The survey was carried out in February 2017 and the resulting report, , offers some new insights on the extent to which parents are supporting their children’s study and the factors that influence their decision making.

The headline finding is that parents spend an average of just over US$44,000 on their children’s education, including everything from school fees to uniforms to tuition and accommodation at the primary, secondary, and undergraduate levels. Nearly nine in ten parents (87%) are helping to directly fund their children’s education to some extent. This average obscures a wide range of spending on education across the sample countries with respondents from Hong Kong leading the table with a reported average lifetime spend of US$132,000 per child. This compares to average spending of US$43,000 in China and US$18,500 in Indonesia.

Most parents (85%) with a child at university or college are helping to fund costs of study, and of parents considering postgraduate education for their child, 76% expect to contribute to that level of study as well.

The vast majority (82%) are prepared to make personal sacrifices in order to help their children succeed. Nearly a third (31%) report giving up personal time or hobbies in support of their child’s education, and 25% either “drastically reduced” or completely stopped leisure activities and holidays.

“In today’s highly competitive global job market, education for young people has never been more important,” said HSBC Group Head of Wealth Management Charlie Nunn. “Parents across the world appreciate this and are willing to invest time and money to help their children get the best start in life. Their unwavering support shows in the personal, lifestyle and financial sacrifices they are making. From forfeiting ‘me time’ to giving up hobbies or reducing leisure activities, parents are going the extra mile to help their child succeed.”

Driven by opportunity; cautious about cost

Most respondents (78%) see a university education as the key to better career opportunities and a brighter future for their children. More than four in ten (41%) would consider a university education abroad for their child, including 65% in the UAE, 60% in Indonesia, 55% in India, and 54% in China.

In contrast to current research indicating that most students do not have an institution in mind when they begin to plan for study abroad, the HSBC survey suggests that many parents do. Around two-fifths (39%) say they have specific universities in mind when they think about study abroad with quality of teaching (45%), prestige of the university (41%), and increased job prospects for their children (41%) the main criteria for choosing an institution overseas.

Indeed, the theme of cost carries through the report, with 40% citing the higher costs of study abroad as the primary barrier to overseas study for their child. Just over a third (34%) acknowledged that they did not know how much it would cost for their child to study at university abroad.

Main barriers to a university education abroad. Source: HSBC

Thinking about online

Cost factors again in a growing openness to online study among the parents in this year’s HSBC survey. Most parents (73%) are aware of the growing range of online university programmes, and 60% would consider a university programme for their child that is either completely or partially delivered online.

As always, lying behind these average response rates are wide variations from country to country, running from 82% or 76% for India and China to 45% and 29% for the UK and France.

When asked to comment on the benefits of online programmes, most cited cost savings for tuition, travel, and living costs as the main advantages. More specifically, three in ten said that they would consider an online degree if the costs were 50% less than that of a traditional, campus-based programme.

Parents’ perspective on the benefits and limitations of online programmes. Source: HSBC

Mr Nunn adds, “While parents recognise that educating a child can be expensive, it is easy to underestimate the full and long-term costs. Parents in China are the best prepared when it comes to financial planning, however internationally many parents are not planning ahead leaving them in danger of neglecting other priorities to help their child reach their full potential. In nine of the 15 countries surveyed, paying for their child’s education is most likely to be parents’ biggest financial commitment, above others such as mortgage/rent payments and household bills. To limit the strain that children’s education can have on family finances, it’s important to plan and save ahead.”

For additional background, please see:

• “Global parents’ survey: three quarters would consider university abroad”
• “Comparing the costs of study for leading city destinations”
• “Measuring the cost of living in major study cities”

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Given their proximity to each other, and often complementary market conditions, many international educators choose to adopt a regional orientation by targeting multiple MENA markets in their recruitment efforts.

The current population of the region is about 523 million people, with 70% under the age of 30. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of MENA inhabitants will reach 700 million by 2050, which at current growth rates will make it more populous than Europe by that point.

Coupled with continued economic growth, these demographic trends have fuelled a boost in higher education enrolment rates over the past decade, with some estimates projecting a further 50% increase over the next ten years. Governments in the region have actively encouraged outbound mobility due to the limited capacity of local systems to absorb this growing demand. As a result, it is now more and more common for MENA students to study abroad.

The top senders in the region are Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the former ranking fifth in global outbound mobility, and the latter tenth, according to UNESCO data from 2014. Iran recently had international sanctions eased, and the government has made decisive moves to bolster links with foreign educational institutions.

The following chart below summarises outbound mobility for a number of selected countries in the region.

Outbound mobility for selected MENA markets, 2014. Source: UNESCO

Though participation of women in higher education has increased, especially in GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, outbound students from the MENA region are about 80% male. Much of the current demand – on the order of 40% of all outbound students – is for undergraduate studies, with the most popular areas of study being business, engineering, and medicine, along with English language studies. As reflected in the chart below, relatively few students gravitate toward humanities and the arts.

We should note as well that the balance of undergraduate-to-graduate studies is likely to shift in the years ahead with some markets in the region, notably Iran, expected to become increasingly important sources of post-graduate students in the years ahead.

Programmes most in demand among MENA students.

Many students from the region will require preparatory programmes, particularly for language proficiency, before beginning academic studies abroad. Roughly 12% of all outbound MENA students are enrolled in foundation studies currently.

Recruiting challenges

Government leaders understand that the rising tide of young people aiming for university admission could become an engine of growth for the region. But even though public expenditure
on higher education in the region is significant, it has not kept pace with demand over the past decade and many institutions and schools are struggling with capacity issues.

Education First’s (EF) most recent in the Middle East and North Africa notes: “Many of the countries in the region spend more per pupil than countries in Asia with similar levels of development, but this higher investment is not delivering better results.” The report reveals as well that Jordan, Tunisia, Qatar, and the UAE are all well below OECD averages not only in English, but also in math and science.

Many observers have raised quality concerns with respect to graduate outcomes in the region. Employers report that only about one third of new graduates are . And interestingly, students believe the same. Only a third of students in a recent survey considered they were adequately prepared for employment. But more than a third also expressed a willingness to pay for further education to increase their job prospects.

Their anxiety about securing jobs is backed up by data. Youth unemployment is high at 21% across the Middle East and 25% in North Africa. When measured against other geographical regions, MENA has the highest youth unemployment in the world, and about 30% of the unemployed hold university degrees.

International educators should also be aware that public support for study abroad can be low in some markets in the region. Egypt, for example, offers only a handful of grants despite a burgeoning higher education enrolment that shot up by a half million students between 2000 and 2015.

One notable exception to this is Saudi Arabia, where the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Scholarship Programme (previously the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme, or KASP) has aided hundreds of thousands of students since its inception in 2005 and, even with recent signs of budget restraint, is still slated to run until at least 2020. Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE also offer scholarship support for students going abroad, albeit on a much smaller scale than has been the case in Saudi Arabia for some years now.

Patience is a must when working in the MENA region. The regulatory landscape is fragmented, and clarity can be lacking. Document preparation, granting of licenses, and government functions can all take longer than would be expected in the West. Countries such as Iraq, Algeria, and Iran rank highly in ease-of-business metrics, whereas Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar rank near the bottom, according to a conducted by the World Bank.

The level of conflict and instability in the region is naturally also a concern. In addition to an economic slowdown spawned by lower oil prices, military action and civil war have severely damaged the economies and infrastructure of Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. The total number of people displaced from these countries may be as high as .

Making contact

MENA students are highly active and engaged online and this means that social platforms and other online services are an effective channel for reaching prospects in the region. Facebook, with an 89% penetration rate across the region, is the top choice of young people when measured in aggregate. Egypt alone boasts nearly 14 million Facebook profiles, compared to Saudi Arabia’s six million and Morocco’s just-over-five million.

Population of Facebook users by country, 2013. Sources: IDP, Arab Social Media Report-2013

WhatsApp is also widely used, and is more popular than Facebook in Syria, Lebanon, and Bahrain. YouTube is big as well, especially in Saudi Arabia, which has the highest daily consumption of YouTube videos in the world. Twitter usage is significant across MENA, but at lower rates compared to Facebook, with the outlier again being Saudi Arabia and its 1.9 million Twitter users (about four times as many as the next nearest country).

As we have reported previously, roughly 40% of international students from the region say social media influenced their decision to study abroad. One in four contacted educational institutions directly through their social media accounts. With close to 90% of MENA inhabitants indicating they have Internet access from home, virtual fairs, webinars, and Skype sessions all have the potential to be useful contact tools for international educators.

Even with the opportunities afforded by online channels, educators hoping to work in the region will still need to build relationships with local partners, raise their profiles with visits and effective branding, and learn the local cultures, which vary significantly from country to country.

Kyle Mack of the Equilibrium International Education Institute, speaking to ���Ϲ��� Monitor earlier this year specifically about his experiences working with counterparts and the government in Iran, emphasised that things take time. “Time is very subjective sometimes in countries like this,” he said. “And that’s often because of political and economic realities. Be prepared to be flexible.”

Educators should also remember that many governments in the region maintain an index of approved overseas schools (often via their respective Education ministries). Obtaining inclusion on these lists is a necessity for working in the region, in part because scholarship funding is often dependent upon the students selecting a listed school.

Springing forward

One effect of the 2011 citizen uprisings known as the Arab Spring is that public expenditure on education received a boost in MENA. Some governments realised the need to invest in education not only to ensure growth, but also to maintain social stability. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been at the forefront of increases on educational infrastructure, and other MENA countries are following suit, although, as noted above, many are nevertheless struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for higher education across the region.

As the past several years have amply demonstrated, many students and families continue to look abroad for education. Study abroad has become an important aspect of the culture of education in many MENA markets, one that can be expected to persist through the ups and downs of scholarship funding and other local market conditions.

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The market is also being shaped by a hot economy. Aside from notable dips in 2009 and 2013, GDP growth has been trending between 6% and 9% per year for the past decade. By some estimates, Sri Lanka will have the highest annual percentage growth in household income over the next decade at 5.8% per year, outstripping other notable emerging economies such as Vietnam (5.5%) and Indonesia (4.3%). This growth comes against a low base, however, and Sri Lanka has only just passed through the US$10,000 GDP per capita benchmark that is often seen as the tipping point for purchasing power and the growth of the middle class in emerging markets. “Many of the countries that are experiencing strong growth in GDP overall and in the middle class are economically well-positioned for strong growth in their tertiary enrolments and therefore outbound student numbers,” says a recent report from the British Council. “These include China, Colombia, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.”

“There is a restricted number of places at the better local universities,” agrees Chris Price, the CEO of Adventus Education and an international education advisor who has worked extensively in Sri Lanka in recent years. “So what you tend to find is that families are still investing heavily in their children’s education overseas. Having an international education is seen as a very prestigious thing.”

For educators approaching the market for the first time, or in the early stages of building an enrolment base from Sri Lanka, Mr Price recommends a focus on the country’s top private and international schools. He also points out that for many recruiters, Sri Lanka can be part of a broader regional effort. “I don’t know an institution that is not active in India. And you can jump on a plane and be in Colombo in an hour from Bangalore, and two-and-a-half hours from Delhi.” Facebook is an important channel for reaching Sri Lankan students as the platform is widely used in the country, and Mr Price stresses as well the importance of local staff, whether in the form of a qualified agent or Sri Lankan staff hired directly by an overseas institution that can support local students and families and represent the institution in-country throughout the year.

Opening up to new destinations

Because of strong historical ties to Britain – the country was a British colony until 1972 – the UK has long been a leading study destination for Sri Lankans. However, Australia is now the clear leader, owing both to the expansion of marketing and recruitment on the part of Australian institutions and a declining interest in the UK in the wake of more restrictive immigration policies there.

It seems clear as well that the market is opening up to new destinations as it continues to grow. Mr Price indicates an increasing interest in Canada and the US, both of which offer opportunities for students to stay on and work, and perhaps even immigrate, after graduation. But Sri Lankan students are looking also at destinations in Europe, often for very specific programmes of study (such as engineering degrees in Germany or technology studies in Ireland), and many are also choosing regional destinations as well, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and India.

Such intra-regional movements are often not well counted in official mobility statistics, and this makes accurate, contemporary figures hard to come by in a market like Sri Lanka. Based on his observations of the market, Mr Price estimates the current level of outbound “in the region of 50,000 students per year,” with the vast majority of those students pursuing undergraduate degrees abroad.

There is also a brisk trade in transnational education (TNE) programmes in Sri Lanka, with an increasing field of foreign institutions delivering part of all of their degree programmes in-country. In effect, this sets up a couple of broad tiers in the market with wealthier families sending their students abroad for complete degree programmes and a further segment of demand for the more affordable option of completing two years (or more) of an undergraduate degree locally.

This reflects in part the earlier point regarding the US$10,000 GDP benchmark for purchasing power. As average income levels in Sri Lanka continue to grow through 2020 and beyond, demand for education is also expected to expand further. “This [lower household income base] is likely to constrain how soon [emerging markets] close the gap in tertiary enrolment rates on advanced economies,” adds a related British Council . “But it does also mean the decade beyond 2020 should see continued rises in enrolment ratios and strong growth in tertiary education demand.” In simpler terms, the increasing outbound numbers we see in Sri Lanka today may be only the start of a larger growth curve over the next 10 to 15 years.

Spending on higher education

Once we start looking at a time horizon of a decade or more, the question of the capacity of the Sri Lankan system comes back into focus as an important factor in shaping those longer-term trends in the market. Students were a significant factor in electing Sri Lanka’s new government in January 2015; they provided strong support at the polls and had long protested the poor state of public education in their country. The new administration, headed by President Maithripala Sirisena, offered a unifying vision for the country’s various ethnic and religious groups, and it has painted an optimistic picture for the future of higher education in Sri Lanka.

Most recently, the government has promised . This is a notable development as government spending on education has been modest for years. In fact, , Sri Lanka ranks among the world’s lowest spenders on education, behind countries like Eritrea and Chad and just above Central African Republic and Zambia.

But the government has promised a four-fold increase to the education budget in 2016 (from 1.7% of GDP to 5.6%) and to increase spending on universities by 30%. For its part, UNESCO has recommended an expenditure level for Sri Lanka equivalent to 6% of GDP, which Sri Lanka has said it aims to reach by 2020.

The role of private providers

Echoing the approach in other emerging markets, the government appears to also be looking to the private sector to help address local capacity challenges. Higher Education Minister Lakshman Kiriella has said that the government believes more private universities are needed to improve Sri Lankan education. On a recent trip to Qatar, where more than 125,000 Sri Lankans have emigrated, he asked educational professionals there to explore the possibilities of . He has since hinted that several foreign universities have expressed interest. As yet no approval has been given for branch campuses but more detailed discussions are slated to occur.

What seems clear for the moment is that the government of President Sirisena has broken with the spending patterns of the past regarding education. The budget has been approved and there is broad agreement that the country should transition to a knowledge-based economy. As the President said in February, “The present government has allocated funds from the budget for the education sector in a way that no other previous government did.” Time will tell how this new spending will translate into expanded access to university within Sri Lanka, and the role that both private and foreign providers will play in meeting the growing demand for higher education in the country.

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• Digital tools, including online search and more specialised school selection sites, play a key role in the discovery phase of students’ research – that is, the point at which they are researching different institutions and trying to identify schools that could be a good fit.

• Given the growing prominence of online platforms – including search sites and online directories in student decision-making processes – senior staff should be devoting substantial attention to these platforms, perhaps more than they have in the past.

• Recent surveys from the UK point to a shift in marketing spending toward digital channels – and to paid and organic search in particular. However, they also indicate that recruiters are struggling with measuring the performance of their online campaigns.

• Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the agents responding to the 2015 ���Ϲ��� i-graduate Agent Barometer indicated that 20% or more of their leads came from online sources in 2015. And for nearly a third, online sources accounted for 40% or more of total leads.

Google research on education-related search volumes highlights the growing role of online search in the “student decision journey” and an increasing trend of students searching exclusively online for information about study programmes.

One of the most important findings offered by the search giant is that non-branded search – that is, queries for more specific programmes or locations as opposed to those for an individual institution or school – is key. Google’s analysis finds that as many as 9 in 10 prospective students don’t know which school they want to attend at the onset of the search process and they reflect this non-brand orientation in their search behaviour.

With this in mind, Google has recommended that recruiters target their search marketing efforts to promoting particular programmes in specific locations.

Platform insights

As these findings suggest, online search and discovery channels should now be a priority for senior marketing and recruitment staff.

Interestingly, school selection sites that operate at scale and that can therefore aggregate large volumes of student search data are now also providing valuable insights into shifting patterns of demand and behaviour online.

For example, Hotcourses, a global search platform targeted to international students, released a new analytics services late last year called “Insights” that allows for greater analysis of usage and search patterns across its websites. The company recently released commenting on some of its initial data observations, with a particular emphasis on a few key destinations and a set of emerging markets: Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

The paper draws on 14 months of Insights data reaching back to November 2014, and relies on data from 23,000,000 Hotcourses users in 2015 alone.

Among its high-level findings, Hotcourses finds that the US remains the most searched-for destination, with a 33.5% share of platform searches in 2015. The UK follows with 27.2%, and then Australia with 17.2%.

Share of search volumes by destination on Hotcourses, 2015. Source: Hotcourses

We have, in recent years, reported on a pattern of declining market share for the UK, and Hotcourses research corroborates this trend. Its whitepaper notes “Across all top 10 major destination countries the UK either flatlines or loses its share of searches from prospective students. This is in keeping with recent HESA data which shows the UK with a diminishing number of enrolments in six of its top 10 source countries. In the first half (January – June) of 2015, the UK received 27.5% of searches across all websites, this reduces to 26.9% by the second half of the year (July – December), an in-year fall of -0.6%.”

Curiously absent from the data are other major international study destinations, including Canada, France, China, and Germany. This perhaps illustrates that data from a proprietary search platform such as Hotcourses may not fully reflect broader patterns of student search or mobility, such as we might see on Google or other general-use search engines.

Trends in the US, UK, and Australia

An important segment of the Hotcourses whitepaper looks at “diversification markets” for the US, the UK, and Australia. It defines a diversification market as “a country which current constitutes less than 10% of students in a country.” In other words, these are source countries that are particularly significant to the diversification efforts of American, British, and Australian institutions.

In terms of these emerging markets, the US received the greatest volume of searches from Brazil (15.6% overall in 2015), Vietnam (9.9%), Thailand (6.7%), Indonesia (5.2%), and Saudi Arabia (4.4%). While Brazilian students remain those the most likely to be searching for the US of students in the diversification markers, Hotcourses notes a drop occurring through 2015 from this market (from 16% to 15.2%), which it imagines is a result of the ending of the hugely influential Brazilian scholarship programme, Science Without Borders.

The UK received the greatest volume of diversification market searches from Thailand (13.3% overall in 2015), Indonesia (11.1%), Vietnam (7.0%), Brazil (6.8%), and Saudi Arabia (4.2%).

As we noted earlier, Hotcourses notes that the general trend is negative for the UK, with the UK either flatlining or losing share of searches from prospective students. However, there is one bright spot: “The UK sees an increase from 37.3% to 41.1% in searches from Indonesia from the first to the second half of 2015 …. this would indicate Indonesian students are looking beyond the traditional countries of USA, Australia and NZ.”

Australia, meanwhile, is generating the most searches from these diversification markets: Vietnam (16.6%), Indonesia (13.4%), Thailand (11.1%), Brazil (6.5%), and Saudi Arabia (2.4%).

Hotcourses notices a significant drop in searches for Australia from Indonesian students (from 15.4% to 11.5% over the course of 2015). It relates this to a wider context of Indonesian students feeling unwelcome in Australia: “In the early part of 2015, there had been a number of high profile news stories where asylum seekers from Indonesia were refused entry to Australia, and this appears to have filtered through into the extent to which prospective students wish to study in that country.”

Top subjects searched for by different markets

Overall, Engineering, Health and Medicine, and Business and Management are the top subject searches, but there is some variation. These are the top subject searches (in order) the report notes for five countries:

• India: Engineering, Health and Medicine, Business and Management, Applied and Pure Sciences, Computer Science and IT;
• Saudi Arabia: Engineering, Health and Medicine, Business and Management, Applied and Pure Sciences, Social Studies and Media;
• Thailand: Engineering, Health and Medicine, Business and Management, Creative Arts and Design, Social Studies and Media;
• Russia: Business and Management, Creative Arts and Design, Social Studies and Media, Health and Medicine, Applied and Pure Sciences.

Overall, the Hotcourses report sheds fascinating light on the study interests of prospective students from key markets as reflected in these students’ search behaviour. The insights from this report alone could help to finetune recruitment tactics for specific markets – including those “diversification markets” that educators are increasingly aware they have to consider in their enrolment strategies.

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We certainly saw a lot of growth this year, and, as always, a number of important market trends taking shape. The following review features 12 of our most-read posts along with a few other bonus items for good measure.

The big picture

Everybody can use a good high-level market summary and so we put together our “State of international mobility in 2015” feature last month. During the year, we also looked more specifically at language travel�����Ի� the continuing growth in the sector in particular. Keep these handy for those moments when you need to stand back and look at the global marketplace from 10,000 feet up.

And while you’re up there, make sure to fold in some of the latest thinking on the most important macro trends with “Global economic power projected to shift to Asia and emerging economies by 2050” and “Four trends that are shaping the future of global student mobility.”

Crossing borders

Immigration is one the most important policy levers in international education and also a reliably hot topic for Monitor readers. We started the year with a look at how Australia is stepping up scrutiny in its student visa system. But by mid-year Australia was also moving to balance strengthened visa controls with streamlined processing.

Canada drew a lot of attention this year as well with the introduction of its Express Entry system, a new process by which foreigners, including international students, would be selected for immigration. The story underscored the importance of post-study work and immigration prospects in determining the attractiveness of a study destination – a point that was more than driven home by the UK’s announcement in July that it would remove work rights for non-EU further education students (among other restrictive measures).

Major senders

China continues to be a major driver of global mobility growth, with 11% year-over-year growth in 2014 alone. But the Chinese market is showing signs of change too, including a shift toward a greater emphasis on undergraduate studies.

Demand in India, meanwhile, continues to surge. Indian outbound kept pace with China in 2014, and, for some receiving markets (notably the US), Indian student numbers have become an increasingly important factor in building international enrolment.

Going through changes

A number of markets initiated big changes in 2015 that drew attention from around the world, including the following:

• In March, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education outlined plans to merge or close up to 52 of the country’s public and private universities;
• In June, the Japanese government asked the country’s universities to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities departments] or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs”;
• The British government announced new English language testing procedures for student visa applicants;
• Finnish universities continued to struggle with austerity budgets this year and the Finnish government continued its on-again-off-again flirtation with the idea of introducing differential fees for students from outside the European Economic Area;
• Malaysia also released a landmark blueprint for education (for additional background, please see our November interview with Education Malaysia);
• In terms of emerging markets, this year we’ve seen notable signs of development in Cuba, Myanmar, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, and Egypt.

Online lights up

Last year, the big story was mobile. But 2015 felt like a different sort of tipping point in terms of the role of online channels in international recruitment. Driven in part by the widespread adoption of social platforms and mobile devices, we continued to see more research evidence this year as to the importance of digital marketing.

This was certainly the case in this year’s ���Ϲ��� i-graduate Agent Barometer findings, and another recent study drove home the point again at year-end.

As always, thank you for reading along with us this year. Whether online or education agents or emerging markets or new policies, one thing is clear: we can all count on a lot more change, challenge, and opportunity in international education in 2016!

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A survey exploring the foreign investment potential and attractiveness of the overall African market for investors, EY’s attractiveness survey Africa 2015 – Making choices, found that Africa holds the #4 spot in the world in terms of perceived attractiveness as an investment destination, behind Oceania, North America, and Asia – but ahead of Europe, Latin America, Central America, and the Middle East.

Survey respondents who are already investing in Africa were far more likely to find Africa attractive than those who are not. Among that first group, Africa emerges as the single most attractive market to invest in, ahead of all other regions. But even that group, as bullish as it is about Africa, considers Africa home to highly challenging labour force deficiencies. One of the most significant issues they face on a daily basis is a skills and education shortage among local African populations.

Many workers, but not many with the right skills

PwC estimates that by 2040, , ahead of even India and China. But as of today, it is a labour force with some serious skills and education challenges.

For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the secondary school enrolment rate is only 40%, and only 7% of students continue to tertiary education. UNESCO predicts as well that Africa will be home to half of the world’s illiterate people in the years ahead. Experts see these factors as important roadblocks to further skills development that will hinder the continent’s economic and social development going forward.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise then that the EY survey also found employers are having trouble recruiting workers with the right skills today. Seven in ten African firms surveyed by EY are recruiting to support planned growth yet “vacancies are taking longer to fill and employee turnover is high.” The report concludes in part that:

“African governments need to reshape curricula at secondary and tertiary institutions to ensure they meet the needs of the labour market. More technical and vocational training programmes are required to equip African workers with high-quality skills that business needs.”

Some of the most in-demand skills are in the technical and professional categories. Over a third of companies said their need for technical and professional skills was likely to grow over the next 12 months.

Education, yes, but also company-led training

The sheer scale and breadth of current education requirements, coupled with the dramatic growth projections for many African economies in the years ahead, suggests a wide range of student recruitment and offshore delivery opportunities in selected African markets.

Another EY survey, Sub-Saharan Africa talent trends and practices, found that local employees with relevant skills training are increasingly mobile, since there is so much competition in the market that it makes it easy to move from job to job. In addition, it found that companies are having trouble filling vacant positions quickly enough. The result is that they are becoming increasingly reliant on expatriate workers, who constitute a ready supply of skills for specialist positions.

Ideally, the number of local workers with suitable skills would increase to the point where the demand for expatriate workers would decline, with the effect of also bolstering spending (and stability) in local economies.

EY’s Attractiveness Survey Africa 2015 advises:

“To reduce overdependence on expatriate workers, companies must foster skills transfer from expatriates to local staff.”

And to have local staff remain in their jobs, the survey’s authors emphasise the need for appropriate human resource strategies:

“There is a rising war for talent in Sub-Saharan Africa. As companies gear up for growth, the demand for skills needed to support such ambitions has increased, and is being matched by greater mobility in the labour market…Clearly, organisations need to become more deliberate in how they plan for, attract and retain staff. To secure the talent they seek, they will need to make training and career development part of their brand, developing processes to monitor and reward employee performance and ensure management continuity.”

Local knowledge is key, both for students and companies

To operate successfully in any international market, foreign entrants need deep local knowledge and involvement, not only for commercial reasons but also for sustainability (e.g., acceptance by populations and governments). Foreign companies are increasingly considering this concept, also known as “shared value,” but some argue that higher education in Africa is actually becoming less “local,” with possibly troubling repercussions.

At the 14th General Assembly of CODESRIA (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), Dr Ramola Ramtohul, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, . She said:

“Whereas the internationalisation of higher education in Africa is widening access to tertiary education and is often seen as a tool towards political stability, democracy, peace and development, it also carries risks of brain drain, which has increased mobility of professional and skilled workers leaving African universities.”

Professor Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi of Kenyatta University, Kenya, added that this internationalisation “… had stunted the ability of African universities to take off and effectively tackle the developmental needs of African society.”

The discussion also touched on the one-way mobility characterising internationalisation in Africa, with African students going abroad to pursue higher degrees and very few foreign students coming to Africa “largely because of the perceived low quality of academic programmes, and poor institutional infrastructure and facilities.”

There was a sense at the conference that the current state of higher education internationalisation in Africa is a colonial legacy, one that may even be impeding African countries in joining the global knowledge economy. This, plus the aforementioned tendency of companies to hire expatriates to fill specialised jobs, may not be a sustainable direction for a continent poised for enduring growth.

Yet for now, families in Africa that can afford international and/or private education are rushing to it, eager to keep their children out of state schools that some say “have left millions with skills suitable only for manual labour.”

Reuters notes that this recognition is also driving demand for better education at home:

“Rising incomes among the continent’s vast population have created a pool of customers willing to pay for better schooling for their children. That in turn is driving an explosion in education businesses that means Africa could soon rival Asian countries like India as the next big hit with school investors.”

As we have reported previously, this demand is leading to a rapid expansion of private education, including school openings by international providers or joint ventures with local partners. Private schools account for 10–40% of K-12 education in Africa, with key markets such as Kenya and Nigeria at the upper end of that range. Observers expect this demand to strengthen in the years ahead as further economic growth takes hold across the continent and as the middle class continues to expand.

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These are some of the findings from an annual survey of international students conducted by . IDP’s Manager, External Affairs, Kim Dienhoff, presented high-level findings from four years of survey data at the recent NAFSA conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

The session focused in large part on reaching students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). With nearly a third of the region’s 355 million people aged 15 to 25, it is perhaps not surprising that Internet usage, and the penetration of social networks in particular, is high.

Ms Dienhoff paired the IDP survey data with additional research to provide an important summary of social media habits and trends in the region.

Social media usage in MENA was particularly visible during the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring beginning in 2011, leaving many observers with the impression that major global networks, such as Facebook and YouTube, are widely used across the region.

Internet penetration is high with nearly 90% indicating they access the web from home. A much smaller proportion (34%) say they have Internet access at work. “For marketers this probably means that you need to schedule online activities like chat rooms, Skype sessions, virtual fairs, or webinars in the evening once people are home from work,” notes Ms Dienhoff.

There are of course variations from country to country. Internet penetration varies from 85-90% in Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar to, at the lower end of the range, 44-50% in Jordan and Egypt. Nearly nine in ten Internet users in MENA use social media every day. Smartphones account for 40% of web impressions in the region (about 45% above the global average), and smartphone penetration ranges from a low of 16% in Morocco to 73-75% in the UAE and Qatar. It is fair to say that, at these levels of adoption, a mobile responsive site is a must for reaching students and parents in the region.

Facebook is your #1 friend

As the following chart illustrates, Facebook is the leading network with a 89% penetration among MENA Internet users. Twitter and Google+ are a distant second and third respectively, but each nevertheless has been widely adopted as well. As with the Internet and mobile usage patterns we noted earlier, the chart reflects national variations as well, including the notably high levels of Twitter usage in Saudi Arabia.

Top five social networks in MENA and selected markets by percentage of Internet users. Source: IDP

Adoption rates are helpful in looking at relative usage from market to market but the absolute numbers of users on each service is arguably the key metric. The following chart reflects the population of Facebook users by country, and illustrates that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, and the UAE have some of the largest populations in the region that are active on this leading social network.

Population of Facebook users by country, 2013. Sources: IDP, Arab Social Media Report-2013

This variance in user counts by market is notable in part because each country carries with it its own language preferences. English and Arabic are by far the most-preferred languages among the region’s Internet users, with the exception of markets such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia where French is the clear language of choice.

Beyond Facebook

Twitter has also been widely adopted by MENA Internet users and the following chart provides a summary of Twitter user counts for selected markets across the region.

Twitter user populations by country, 2013. Sources: IDP, Arab Social Media Report-2013

As the chart illustrates, Twitter is especially well used in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom accounts, on average, for roughly 47% of all Twitter traffic in the region. And, influenced by the fact that half of the Saudi population of Internet users prefers to use Arabic online, 74% of all Tweets by MENA users are in Arabic (as compared to only 18% in English).

YouTube, while not a social network as such, is one of the largest and most heavily used sites on the Internet, and its content is easily and widely shared on social media. It happens that this leading global video service is also extremely popular in many MENA states.

YouTube reach in MENA. Source: IDP

YouTube is the second or third-ranked site by usage in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, and Morocco. Across the region, there are 300 million YouTube playbacks each and every day, and Saudi Arabia leads the pack as the #1 market in the world in terms of views per capita.

“YouTube of course is highly valuable to marketers,” says Ms Dienhoff. “So if you don’t have a YouTube channel you should probably get one. You can use it to house videos that are then used on many other platforms and of course it will help greatly with your SEO.”

Implications for marketers

As the preceding charts and figures clearly reflect, social media usage in the region is highly concentrated around the most-popular social networks and social content sites in the world, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. “The good news is that they are using the same platforms you are already familiar with,” adds Ms Dienhoff. (Not to mention that you can reach the vast majority of prospects in the region in English and Arabic.)

For additional trends and best practices in social media, please see our post “Facebook is still the top social network but other platforms are growing faster.” It includes links to some of our most-popular posts on social media strategy, including tips for Facebook, Twitter, and social video.

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Standing in the way of government plans is economic and political instability, including fallout from the civil war in neighboring Syria and . Today ���Ϲ��� Monitor returns to Turkey with another detailed look at the education sector there and the challenges to overcome.

Turkey’s inbound landscape

Turkey had about 54,000 international students in 2014, with the majority coming from nearby nations such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Iran. However, three EU nations – Germany, Greece, and Bulgaria – are also among the top ten sending countries.

Mr Gündoğan puts the number of 2014 applications from international students seeking Turkish university admission at 90,000 from 176 countries, a major jump from 56,000 in 2013, and 44,000 in 2012. In order to reach the 2023 goal, government policies are aimed not only at increasing the number of applications from abroad, but the number accepted.

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2007, has made more scholarships available to international students. A 2012 report issued by the AKP-linked Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research () recommended this method as a way to attract more foreign students, and about 13,000 inbound internationals currently receive financial aid from the government. Still more receive other scholarships: the SETA report noted that stemming from three sources: private institutions, governmental agencies, and the Turkish government’s Grand Student Program BOP. In 2014, Turkey allocated about US$96 million for government scholarship programmes, the highest amount ever.

Turkey’s Higher Education Board (YÖK), also eager to bring in more international students, has liberalised its admission guidelines to be able to admit more students from conflict zones. The hope is that the number of Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian students in Turkey will increase. One private sector educator has taken up the specific issue of Syrian refugees by pledging US$10 million to create accredited universities for the more than 40,000 people who would be college-bound if not for the war.

The government has also bolstered official education links with foreign countries. It recently made pacts with , Vietnam, and . And in late-2014 it agreed to form a Balkan Universities Association (BUA) to foster sustainable higher education cooperation in the multi-ethnic, multinational region Turkey shares with Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

While new Turkish policies have brought in more foreign students, and the number of universities has risen from 77 to 176 in ten years, . Many observers and political opponents say the AKP’s approach is backward – that first the quality of education must be improved so it both functions better for Turkish students and appeals to the upper echelon of global students, and then the level of admissions should be increased.

. YÖK President Gökhan Çetinsaya has pointed out that each Turkish academic teaches an average of 21 students, while the OECD average is 16. He also noted that the ratio in Turkey increased to 51:1 in state universities.

However, the quality of at least some Turkish universities has improved. The country has gone from no institutions listed in the Times Higher Education top 200 in 2012 to four in 2014. Ankara-based Middle East Technical University has risen all the way to 85 in global rankings.

Turkish students overseas

Turkey still sends about twice as many students abroad as it receives. Those students overwhelmingly choose Germany and the United States as study destinations, with Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, and France among the top ten. The following table shows the most recent outbound data for Turkish university students.

Most popular study destinations for Turkish students, 2012. Source: UNESCO

Turkey sends a total of about 100,000 students abroad every year, which ranks the country among the top 15 senders globally. It is a leading sender for the US as well () and the number one source country for the US from Europe, according to the Institute of International Education. Most of these students seek advanced degrees, though growing percentage are undergraduates seeking their first degree.

However, these figures will shift slightly. , according to the British Council, which forecasts a falloff of about 0.7% per year. Even with this drop, by 2024 the US will remain the top post-graduate destination for Turks, along with Germany and the UK.

The UK is also projected to see a shift, as the numbers of Turkish post-graduates increase by 2.5% per year, while Germany, Canada, and Australia will all see more modest gains. But international educators and recruiters can still consider Turkey as a market with growth potential, as the country’s tertiary-age population is predicted to grow by about three-quarters of a million students through 2024.

Tertiary enrolment growth, 2012-2024. Source: British Council

Turkey’s unique education issues

Turkish higher education faces many challenges. Among them is . Many will remain in Turkey even when the war in Syria ends, but they face language, economic, and – as a group perceived to bring crime and joblessness to Turkish communities – discrimination barriers. If those of school age cannot continue their education, future social problems will arise.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Kurdish regions are as part of a wider push for autonomy. The government made concessions in 2013, among them legalising instruction in Kurdish at private schools, but Kurds want their language legalised at state schools, which are free of charge. This is no small issue, considering that Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority and Kurdish separatists are engaged in armed conflict with Turkish troops in Northern Kurdistan.

Other Turkish education challenges derive from the economy. Growth was 2.5% for 2014, below AKP’s preferred level, and unemployment has reached a four-year high. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, (725,000 in October 2014, a steep increase from the 488,000 at the beginning of February 2014). More Turks are attending and graduating university, but this trend will only produce more unemployed if the economy cannot accommodate them.

While the AKP touts its education reforms, the road has not been smooth. Some of its moves have . During the fall term a new scheme for assigning students to schools saw 40,000 students, including non-Muslims, allocated against their will to religious schools where Sunni-oriented Imam-Hatip classes were compulsory.

Critics have noted a sharp rise in the number of Imam-Hatip schools during AKP’s time in power, and an 83% increase in just the last five years. Vocational training institutions have been converted for the purpose, leaving some communities with no non-religious alternatives for education. Such changes have led some to suggest AKP has a hidden agenda to “Islamicise” the nation’s schools.

Government plans to build mosques on 80 university campuses add weight to these fears. The government countered by saying any religion could be represented on campuses if the demand existed. (To which students at Istanbul Technical University responded by collecting .)

Another AKP move that aroused negative responses gave the Higher Education Board – a government body – the responsibility for appointing the administrators of the country’s 71 private foundation universities. This essentially by removing their ability to choose their own administrators.

However the impact of reform and ongoing political conflict could generate – in a 2013 British Council survey of more than 4,800 Turkish students, 95% expressed wishes to go abroad. The main reason they did not pursue such opportunities, according to the survey, was the expense.

An election on the horizon

The future in Turkey is about to become clearer. A general election looms in June in which four major political parties will vie for 550 seats in the Grand National Assembly. All four parties speak of improving the higher education sector, but the most immediate impact is likely to occur if AKP wins enough seats to rewrite the Turkish constitution – a stated goal.

. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggests , but the change would also accrue unprecedented power to the office of the presidency. Under such circumstances opposition to AKP policies – including education reform – would weaken substantially.

What Turkey has achieved in improving access to universities is nothing short of remarkable. It had one million students in tertiary education in 2000; today the number is . But as the British Council and other international bodies report, the country still falls behind in quality, particularly compared to OECD and EU states. This is the issue the winner of the June election may find himself hard pressed to resolve.

Editor’s Note: June election results have shown that the AKP has lost its parliamentary majority and the main pro-Kurdish party has won enough votes to enter parliament for the first time. The result means a coalition government is likely.

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