Newsletter #126: Why most international students don’t use peer-to-peer; LinkedIn’s student audience is misunderstood; Gen AI has minimal impact on students’ study decisions
✏️ From the Education Marketer desk
Why most international students don’t use peer-to-peer. Read
LinkedIn’s student audience is misunderstood. Look
Generative AI has minimal impact on student decisions. Read
How to create a virtual campus tour that’s remembered. Register
📰 HE news
Universities UK (and its 141 members) suggests raising the cap of UG home fees to £13,000 per year. You’ve seen the charts. The real-terms value of the current £9,250 fee falling to the right whilst inflation rises. I won’t bore you by pressing that point, but I will say this: If it comes to pass that universities are allowed to raise fees, take a close look at your offer before upping its sticker price. In 2012, next to no institutions attempted to differentiate on price or alternative offers to the traditional 3-year campus model. “But Kyle, even after trebling tuition fees, students still rocked up.” Yes, they did, but we’re in different times. Not only is our audience appalled at the prospect of fee rises, but alternatives to university have boomed over the last decade. Online education is now accessible, of high quality, and mainstream. Employers increasingly value skills over degrees. And apprenticeships are at unprecedented levels of demand, with the likes of TSR (already!) reporting a +78% surge in interest YoY. In short, students have options and paying £13,000 is at the bottom of the list. Read
📊 Marketing and media news
YouTube’s invented a new way for your content to be discovered - Hype. I’m not a big fan of the verb, i.e. to “hype” a video, but if enough users hit the button, your content is promoted in a separate feed to the trending tab. It’s part of the company’s efforts to surface new or smaller accounts, and, therefore, a boon to anyone publishing for a niche audience - like student creators or small university accounts. Thank god, because turning up consistently in YouTube’s algorithm sometimes requires industrial levels of expertise (just ask Mr Beast). In other YouTube news, we’re also getting better community tools, including a new way to “spotlight” (bestow status on) our most active commenters and a fully-fledged “community hub” that borrows heavily from apps like Discord, Reddit and WhatsApp. Few institutions are aspirational with the community side of YouTube, so you’ll have to do relatively little here to stand out. Look
If I told you that 85% of higher ed leaders using AI considered themselves “extremely” or “very knowledgeable” of the technology - would you believe me or laugh me out of the room? Well, I’m laughing with you because that’s what Higher Ed Dive’s latest report into AI’s use by admissions and enrolment professionals suggests. However, the root of these leaders’ confidence is clear: They overwhelmingly focus on LLMs (chatbots and content generation) and not the more complex stuff like predictive analytics. Just 39% of leaders have leveraged AI technologies for analysing data, and even less (20%) have used the technology to interrogate their thinking and get recommended actions. I can understand why the latter is less - at present, AI tends to answer in the affirmative i.e. it won’t explicitly tell you that your thinking is wrong. Still, tools like ChatGPT o1-Preview (catchy name) go a step further with the ability to review the quality of their own answers. A competent AI advisor isn’t far off. Read
🏫 What unis are doing
As rebrands go, I think Staffordshire University (now University of Staffordshire) deserves love for this one. Yes, it looks great, but I think dropping in lines like “as higher education evolves” and “we need to do things differently” is even more powerful, given that the sector will soon (hopefully) start a new chapter. Look
Massive kudos to University of Chichester’s senior video producer, Harry Plunkett, who looks to have poured his soul into the University’s recent graduation video. There’s some superb editing here, and I particularly like how he incorporates graduation ceremony speeches as voiceovers - an underutilised way to repurpose that kind of content. Look
While UK higher ed seeks to raise home fees to £13,000, some US institutions are slashing their fees by almost two-thirds. Hartwick College will be one of them, down to $22,000, but I can’t help but think that this is more it “reading the room” than offering its students “decreased stress and improved campus well-being.” Look
🧑🎓 What students are saying
“Coming from not the best background, it's hard enough to go to uni and if you don't have a lot of backing behind you or your parents’ money to support you, then [raising tuition fees] is just going to make things so much harder. University is already expensive.” Students outside King’s College London respond to UUK’s proposed tuition fee increase. Look
👾 Culture shock
Samsung being aggressive. Look
Nintendo catches up to “Pokemon with guns.” Read
