I am part-way through a tour of the country hosting alumni events and holding meetings with our agents, potential students, and academic partners. Last night, we ran a very successful alumni event in Mumbai on the south-west coast of India. The team I’m travelling with are now getting into a groove, becoming increasingly confident about journeying half-way round the globe to meet up with our graduates and to establish alumni chapters. It’s all part and parcel of a high-level university strategy, which senior colleagues and myself drew up at the end of last year. To date we’ve held events in the US, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Nigeria, South Africa and India. With 130,000 graduates out there and an External Relations Office that is now running a CRM database with contact details for almost half of these people, the university is well placed to make significant progress over the coming years.
In India, we’ve already held events this week in Chennai and Mumbai, and I am now in Delhi for the final event. The format is best explained by looking at what happened last night in Mumbai. After initial contact with alums is made by distance using the CRM and social media sites, we then set up an event in a good location in country (usually a luxury hotel) and make the commitment for a member of the university’s senior management team to be present along with a member of our External Relations department. This week, we are also fortunate to have the Head of our India office available as well. The evening is run like a seminar so that we can actively involve the alums in an active discussion. We’re interested to hear about what they have been up to since graduating, and also about how they could help us with a number of strategic objectives, which include recruiting future students, offering mentoring to existing students and helping us engage in more high-quality academic partnerships with other universities.
In Mumbai, the two hours of talk with snacks and drinks went very fast. It’s fascinating to hear and share the stories of your alumni. Every event is slightly different, but last night’s was as engaging as ever. The alums came from the disciplines of Architecture, Physiotherapy, Motorsport Engineering, Urban Design, Planning, Business, and Project Management for the Built Environment. They had all engaged in postgraduate study with the university, and without exception, everybody present wanted to re-engage meaningfully with their alma mater.
First off though, I hosted a discussion about what had made their time in Oxford so special. The list included: the location of this English city steeped in history; courses that were vocational and explored their subject in great depth and included ‘real world’ live project work; the warmth with which they were welcomed into the university; the quality of the teaching; the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world; and the competitive pricing of the course fees taken into consideration alongside the good reputation of the university. They also told us what could be better with our offer: working harder to ensure that the qualifications could be officially recognised in India as well as in the UK; lobbying the British government to re-instate longer term post-study visas; and providing an alumni ‘cushion’ back in India to help graduates negotiate their return into thei home job market.
This morning I have been meeting agents to discuss how we can work together better to enable good students to come and study in Oxford. I sat in on interviews with a stream of potential Indian students, in one particular agent’s central Delhi offices. It was good to be reassured about the rigour of the operation but also about the tenor of the interview process. My private meetings later with the agents are fascinating, because we tend to dance around the commercial aspect of the student recruitment process. It’s business and agents work on commission. Crudely, they receive a fee for every student they ‘land’, and this fee comes directly from the university. In India, Oxford Brookes uses a small number of agents who process a large proportion of our students from this country. We also have our own university office in Northern India which is becoming increasingly important to us.
Unfortunately, a number of universities have been stung (and potential students disadvantaged) by corrupt practices in the sector. Student recruitment offers considerable financial returns, especially in a growing market, and therefore has attracted some rogue practitioners. All of the agents Inspeak to remind me that the UK is doing itself no favours. Because the government has introduced a significant tightening up of immigration compliance and monitoring, other countries (particularly Australia, Canada and New Zealand) are stealing a march on us. The UK still remains a key destination of choice for a university education, but the agents feel we are perversely undermining our reputation by making it difficult and expensive for international students to study here. So it is important that I oversee a recruitment process that doesn’t endanger our future ability to recruit students from overseas. After all, our ‘highly trusted’ status is built upon open honest partnership work with recruiters. But, we are also going to have be much more innovative in our recruitment methods in the future if we wish to continue to be an internationalised university, and country.
It can be very easy to lose sight of the importance of a university education, whilst dryly honing student recruitment processes. Therefore, it was uplifting this afternoon to meet up with one of Oxford Brookes’ postgraduate Architecture alums, who now runs an architectural practice in Delhi. Over tea, I sat and listened to him recounting his formative experiences in Oxford over six years ago. He received (or more accurately participated in) a radical learning environment where his entire belief system had been stripped down and re-evaluated. Reflecting, whilst sipping Assam tea in a hotel restaurant, he constantly tripped over his words as he excitedly explained why this experience was so important to him. The hour I spend there is worth more than any amount of time I could devote to articulating our brand, and I know his tutors will be thankful for his positive recommendation of their academic endeavours.
Meanwhile, outside, the noise of the city doesn’t abate. The heat of the afternoon sun keeps beating down, and my desire to go for a walk and make photographs gets stronger. In case you may be interested I am posting up these photographs on my Twitter feed at @pinman. A good colleague and friend of mine has been bemoaning my lack of activity on social media to drive traffic to this blog. In my defence I have offered the excuse that India is full-on and I simply don’t have the personal bandwidth at the moment to engage in a digital marketing campaign. Mind you, everyone’s a critic these days. My brother-in-law has messaged me to point out that he wasn’t sure what to make of the mix of personal reveal and what he refers as my Brookes Lite promotion. Even my wife has texted me to point out the typos. But, I’m being overly defensive. The blog has been welcomed by my friends, family and higher education colleagues. Over 350 people logged onto the WordPress site in the first four days. Not a bad beginning.
Tomorrow is my day of rest, but I’ll be back online on Monday.
@pinman blogs 