Agent compliance without senior leader visibility is not possible

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Even a modestly sized university will today pay several million dollars a year to its education agencies. Larger institutions regularly commit 8 figures annually this way, with some over-exposed universities reliant on those agents for as much as 50% of total organisational income.

For the past decade, as reliance on agent-supplied international students grew in especially the UK, Canada, and Australia, this annual outlay on commission and bonuses was seen by executive teams and CFOs as an unavoidable cost of sales. I myself spent multiple executive meeting slots extolling the criticality of agency partners, and defending the need to “remain competitive” (read: pay increasing amounts, whether in commissions or ever-more-lavish fam trips). This pattern was repeated at thousands of institutions worldwide, since the largest agencies have managed to persuade their clients that, without their support, results will suffer.

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Regulation Brings A Need For Greater Openness

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With increasing regulatory pressure, be it self-administered as with the UK’s Agent Quality Framework, or Australia’s current drive for institutions to markedly improve critical governance elements, it can no longer be appropriate to continue funding these recruitment operations unquestioningly whilst quietly reporting the cost in ‘other operating expenses’ lines in financial statements.

Executive leaders from outside the international portfolio should have this visibility also, as should Council members; and there should not be the need to seek summary data from insights teams. After the Dundee debacle, it’s more important than ever that data is self-accessible by the person consuming it.

To know the right questions to pose operational teams, senior leader need first to see the balance of delivery today. In our hundreds of conversations with prospects and customers globally, almost no university executive member we’ve met has held direct access to agency contracts in a way that allows comparison or analysis of outcomes. Sharepoint access, maybe. Capability to view in aggregate and compare with those agencies’ performance, far less common.

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Contracts Are Often Viewed As 'Admin', When Actually They're Crucial

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Some organisations spending as much as £15M recurrently on commissions have leaders with no visibility at all of the way those terms are crafted, meaning, as an example, their DVC(I) cannot see the commission low-high delta, or that its agencies cannot in any way compete on price (a huge disbenefit for all universities using agencies to recruit, and the principal driver of commission creep globally).

Visibility of live contracts should be table stakes for senior leaders. Beyond this, robust approval workflows for new contract issue and contract renewal are critical to safeguard regulatory compliance and to ensure money is spent wisely; your CFO should be seeing commission schedules and approving (or rejecting) onward flows prior to the document leaving for the agency’s signature, and your Legal team should sight documents where any changes have occurred versus prior iterations. And for UK institutions (and any agency partnered with a UK organisation) the Good Practice Guide's stipulation that policy and term variations must be shared rapidly and against all existing agreements will create significant manual workload lest a digital solution is applied.

We’ve built this functionality and more so that these 6-8 figure cost centres - which of course are also very significant rev-get operations - can function more robustly and professionally than before. Next comes auditable trails for leadership, and admin-busting auto-renewals and variation management, all of which can save dozens of days per year for now overstretched teams.

To speak to us about how this can support your executive team’s governance and decision-making, book a short demo.