A couple of big events occurred internationally over the last few weeks, which will matter to folks in the international recruitment field.  Briefly, they are:

1) The Saudis are pulling back.  Things are moderately bad in the kingdom right now.  Their gambit of driving down the price of oil in order to run the American fracking industry out of business is not working as quickly as they hoped, and may have re-established an era of cheap, $50 (or sub-$50) oil for the foreseeable future. (And yet Jeff Rubin still gets paid to dispense expertise.  Life is not fair.)  Plus they’ve gotten themselves stuck in a costly war in Yemen.  Result: Government deficits running at 12% of GDP.

Now, this isn’t the end of the world because their sovereign wealth funds are sitting on roughly a gazillion dollars in assets, and they can draw those down for awhile.  But still, economies have to be made, and that’s a tricky business in a country where the social contract is that the al-Sauds pay for everything in return for everyone agreeing to let slide the fact that the al-Sauds own everything.  Put it this way: foreign scholarships aren’t top of the list for cutbacks, but they’re not at the bottom, either.

It seems the way this is going to play out is with typical Saudi opacity.  Very quietly, schools are being told they are no longer eligible to be in the program.  It seems to have little to do with quality of individual schools or programs – the entire Atlantic region suddenly got cut off last month.  How many schools will this eventually affect?  Too soon to tell.  But even top schools need to be looking towards 2020 (the program’s current end-date) and wondering what comes next.

2) Brazil is suddenly hostile to overseas education.  Go back a couple of years and everybody loved Brazil.  They were spending money like nobody’s business on foreign scholarships through their Science Without Borders Program.  But things have been going sideways for Brazil lately for reasons eloquently described in last week’s Economist, and the repercussions are severe.

Back in September, the government imposed a 40% cut to the program, which basically meant they could not accept any new students.  Now, a new draft law has been put forward, which places a tax of between 5 and 33% on any tuition fees paid outside the country (and yes, that does sound difficult to police – I think it’s only going to apply to fees paid through an agency, but it’s hard to tell from the article).

Of course, stories like this always bring up the dreaded question: what if the China market tanks?  Regular readers will know I am skeptical about talk of any China “bubble” in higher education, let alone a pop: in my view, political risk will likely increase the short-term flow of students rather than decrease it.  So there’s no need to get too panicky.  But these events should remind people that a sustainable recruitment policy requires some geographic diversification.