To best position themselves for changes in international student recruitment and enrollment, U.S. institutions need to become first-movers and adopt regulatory-ready processes for working with education agents.
Innovating agent processes will actually become a competitive differentiator, industry leaders who discussed the topic recently at the AIRC Spring Symposium and 2025 NAFSA Annual Conference & Expo events agreed. Demand for international education is strong, but competition will increase as students continue to look beyond the traditional big markets. Education agents are an important part of helping them make their choice.
What can U.S. institutions do now to both prepare for changes and soothe an environment in flux?
- Adopt lessons from countries more mature in agent use – such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom – and look to their regulations and standards.
- Look to organizations like ICEF, IDP and AIRC for guidance in applying standards and developing relationships with trusted agents.
- Digitize and automate more transactions between agents and the institution.
“We have a vested interest in self-regulation, and in coming together and joining forces, I think, across the ecosystem,” said Tony Lee, Chief Visionary Officer at ICEF, adding that there’s a lot that institutions and agents globally can learn from one another.
Clear standards ensure agents can function at their best, students are placed where they are most likely to have success, persistence levels increase and retention rates rise. Here are three things U.S. institutions should know that can help ensure that the ecosystem thrives.
1. A lot of the groundwork has already been laid for solid agent relationships and processes.
While the use of agents in the U.S. is not as mature as Australia, the United Kingdom or Canada, evolving regulations and dedicated standards have put substance around many of the things that previously turned institutions off from these relationships in the past.
There are clear rules, for instance, around the legality of commission structures, as well as organizations such as Washington, D.C.-based AIRC, a non-profit advocacy and standards body, that has developed extensive, comprehensive processes for institutions to work with vetted recruitment agencies. Their multi-step agent certification process includes undergoing background checks, site visits and regular accountability audits to achieve and maintain certification.
Standards and clear processes work to keep the interest of the student top of mind – and guard against practices such as students applying to a higher cost school and transferring to a lower cost one upon getting a visa.
“The ultimate thing we're doing in any kind of quality scheme is to protect the interests of the students and the enrolling institution,” said AIRC’s Jennifer Wright, who is the Director of Operations and Certification. “We want to make sure that the process of assisting a student to fulfill their dreams is done in such a way that's ethical.”
2. The U.K.’s AFQ offers clues to how regulations may unfold globally and in the U.S.
It is likely that some version of the Agent Quality Framework (AFQ)– a set of standards for ensuring high-quality agent and institution relationships – currently being rolled out in the U.K. will eventually come to the U.S. Institutions can look to those recommendations to ensure the best possible agent, institution and student experiences. It includes recommendations, for instance, to enhance and ease agent training, ensure systems are in place to track and pay commissions, and automate outreach to agents on overdue tuition payments and more.
“Read that document, and look at how you can embed that within your own institutions,” said Tom Wilmot, Director, who has spent more than a decade in the agent space and is now part of the Global Expansion team at Flywire.
The level of regulation in Australia, where quality assurance processes are legally required to enroll international students, may be more difficult to achieve in a market like the U.S., where there are far more institutions. But still, institutions can take lessons from Australia, such as institutional data sharing practices to help ensure high-quality information on education agents, according to Tim O’Brien, Senior Vice President at INTO, a global education services organization.
3. Agents are already assisting students in the U.S, so getting systems in place now to better manage them is critical.
Institutions may claim that compliance is being upheld and agents don’t submit applications themselves using student log-ins, but they often do.
“We can either be naive and think they're not, or we can accept that's happening and make sure that institutions have systems in place to capture that data on the front end,” Wilmot said. “That opens up so many other things, with real-time data showing how many applications have come in. This helps commission forecasting, because we know which agents are attached to what.”
To that end, “The biggest single thing you can do is make sure the data you have coming in is as good as it can be,” Wilmot said.
In fact, agents rank access to systems that make it easier for them to do their job as more important than even their commission rates, Wilmot continued, because reliable processes help them strengthen relationships with students, build their reputations and grow their business.
“In 2025 we shouldn’t be managing agents on spreadsheets. We have to be looking at that now, particularly at a time when regulation is coming. Let’s get ahead of it with automation,” Wilmot said.
To learn more about Flywire’s solutions for education agents:
- Read our International Education Agents 101 guide and learn how to best support education agents
- Learn how Flywire’s Agent platform streamlines work for education agents and eases tracking and reconciliation for institutions
- Read about how Canadian institutions are approaching its international student enrollment changes
- Find out how Flywire’s StudyLink solution streamlines agent relationships and application management