have steadily cut into the US market share in the past decade”.
Comments Mitch Leventhal, AIRC’s president: “The startling growth... is testament to the urgent need for professional standards in the field of international student recruitment, as well as the imperative for non-governmental leadership to initiate more effective global marketing practices.”
Institutional members of the AIRC include Ohio University, the University of Idaho and the University of Illinois, Springfield. Agency members include the Australian company IDP Education, China’s EduGlobal and Study Overseas UK. The American academy traditionally has had ethical reservations about the use of agents. The US is the world’s leading draw for foreign students, but until recently had not taken an active or commercial approach to recruitment.
Agents are now viewed as a key element in this process, as they can make recommendations to students choosing their higher education destinations.
Publicly funded research sharing Bill
Senior academic officers of 27 major US universities have backed a plan for open access to publicly funded research, which they say would “accelerate the advancement of knowledge”. A Bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives proposing that the 11 federal agencies with external research budgets of more than $100 million (Rs.450 crore) provide free online access to the results of the research they fund, no less than six months after publication in a journal. A previous version of the Bill, covering research funded by bodies such as NASA (National Aeronautics & Space Agency), stalled in Congress last year as legislators became bogged down with healthcare reform.
Now provosts and presidents from 27 public and private research universities have written an open letter, released by Harvard University provost Steven Hyman, in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Other signatories to the letter include Christopher L. Eisgruber, provost at Princeton University, and George Breslauer, executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley.
The signatories note that, on average, about 50 percent of research funding at their institutions comes from the federal government. They say the legislation gives the opportunity to broaden “access to publicly funded research in order to accelerate the advancement of knowledge and maximise the related public good”. “Scholarly publishers, academic libraries, university leaders and scholars themselves must engage in an ongoing dialogue about the means of scholarly production and distribution. The passage of FRPAA will be an important step in catalysing that dialogue, but it is not the last one that we will need to take.”
The Bill is likely to face opposition from journal publishers, who fear their business model is threatened by open access to research. But Mike Doyle, the Democrat Congressman who introduced the Bill, says he hopes it will pass through Congress by the end of the year.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)