Envisage International Corporation

I just finished Robert Massie’s biography of Catherine the Great, and like his other histories of czarist Russia (Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra), it was excellent.  Catherine was obsessed with opening her historically insular people and lands to ideas, culture and art from the west, and improving Russia’s standing and perception in the world through international diplomacy.   And she had some success in nurturing a learned class in Russia and impacting the international perception of Russia.

But what she lacked was the ability to truly scale her efforts.  Even with her immense wealth, Catherine was sending only handfuls of Russians abroad, and bringing in limited numbers of foreigners.  Most of those she brought in were concentrated in Moscow or St. Petersburg.    But what if she had a J1 program?

According to the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange, under the J1 Exchange Visitor Program, since 2005, the U.S. has hosted 161,000 Chinese, 164,000 Russians, 117,000 Brazilians, 71,000 Turks and 34,000 Indians; 80% of these visitors are under the age of 30.  Although there are some government funded J1 programs, most of these visitors come under the public-private structure of the Exchange Visitor Program that are of zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer.  This structure has allowed the Exchange Visitor Program to scale dramatically, leaning on the private sector to provide much of the program infrastructure and support.

Exchange visitors go to every part of the U.S., working in theme parks, hotels, and ski resorts, as au pairs in American homes, as interns and trainees in American companies and as high school students in American schools.  Having a work component to the exchange means that the program is accessible to interested students of more limited means than a typical international student, and exchange visitors interact with Americans from all walks of life.  When they return home, forever changed, they bring a deeper understanding of the U.S. and its people, language and culture; and as they continue through life to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, business people, parents and leaders, they carry with them their experiences in the U.S.  The result is worldwide, personal diplomacy on a large scale. The benefits to the participants and to the U.S. are immeasurable.

The United States desperately needs immigration reform, and NAFSA, the Alliance and anyone else in international education that I’ve talked to would agree and support 99% of the current Senate bill.  Pathway to citizenship issues rightfully dwarf exchange visitor issues. It would be a shame, though, to unintentionally lose the scalability brought about by the effective public/private infrastructure of the Exchange Visitor Program.  According to the Alliance, that is exactly what will happen if the current Senate bill were enacted into law, as buried in the 700+ page bill are a handful of paragraphs that would make radical changes to the Exchange Visitor Program.

Read the attached letter to see what the Alliance has to say about very specific provisions of the proposed Senate bill on immigration reform, the impact on J1 programs, and what you can do about it.

Agree or disagree, I’d love to hear your comments.

I read with interest StephenFerst’s post about his 18 NAFSA Annual Conferences, his experiences and the changes he’s seen. He mentions the increase in sophistication of the industry, and I have to agree -the increase in the sophistication of the business of international education in the past decade, since the launch of Envisage International, has been remarkable. Here are a few examples of this trend in the areas that I have a lot of exposure to:

1. Sophistication of International Student Recruiting and Marketing Providers

As regular attendees at the LeadsCon conference, we see the sophistication of the domestic student recruitment world. There are dozens of lead buyer/seller technology platforms, call centers, live lead transfer technology, lead scrubbing technology, anti-fraud providers and others, building an entire industry and bundle of technologies around recruiting US students into US colleges.

Contrast this domestic US industry to international education, where school promotion, student recruitment and inquiry generation has largely been listings on directory-style sites and excel spreadsheets of interested students on one hand, and in-country agents and in-person student fairs on the other. The development of a cluster of technology-based solutions around international student recruitment is in its infancy but moving fast, as in addition to us, there are participants like Zinch building technology to take international student community and inquiry generation to a whole new level. There is no doubt that the landscape of international student recruitment will look much different five years from now.

2. Types of Insurance Companies Involved in International Education

Throughout my tenure, there have always been many insurance providers exhibiting and advertising at the NAFSA Annual Conference . The numbers seem to hold steady, typically between 25 and 30 exhibitors in the exhibit hall. But the make-up of these providers has been changing, as we see less and less of the NAFSA-networked, small brokerage shop, being replaced by very big or very tech savvy insurance companies. Aetna and United HealthCare are as big as it gets in US healthcare, and they have both squarely targeted international students for their school group business. And to supplement their group business, technologically enhanced companies, like our International Student Insurance or ISOA, harness the power of the internet to reach individual students around the globe.

3. High Quality Media on the Business of International Education

The PIE News and ICEF Monitor are two good examples of this trend, but they are not alone. Each provides high-quality reporting and analysis on the business of international education. The Pie News even has a section devoted to acquisitions, highlighting M&A activity in the international education world. When there is a valid business model in publishing primarily on the business of international education, and a level of acquisition within the industry to warrant its own coverage and section, it is pretty good evidence of the flow of money into international education.