Sea Turtles or Seaweed? Does International Education have an employability problem?

I am the first to admit I didn’t know a lot about the international education sector when I first set up the International Alumni Job Network (IAJN) in 2016, rebranded to Cturtle in 2019.

Cturtle international student and graduate jobs and internships in Australia, United Kingdom UK, United States USA, Canada and New Zealand

IAJN initially established as a social enterprise to connect returning international student graduates with older alumni to help returnee graduates transition from education to employment in home countries. I didn’t know how dependent many universities have become to international student tuition or how much money went to agents and marketing companies to keep those numbers rising and the dependence growing rapidly, year on year since the early 1990’s. All I did know for sure was that as I kept meeting returnee international student graduates across Asia (affectionately called sea turtles) issues of employability brought up strong emotions.

A lot has been learnt in the last three years as we were first overwhelmed by the demand from graduates and alumni for career support (100,000+ registering in the first 12 months), to the very step learning curve on the complications of the university decision making matrix, and our research partnership with Decision Lab where we explore International Student Employment Outcomes and Satisfaction (ISEOS) which we launched in 2017 to try and sperate the signal from the noise around the employability issue.

UniAdvisor rankings and reviews of the top best universities in Australia, United Kingdom UK, United States USA, Canada and New Zealand

Instead of debating questions around a universities role and obligation with regard to alumni employment we wanted to explore questions like; 

What were international student graduates and alumni employment outcomes?

How was post-graduation employment related to satisfaction with the overall experience and investment in the international student experience?

 Did international student alumni recommend the experience and investment to future students?

Our startup group now called Cturtle uses the research to drive our platform development looking at greater transparency in pre-departure advice, employability training through WIL internships and ongoing graduate and alumni career services back in home countries.

Going into our third year of research we seem to raise as many new questions as we answer. Our research has so far surveyed 10,787 international student alumni across Asia (skewed to ASEAN countries we were launched our startup) who had studied at universities in Australia, UK, USA, New Zealand, Canada and Europe.

The findings are positive; 85% of alumni report that overall their international student experience was positive and 69% are satisfied with the return on the investment. Things start to get more complicated the more we dig into the data. For example only 36% of alumni recommend their university to future students and only 40% recommend the country; 

Of the 10 key drivers that affected likelihood to recommend their university to future students, 5 are related to employment and university career support. Even more so the 10 key drivers to recommend the country of education, 7 are employment related.

While some findings were to be expected; The number one reason (81%) of students choose to study abroad was to improve their career opportunities some interesting insights emerged such as;

• 86% of students have their first post-graduation job in their home country
• 62% of international students get unreliable advice from an international student agent
• 81% arrive in the Country of Education with none or limited pre-departure advice
• 4 in 5 international students have no access to internships
• 72% have no support to find part time work while students
• 66% receive no career support or guidance after graduation
• 74% have no alumni career support
• 68% have no alumni association back in their home country

Returns on investment depend very much on where students come from and how their earnings on return compare with their locally educated competition. In Vietnam for example, the average monthly wage of a locally-educated graduate is US$175 a month while in Singapore and Hong Kong graduates earn on average US$1,966 and US$1,722 per month respectively. Australian-educated students were the most likely to receive a salary increase, with 60% of respondents who had studied in Australia saying they had gotten one on their return to the workforce.

Our ISEOS research continues to drive our direction at Cturtle, identifying areas in the international student journey that could do with more attention and developing technology platforms to create solutions at scale. Our journey is building the largest globally educated talent community in Asia while our mission to connect students, alumni, universities and employers has created a community who can solve global problems together.

To get back to the original question of does international education have an employability problem? I am not sure if the question is even fair but what in life is. The employability problem for university graduates does not seem to be unique to international students however their contribution to university revenue is undeniable and this might lead to even bigger and unfairer questions in the future.

Data from the ISOS project from 2017 to 2019 is now available on UniAdvisor.

 Shane Dillon is an Australian entrepreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Hong Kong. He is passionate about the opportunities to unite people through international education and global mobility.