Education agent standards in Australia and New Zealand – government’s role in agent-based international student recruitment

ABSTRACT

Australia and New Zealand have enacted legislation to protect international students’ rights and the long-term sustainability of their export education sectors. A pivotal, but under-researched, sub-domain of these legislative frameworks is education agent-based international student recruitment. The principal-agent relationships between governments, education providers and education agents involve complex agency problems that regulators need to consider to safeguard the interests of government and international students. This article evaluates the longitudinal development of Australian and New Zealand education agent standards and other government regulation through the analysis of legislation, policy and other documentary sources. The findings demonstrate how, over time, Australia and New Zealand governments have adopted a more active principal role, seeking to steer and control education providers’ engagement with education agents, predominantly through legislation. The agent standards now contain a wide array of requirements for education providers to fulfil. However, there are a number of limitations that diminish a government’s ability to mitigate providers’ opportunistic behaviour and protect international students. This article concludes by discussing potential future avenues for government regulation in this policy domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Recruitment agents
• international education
• international student recruitment
• agency theory
• government regulation
• code of practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other types of education brokers exist (e.g. Tuxen and Robertson 2019), but this article focuses on institution contracted agents aligning with the agent definitions in the Australian and New Zealand legislation (Tables 2 and 3).

2 Clause 2.6 refers to representatives and staff members, without a clear explanation for a ‘representative’. As other code sections refer to agents explicitly, representative was not interpreted to cover agents. This interpretation is supported by the 1990 and 2002 codes, where content similar to section 2.6 is not applicable to agents.

3 University and institute of technology and polytechnic (ITP) websites were reviewed on 29 December 2019 to examine whether New Zealand providers voluntarily disclose their contracted agents. An agent list was provided by seven out of eight universities, but only by one third of ITPs who reported using agents on their websites.

4 The Australian Code outlines that providers must require their agents to have appropriate knowledge of the Australian Agent Code of Ethics, which includes London Statement principles (Australian International Education and Training 2016). However, the standards neither include explicit mentions of most of these principles nor requirements for providers to ensure they are followed.

Additional information

Funding

No financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article was received.