As enrollment of international students at U.S. colleges thins, Ohio University is paying overseas recruiting agents to drum up numbers.  

Bringing in more than half of OU’s 113 Chinese international students this year was JJL Overseas Education Consulting & Service Company, The New York Times reported Sunday.  

At OU, international student enrollment has increased 32 percent since 2005, from 925 to 1,221 students. The state does not count international enrollment in its definition of diversity, a point raised by OU officials in response to a February report ranking OU as the second-whitest main campus in Ohio.
“We define diversity to be inclusive of international students, and last year we saw a 13 percent increase,” said T. David Garcia, director of Admissions, in an earlier interview.

Like other recruiting agents, JJL takes money from both the students it helps and the colleges that accept them. OU signed up with the company as other four-year schools began to more actively pursue international students earlier this decade, said Vicki Seefeldt West, coordinator of International Outreach and Recruitment.

JJL is one of seven overseas recruiters under contract with OU, which pays a commission of $1,000 for each undergraduate or 10 percent of the first year’s tuition for students studying only English, which amounts to just over $1,000.

That fee is low-end compared to other institutions, said Josep Rota, associate provost for International Affairs.

“Based on what I’ve done with other colleagues, most institutions pay between 10 to 25 percent of the first year’s tuition,” Rota said. “We pay less than pretty much anybody in the country.”

After failing an entrance exam at her second Chinese university, Xiaoxi Li, a 20-year-old communications major from Beijing, decided to go abroad.  

During the course of JJL’s application and visa advising, for which she paid about $3,500, Li said she was unaware JJL received a fee from OU.  

Knowing the arrangement now, she said she still has no regrets and appreciates the help of JJL.

Rota said he is unmoved by the calls of some colleagues to institute ethical reforms that would guarantee the quality of students or to remove the two-sided interests of recruiting agents.

“I don’t know what other universities do, but we have a very stringent ethical code that all recruiters have to sign on in the contract,” Rota said. “As far as we are concerned, we are really following not just the spirit but the letter of the contract in the ethics code.”

Because recruiting agents provide a two-fold service, one to students and the other to universities, they deserve two fees, Rota said.

“We’re not paying the agents a fee for what they do for the students; we’re paying them a fee for what they do for us,” he said.

Paying recruiters actually keeps them accountable, West said.

“If we weren’t to have compensation for the agents as a university, there’s not really much of interest for them to perform as well,” West said. “This allows us a level of quality control.”

Recruiting becomes essential as the U.S. falls out of favor with international students at the same time that competition for their favor heightens, Rota said.

Last year, international students brought $13 billion to the U.S. economy, making international-student education the fifth largest export in the service sector, Rota said.    

Attracting those students to the U.S. is getting harder, he added.

“If you go back 20 years, 50 percent of all the students in the world traveling to another country to study came to the U.S.,” Rota said. “Before 9/11, that number had gone down to about one-third. Now it’s less than one-fourth.”