Have you ever wondered how well your organisation’s international student recruitment operations are resourced compared to others, or whether your cost per acquisition is higher or lower than others by source region?

Edified’s Benchmarking International Recruitment Operations (BIRO) is a syndicated research programme designed to help higher education institutions in the UK to understand the resourcing and cost effectiveness of their international recruitment operations relative to other universities in the UK.

We gather a range of data - application and enrolment numbers, staff, budgets, etc. - and build a profile of your institution. 

Our experts then benchmark the data against the sector aggregate so you can understand your performance and resourcing.

Participating institutions receive a personalised report including insights into:

• international recruitment staff resourcing relative to other providers
• the cost of international student acquisition by source region relative to other providers
• the effectiveness of different organisational models and systems

This strategic information can be used to make the case for additional investment in your operations, identify areas for improvement, and build on areas of success. This is the only data set of its kind in the UK.

Edified will verify and clean the data, then aggregate it to understand key benchmarks, answering questions like:

• How many admissions staff does it take to recruit 500 international students? – are we appropriately resourced to be competitive?
• Is there a correlation between systems and recruitment outcomes or resource requirements?
• For every pound spent on international recruitment, how much income is generated? – are we more or less efficient than the sector?
• What is the correlation between admissions decision turnarounds and enrolments?
• What is our cost of acquisition from South Asia relative to other institutions?
• Which is the most productive channel to recruit through in Africa?

The benchmarks are presented for the whole international operation and by recruitment regions so you can see, for example, whether your institution’s cost per acquisition from India is higher or lower than the sector’s and how your budget spend compares such as the relative spend on marketing compared to scholarships. 

You will be able to purchase a Standard BIRO with benchmarking against the sector, or a Premium BIRO which includes the sector benchmark and a bespoke competitor benchmark against 8-10 participating institutions of your choice.