Why unis are losing out on SEA students

“For 20 years I've worked on digital marketing and university recruitment communications across South East Asia (SEA). For the last six years we ’ ve been running recruitment programmes focused on driving regional recruitment across multiple faculties and the same pattern keeps showing up in every market. The student does the research and builds the shortlist, but it is the parents who make the call about which university their children go to. Most Australian institutions know this, and most can cite the research. However, if you read their websites, the open-day decks, and the offer-stage emails, you would never guess it. Recruitment communications are still written with the 18-year-old applicant in mind, while the 48-year-old actually making the decision lands on the same website and finds nothing that answers her questions. This is why Australia is losing ground. The numbers tell a specific story Japan is targeting 400,000 international enrolments by 2027, while Korea is aiming for 300,000. Communications from both universities lead with proximity, safety and graduate employment, in that order. They have also tied study to work pathways in ways that give parents a return-on-investment story they can use to justify their decisions to themselves and extended family. South East Asia sent over 350,000 students abroad in 2022 according to an Acumen study, making it the third-largest source region globally. Historically, Australia has owned a large share of that flow, and that share is now slipping. Visa changes and the student cap debate have had a significant effect, but institutions that blame policy alone are missing another dimension – what has actually shifted in the decision process itself. For instance, Vietnamese parents rank living conditions and total cost ahead of curriculum or academic reputation. Their first question isn ’ t ‘ Is this a good university? ’ It ’ s ‘ Is this a safe, affordable place for my child to live, and will this investment pay off? ’ In other words, an Australian prospectus that opens with rankings is answering a question nobody is asking. What parents are actually evaluating In our work running regional recruitment for Singapore ’ s flagship university, three patterns show up every time we audit how SEA parents experience an institution ’ s communications. Safety stays surface-level Most institutional sites mention “ a safe campus ” once in a welcome paragraph and move on, but parents want specifics: after-hours transport, accommodation vetting, mental health support, incident reporting processes. Japan and Korea answer these in detail, and most Australian sites don ’ t. Graduate outcomes are buried Employment data exists on almost every institutional site, but it ’ s almost never on the pages a parent in Jakarta or Hanoi is actually visiting. It sits three clicks deep, framed as institutional reporting rather than parent-facing reassurance. A parent working out whether an A$80,000 investment will change her child ’ s trajectory needs to find this information in under a minute, and typically she doesn ’ t. Cost narratives are incomplete Parents are running a total-cost model in their heads that covers tuition, living, flights home and contingency, so institutions that lay this out clearly convert better. ‘ Scholarships available ’ isn ’ t a compelling cost narrative. Those that hide behind ‘ contact us for details ’ tend to lose the parent in the first session on the site. This is a communications problem Australian higher education has always been a strong product. Graduate outcomes hold up against the competitor set, support infrastructure is genuinely better than most regional alternatives, and course quality is rarely the reason a family chooses Osaka or Seoul over Melbourne or Sydney. The gap is in who the communications are written for and where they reach. A parent in Manila isn ’ t on TikTok watching campus reels. She ’ s in a Facebook parent group, or at her desk at night running the numbers, or in conversation with an education agent whose framing is shaping her perception more than any institutional marketing is. Most institutions still treat parents and students as one audience when they are in fact two very different ones, researching the same place but asking completely different questions, through different channels, at different times, and often in different languages. The conversation that converts When a student declines an offer without explanation, the instinct is to examine the offer itself or the competitor she chose. Rarely does anyone go back to examine what her parents found, or didn ’ t find, when they looked up the institution on their own. That work is diagnosable. We ’ ve put together The SEA Parent Decision Audit, a framework for checking how any current recruitment communications land for parents across Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. It covers the 12 things most Australian institutional sites get wrong, and what shifts when they are fixed. The institutions that will hold SEA share over the next three years aren ’ t producing a separate parent brochure and calling it done. They ’ re rebuilding the recruitment journey around who is actually making the decision, and then instrumenting it to keep learning what ’ s working. Charanjit Singh is CEO of Construct Digital . He leads campaign strategy across the SEA region and has direct, hands-on experience with the recruitment challenges of universities.

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Campus Review AU. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on campusreview.com.au.