If you haven’t been hiding under a rock these last few months, you may have noticed that the US dollar is on a roll.  And it’s not just on a roll in Canada, where the price of oil has reduced the value of our own currency; since mid-2014, the US dollar is up over 20% against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. This creates some interesting conundrums and strategy options for pricing international education.

The change in the dollar’s status means that everyone’s price has been reduced vis-à-vis those at American universities. If you’re a university in, say, Sweden, it doesn’t matter much because practically all of your competitors are European. Basically: if your price isn’t changing relative to that of your main competitors, then the fall of the dollar is fairly meaningless.

However, if the fall in the value of your currency is greater than that of your competitors, then this does actually create some room to maneuver. I was in Russia last week, where the fall in the value of the rouble (76:1 USD, down from 37:1 USD at the end of 2014) means that their product is now much cheaper, relatively speaking, than that of their competitors, and that makes them a more attractive destination.  As a result, the Russians are now marketing themselves as a “bargain” product because, let’s face it, Russian universities have a brand image problem after the disasters of the 1990s. Their strategy is to go low price, high volume, and admit as many Asian and Latin American students as possible.

That’s one strategy. But there are others. If you are an Australian or a British university with a reasonable reputation, you might ask why you should keep your prices constant in local currency. If you think your main competitors for international students are American schools, you might also think it makes sense to take advantage of your lower currency, and increase prices a bit. It won’t necessarily hurt you with recruitment, and you can make a little bit of extra money in local currency terms. Basically, in these situations, universities have a choice between marketing themselves as a “bargain” institution (take advantage of low price to increase volume) or as a luxury institution (risk volume to increase price).

Now in Canada we have a somewhat different set of issues at play, for two reasons. First, we actually have a lot of American students, institutional pricing strategies need to take account of that market. Second of all, unlike European universities, Canadian schools can be very sure that US institutions are a major source of competition, and hence we have more scope to re-price based on currency changes. So here’s the question: should institutions take the “bargain” route and keep prices steady in local terms, or a “luxury” strategy that sees us raise prices, or perhaps even start charging in US dollars?

Essentially, this is the choice every institution needs to make over the next couple of months. I think there’s a pretty clear case for Toronto, UBC, and McGill to move to USD pricing, and keep last year’s fees constant in USD terms (that is, raise them by about 20% in $CDN terms). Will they lose some applicants? Probably. But they have the brand power to deal with that, and the students for which they are really competing are going to be paying more anyways to go to an American university. And the prize is a big whack of extra cash.

For everybody else, it’s a trickier proposition. Some institutions – particularly if they are experiencing recruitment shortfalls (say Trent, or any one of a dozen Atlantic universities) – will probably see more benefit in going the “bargain” route, and aggressively going after students looking for a “cheap” North American experience. Others – Windsor, perhaps – might decide to take that pitch directly to American students. The institutions with the trickiest task are the other U-15 universities. They might be tempted by the USD route, but may be unsure if they had the brand power to make it work. Expect a period of experimentation, not all of it successful.

In any case, for those interested in looking at price elasticity as a function of institutional prestige, the next couple of years promise to be quite interesting.