By Business & Finance 
Piero Tintori, CEO and Founder, TERMINALFOUR
The survey highlighted key issues in regard to student recruitment targets due to proposed visa/travel restrictions.
TERMINALFOUR, a digital-marketing and web-content management platform for higher education, recently announced the results of its Global Higher Education Survey showing that out of 391 higher-education professionals from 333 institutions in the US, UK, Ireland Australia and South Africa across web, marketing, recruitment and leadership roles, over half (56%) said travel restrictions will directly impact recruitment targets.
Additional figures showed that 37% of higher-education professionals have high levels of job insecurity and just 28% said they feel high job security in the context of governmental policy.
In regard to travel restrictions impacting institutions, 11% of respondents said that international students account for 20% of total recruitment numbers. A further 19% stated that these students accounted for more than 10% of total student recruitment.
CEO and Founder of TERMINALFOUR, Piero Tintori, said: “There’s no doubting that Brexit and the election of President Trump has caused some rumblings in student recruitment teams across the globe. 56% said visa and travel restrictions would impact recruitment targets. Let that sink in. More than half of the participants think travel restrictions will effectively cost them millions in lost revenue.”
42% of respondents (working in web, marketing or recruitment roles) were not sure of the situation regarding vacant seats in their institution. 20% surveyed stated they never have vacant seats; 12% have less than 2% vacant seats; 10% less than 5% vacant seats and 7% stated their institution averages above 11+% vacant seats every year.
Mr Tintori went on to comment about these figures, saying: “The results of this survey serve to illustrate the ever-present challenge of filling seats. The statistics reveal a mixed bag when it comes to vacant seats. What really causes alarm bells for me is the lack of awareness shown by many respondents when it comes to the percentage of vacant seats in their institutions, with many unable to even guess at the answer.
“This drives home the point that there’s a big disconnect between the organisational goals of the institution and the online goals. One informs the other; it’s unconscionable that these figures aren’t understood across an institution.”
In the 2017 survey, a new question was posed in relation to the level of adoption or incorporation of web-based personalisation on higher-education websites. 79% of the respondents said they didn’t incorporate website personalisation on their website, while only 14% said they did (this figure included 6% that only had location-based personalisation).
Web-accessibility improvements were a top-three priority for 61% with 62% of this figure saying “Legal & Policy” forces were behind its prioritisation. This was followed by social factors at 25%.
“The other side of the debate is that accessibility opens the door to opportunity. 285 million people in the world are visually impaired, between 1% and 9% of the population have movement-related disorders and 15% of the US population has a learning-related disability. These are potential and prospective students and a failure to address their needs is a failure to tap their potential to join your institution.”, said Mr Tintori.
