I love the annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA), which is being held this week in Washington DC.  NAFSA, for uninitiated, is both a conference with lots of interesting presentations on international education (I was doing one on International Education Policies in the Americas, as part of the work I have done with colleagues Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsiligiris and Pat Killingley for the British Council—watch the blog next week).   But it is also a massive exhibition space for institutions interested in finding international partners, like a massive exercise in transnational education speed-dating, and for people who want to sell into this space. 

Some of the speed-daters and service-providers are delightfully zany, and my favourite past-time here is finding the zaniest ones.  A couple of years ago, the tiny emirate of Ras Al Khaimah was touting an education-focussed free-trade zone and was searching for prestige institutions who might want to act as “anchor tenants”.  The idea was preposterous: RAK is about the size of London, Ontario and is only about an hour (assuming favourable traffic) outside of Dubai, which outshines it in pretty much every conceivable way, so the whole thing was a massive exercise in wishful thinking. 

Or, a couple of years further back, there was the guy who represented a set of “somewhat opaque” Russian monied interests who had somehow acquired an empty campus in northern Spain (I think it was in the Basque country, but I can’t remember exactly).   The idea was that he was going to get a series of prestigious international institutions (preferably one from each continent) with business/engineering programs to come together on this campus and do lots of joint projects in connection with local industry, organized and arranged by his company.  And yes, this was also wishful thinking and would have been so even if it weren’t a mysterious Russian organization trying to make money off some repossessed Spanish pharmaceutical company’s ex-research facilities.

This year was a little low on the zany, which I take to mean that the higher education market is less frothy than it was a couple of years ago (which is good but is also disappointing for my level of NAFSA enjoyment).  Still, you can still learn a lot about the state of international higher education just by wandering around the halls.  For instance, there are a bunch of relatively minor players in international higher education who seem to be putting significant funds into pushing themselves here: Peru and Chile come to mind – future competitors, perhaps?  Also, the presence of institutions from countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania is well up from where it was a few years ago.  Indian institutional participation is off the scale compared to the number of students they attract.

(In more local news, Quebec seems to have a larger-than-usual presence here.  While the Quebec kiosks are technically part of the EduCanada area in the exhibitor lounge, they are visually separate, with all the other provinces working under a common red/white roof while Quebec is at the other end, outside the roof, at a separate set of fleurs-de-lys branded pedestals.  Hilarious).

In terms of non-institutional exhibitors, you tend to get a few big, clearly defined categories.  First are the big recruiter/pathways companies like IDP or INTO, and the big test companies like IELTS and TOEFL.  Then, there are a host of little agents/recruiters (mainly operating in India and China), the companies that put on educational recruitment fairs in various parts of the world, and the digital marketers and the companies that straddle the line between all three (like BMI).  There is a whole industry of companies who sell themselves as generators of international student leads (FPPEdu claims It uses “artificial intelligence” to do this, which is probably true if by “AI” you actually mean “an algorithm”) or analyzers of data (Studyportals – interesting idea, approach with caution given the data source), or improvers of yield (Unibuddy – really interesting idea though I can’t actually see how it works without an enormous amount of work from the institution itself).  Maybe the most astonishing group of companies, at least in terms of the sheer number involved, are the organizers of “study abroad” experiences.  For a Canadian, this stuff is kind of bewildering because chez nous it is largely assumed that to be an institutional responsibility, but in the United States it’s a huge area for outsourcing (which, when you think about how small so many American institutions are, makes sense).

Unless you’re an international office professional, NAFSA isn’t necessarily something you’d want to do every year.  But once every few years it’s completely worth it.  Partly because you’ll learn things in the conference sessions, but mostly because when you’re on the expo floor you can see with your own eyes three very crucial truths about global higher education: i) it’s a big and impossibly diverse sector ii) there’s a lot of money in it, and iii) the competition is ferocious.  To succeed, institutions have to be ferocious, too. 

Lord knows that doesn’t come naturally to Canadians.  But as international competition heats up, maybe it’s something we’d better learn.