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Return to Bulletin Home - January 2009 |
New Destination-Focused Workshop for North America For the last 13 years, the ICEF Americas Workshop has taken place annually in Miami. The last two years in particular have seen an impressive growth rate of 52% (from 272 participants in 2006 to 413 in 2008). 128 educational institutions were represented at the 2008 ICEF Americas Workshop, nearly 60% of which came from the US and Canada. 152 educational agencies attended from 46 countries.
Participants meet on the grounds of the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne during the 2008 ICEF Americas Workshop in Miami. To build on these strengths and also recognise important market opportunities for both educators and agents, the ICEF Americas Workshop will be renamed the ICEF North America Workshop in 2009. The Workshop will be re-focused as a destination event providing educators exclusively from the US and Canada with the opportunity to showcase their programmes, schools, and regions to a large group of quality agents from all over the world who have a demonstrated specialisation in these two study destinations.
The workshop's new orientation recognises the importance of the US and Canada as leading destination countries as well as the growing interest among North American educators in forging strong working relationships with qualified agents (see "The Americans Are Coming" below) and the consistent interest among agents in increasing their referrals to American and Canadian institutions. The ICEF North America Workshop also builds on the successful innovation of last year's Australia New Zealand Agent Workshop, ICEF's first-ever destination-focused networking event. Now in its second year, the ANZA Workshop is already becoming one of the largest ICEF events, and, as such, clearly illustrates the potential for destination-focused workshops.
The ICEF North America Workshop will take place at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne in Miami from December 6 to 8, 2009.
The Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne In addition to ICEF, Inc., the US division of ICEF led by Ms. Diana Forman, ICEF has recently opened an additional North American office in support of its expanded programming in the Americas. The office is based in Toronto, Canada, and led by Ms. Bogumila Lapinski Anaya "The Americans Are Coming" ICEF CEO Markus Badde was recently quoted in an Economist article about the growing interest among American universities in working with qualified educational agents. The article observes that, if US universities do develop closer ties with professional agents, "the market in international students will be transformed." "A September 2008 survey carried out by i-graduate in partnership with ICEF found that although few agents recommended American institutions to their clients, most wanted to. 'Agents said the United Kingdom was the country in which they placed the most students,' according to Will Archer, the firm's director. 'But they said the country in which they would most like to place students was the United States.' Those agents rated America as the most desirable for undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA courses." In a related development, a broad-based group of American higher education institutions have established the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC) as a new standards body for educator-agent relations in the US. AIRC was founded in July 2008 with a mandate to establish standards and best practices for working with agents as well as a framework to certify agents to act on behalf of US institutions. Under the leadership of Dr. Mitch Leventhal, the Chair and President of AIRC and Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati, the Council expects that its membership will number more than 100 American universities and colleges by the end of its first year of operation. |
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