It seems like first we have to go through international affiliated partners before speaking to DSOs of a certain schools.
I’ve worked with agents before for a previous university, where I worked as an international student office administrator. I would say the major reasons are:
- Save time for our overall admission efforts and focus most of our time on current students. Let the sales do the sales job.
- Agents/partners can usually reach out to the markets and audience that we typically can’t, sitting in our offices on campus. For example, overseas markets. Also for the hybrid professional programs, we also subtlety need our name out there saying we have them for international students. Partners/agents are more professional in making and running the channels.
- It’s overall more efficient, especially for DSOs, most of them I know are already busy enough dealing with currently enrolled students. It’s not really always their responsibility to help with the admission, let alone individual students.
- Higher education may look fancy in some ways, but consider sometimes people are also underpaid, overworked, or for some departments they are under-staffed.
- Schools do have compliance checks and training on agents as far as I know. For potential students the partners are also quicker and easily accessible. I would say it benefits all three sides.
Open to discussion.
4 Likes
Thank you very much for your response, makes total sense!