Deferrals didn’t rise as expected in September 2020. With Coronavirus lockdowns seemingly around the corner and worries over the state of the economy, many experts were expecting student numbers to drop this year.It didn’t happen. In fact, 2020 saw record student numbers across the UK.
Perhaps one of the biggest factors affecting this were restrictions on travel. Many students who may have been planning to take a gap year were afraid of missing out on travel opportunities, and therefore plumped for the safe option – head to Uni.
So what does this mean for Universities in 2021? Can they expect another record-breaking year of admissions?
Believe it or not, UK universities have been struggling to find international students for a while now. While our education system is world-renowned, there’s no standard process for foreign students to apply, like UCAS in the UK for example.
While the overall flow of students is high, individual Universities struggle to deal with incoming leads, mainly because they come in from all over the world from markets very different to the UK. There is also a lack of data overall, as international admissions are lower than national ones.
Unis are, for the most part, a bit lost on how to improve their international admissions strategy and 2021 will only complicate things if admissions teams do not adapt.
Big data and predictive analytics can provide educational leaders with speedy, actionable information in order to make smart enrolment decisions and allocate both staff time and financial resources to increase enrolments from existing markets while building new ones.
An algorithm predicting which students are likely to enrol will immediately notice any behavioural changes and identify which new segments (i.e countries, regions, ages) are more likely to enrol, before the lead has even performed any action.
This is the main difference between AI and standard scoring – the data is immediately actionable.
With this information, international strategic planners can create evidence-based international strategies and change recruitment plans in real-time as opposed to waiting for end-of-the-year results.
The process has already been influential in increasing admission rates by 35% in international enrolments.
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