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Return to Bulletin Home - October 2008 |
REPORT FROM ANTWERP: Higher Education Workshop Grows 68% in One Year Higher education institutions around the world are expanding their working relationships with quality recruitment agents. At the same time, agencies in many markets have increasingly focused their efforts on recruiting students for university studies.
These overlapping trends were very evident in Antwerp this year as a total of 153 participants from 52 countries and 6 continents joined the 2008 ICEF Higher Education Workshop (September 7-9). This represents a 68% increase in the number of attending organisations and a 50% increase in the number of countries represented compared to last year's event in Trondheim, Norway. Participating educators were impressed with the quality of the agents and acknowledged the rigorous ICEF pre-screening process for selecting the most qualified agents. Steffen Tabel from International University of Applied Sciences Bad Honnef, Germany explained: "This has been an outstanding workshop experience—a very good opportunity to get in contact with new agents and to establish future relations. We very much appreciate the pre-screening of the agents by ICEF, as this definitely secures high quality participants."
In addition to the one-to-one business appointments with agents, educators also met with each other to discuss exchange programmes, twinning arrangements and joint ventures. The 37 educator-educator meetings that took place highlight the trend of educational institutions taking steps to establish global partners.
The workshop included a half-day schedule of market intelligence seminars. According to Prashant Dua of TASMAC London School of Business in the UK, "These seminars for me are amongst the key reasons for attending ICEF Workshops. They add so much value to the overall workshop experience. The presentations are clear and concise and I am glad that I can have access to them post workshop as well. Overall they made for a very positive beginning to the workshop."
Michelangelo Balicco from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) sums up the workshop: "High quality agents and a perfectly organised event. ICEF will have to work very hard to perform any better." Dr. Somnath Basu from California Lutheran University (United States) predicts, "This event will grow 50-100% over the next year, just wait until the word of mouth gets out."
Next year's ICEF Higher Education Workshop will take place in Madrid, Spain from September 13-15, 2009. Once again this event will take place just prior to, and in the same city as, the Annual Conference of the European Association for International Education where nearly 3,000 education professionals meet to discuss and share ideas on the internationalisation of higher education in Europe and around the world.
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