StudyIn’s Rob Grimshaw names the international education markets to watch

In an exclusive interview with The PIE News, Grimshaw named Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as key European destination countries, as ripe for expansion.

“Malaysia is quite a hot market, partly because there’s a lot of transnational education (TNE) activity going on there,” he told the audience at The PIE Live Europe on March 25.

And he said that UK universities who aren’t currently eyeing new branch campuses in Indonesia “will be coming to join the party” soon, remarking that StudyIn is already working with many that are “very deeply engaged” with the country.

“if you look at where students are going to come from over a five-year horizon, a 10-year horizon, Indonesia must be part of the picture,” he said.

Indonesia has been increasing in popularity as a TNE destination of late, with its President setting an ambition for 10 new campuses to open over the coming years. It was also namechecked in the UK’s most recent international education strategy as a key market in which to explore TNE opportunities.

The South-East Asian market is particularly well known by StudyIn – formerly known as SI-UK – as it bought Indonesian student recruitment agency SUN Education just last year.

Grimshaw elaborated on other countries he saw as growing their market share, as students increasingly look beyond the big four – the UK, the US, Australia and Canada.

In Europe the big story is all about development in France and Germany and I think that Spain and Italy will come to that party as well in quite a big wayRob Grimshaw, StudyIn

“In Europe the big story is all about development in France and Germany and I think that Spain and Italy will come to that party as well in quite a big way,” he told delegates.

He added that there was “general diversification” in the market at the moment, which he said StudyIn saw “fundamentally as desirable”

“What’s behind all this is that the government’s obliging the sector to be much more careful… about triaging the students who are coming through,” he said.

“We are a business which is fundamentally about study overseas for academic purposes – we don’t see ourselves as being a sort of backdoor conduit for immigration.”

With many UK institutions backing out of key sending markets such as Bangladesh and Pakistan over compliance concerns, Grimshaw suggested that this showed a “lack of creativity in addressing these issues”. He added it was “perfectly possible” to recruit from such countries “without ending up with lots of trouble in your pipeline”.

“We’ve done it for years… we’ve got very rigorous processes going on in the background where in the back office, we are checking the documents, we are checking the characteristics of the students in a thorough way,” he elaborated. “And guess what? When you do that, you can spot the people who are trying to defraud the institutions and getting the system. It’s just about being sensible and rigorous about what you do.”

Grimshaw added that he instead wanted to see UK universities working together to prevent issues in the recruitment pipeline.

It comes as the UK government is cracking down on international student compliance as political debate over immigration intensifies.

The government is tightening Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) metrics, putting further pressure on already strained international offices as they seek to recruit more international students without falling foul of the new requirements.

Grimshaw told the audience that the Middle East – long a stronghold for international branch campuses and currently seeing market disruption due to the ongoing war with Iran – could see a dip in student Interest in the short term. But he added that students would likely “re-engage” quickly once the conflict was over.

 “People don’t like to make big decisions in a context of uncertainty, they, they really don’t, and the one thing that this conflict is producing at the moment is a huge amount of uncertainty,” he said.

“I think that there will be a period of time where students are stepping back and saying, wow, I don’t know what’s going on here at the moment – I’m just going to wait to see what happens.”

But he added that the market would likely level out and student interest would recover once there was more clarity over the situation, similar to the dip and recovery the sector saw during the pandemic, when some students still decided that studying abroad would be the right decision for them.