Understanding how international students make decisions when choosing which country to study in is of fundamental importance when defining the brand and marketing strategy in any market.

As the global environment becomes more and more competitive, we need to have access to current, high quality, international data on student decision making that we can track over time.

This student decision making study has been designed to meet these needs, and also aims to improve our understanding of the UK's competitive advantage in the international student market which will enable us to develop a responsive marketing strategy for Education UK.

Aims and objectives
This project aims at systematic and longitudinal monitoring of international student demand for studies overseas. Key sub-objectives of this project include:

			identifying and examining the key choice factors for students choosing overseas study
			identifying and considering the factors that determine which country, city, institution and course they choose and the timeframe over which they make these decisions;
			determining the key influences and influencers upon students decisions and their impact
			ascertaining changes occurring in the different markets, whether any of these represent a discernible shift and why these changes are occurring
			tracking student demand for courses and subjects at city level across a wide range of countries in order to secure timely promotion of the requested products by the UK education sector.

The project
In February 2007, the British Council launched the on-line global student decision making survey, which targets potential students. These are students in their home country who are interested in studying abroad, or pursuing a foreign qualification in their home country.

Throughout 2007, the survey was run in over 30 countries, on-line and at education exhibitions, attracting over 32,000 respondents. Equally, in 2008, it has been promoted through the same channels and has already, between January and April 2008, attracted an additional 8,000 students.

The British Council plans to run this survey every year to enable trends to be tracked.

Potential uses for the data include:

			informing institution promotion work at country / city level, depending on exhibitions or other type of promotion activities (example: snapshot data showing demand for postgraduate research courses in two key cities, Beijing (43KB JPEG image) and Seoul (45KB JPEG image))
			using longitudinal data to track changes over time in terms of increased demand from certain markets
			tracking changes in the demand for certain subjects (when compared to existing statistics, e.g. subject demand in HESA data) according to the level of study (example: comparison of 2006 / 2007 HESA data (45KB JPEG image) with the current data generated in the student decision making tool (43KB JPEG image) showing demand for postgraduate taught courses in India)
			identifying promotion vehicles and knowing how to best reach / influence students in a particular location, etc.
			developing bespoke country-specific reports which can be tailored to the needs of schools / faculties within a particular institution
			informing targeted promotion of particular courses at exhibitions
			informing institutions' recruitment strategy and market planning.

Some initial findings:

			students in China are interested in creative arts and media courses more than ever before, whilst students in Bangladesh are interested in business, engineering and computer sciences
			a high proportion of students in South Korea who are interested in studying outside of their home country have already taken English language courses in the UK.
			seventy-eight per cent of Sri Lankan students surveyed have a friend or relative studying in their country of choice.

Data analysis tool
The data captured through the student decision making study is available for analysis to Partnership members through an on-line data mining tool. The tool allows the survey data to be captured and analysed in real time. Users will then be able to:

			design a vast amount of unique cross-tabulations that are specific to their market interests
			run bespoke analyses supported by charts and export options in Microsoft Excel
			interrogate data in real time, as new data is added on a daily basis.

A user guide (521KB) for the data analysis tool is available.

The Education UK Partnership has agreed to include access to this student data as part of the core Partnership membership package until April 2009.

As the volume of data available is so great, we are offering training on how to make the most effective use of the data mining tool. We strongly advise that individuals receive this training before using the tool. The training is available in two ways: face-to-face workshops and on-line workshops. Details of future workshops are available.

The tool was introduced at two workshops that took place in May 2008. A presentation given at the workshops about the project is available.

If you have any queries about this study, please contact the Education Market Intelligence team.