(Family & Children magazine)
The perception that only the school that has no application needs to conduct student recruitment is questionable. Looking into the world, prestigious schools like Harvard University consider student recruitment as crucial factor for maintenance of educational quality over the years.
How Harvard recruit the students?
Study at Harvard is a dream for everyone. In order to keep up with continuous reputation, in spring each year, Harvard starts sending mails to over 70,000 students with excellent grade recommending them to apply for the study. This list can be purchased from the College Board – organizer of SAT and ACT Inc exams who specializes in enrollment of students for Midwestern region in US, 70% of students at Harvard are recruited through this source.
Recruitment board travelled to over 140 cities across the U.S to scout for talents. They even made visits to Latin America, Europe, Africa and Western U.S. Approximate 10% of selected students come from other countries.
Lecturers and professors of all faculties always keep eyes on those who won prizes at the exams. A cohort of volunteers is in charge of finding and attracting excellent candidates, at the same time involving in the interviewing of the candidates.
Thousand of applications will be screened by the professors, each application will go through a process of reviewing and approving by 6 members of recruitment board. Each application will be discussed like in trial court. This process will be repeated until the number of applications equivalent to quota is reached.
Afterward, they will put all efforts into persuading qualified students to select Harvard. All professors, alumni and school students…will be mobilized for persuasion of fresh students. Harvard’ s recruitment plan always achieves great success with 80% of students agreeing to select Harvard for their study.
Student recruitment – The schools promote and learners seek information themselves
Tu Phuc has attended a client conference organized by RMIT university. Before going here, his mother convinced him to attend this conference. Phuc himself wants to study Multimedia, but he still has a number of concerns because this field is still new in Vietnam.
University, college, vocational education is a market where consumers and recruiters have relatively good understanding of education quality
After attending conference, being introduced about this discipline, having chance to directly communicate with students studying this discipline at the university, Phuc is no longer concerned with his decision. However, later he does not choose to study at RMIT, but through this conference, he searched for more information regarding his chosen field of study.
In recruitment seasons, a considerable number of globally famous universities, colleges went to Vietnam for organization of client conference and conducting of their student recruitment. Such conferences are not only the chance for the schools to promote themselves but are also an opportunity for learners to study more about the fields of study. However, there are only a handful number of Vietnamese universities, colleges, vocational schools doing this.
In 2014, General Directorate of Vocational Training cooperated with the Hai Duong province’s Department of Labour – Invalids and Social Affairs to organize the Festival for Vocational training recruitment and employment, this reflects an endeavor and the change in perception regarding student recruitment. Ass. Prof. Cao Van Sam used to say in conference of vocational schools: “Never fall into the state of “self-esteem” to judge that student recruitment is only needed in case of difficulty. That requires a fundamental change. (One) should not think that recruitment is needed when facing difficulty in student recruitment. But it should be seen as an intrinsic, regular activity for any school in the world, not only Vietnam vocational schools. Even Harvard professors or professors from any country, when they come to Vietnam, the first thing they do is student recruitment. Student recruitment requires fundamental transformation, change of perception. This activity is continuous, regular and requires that personnel of the school fully understand the importance of student recruitment. Therefore, knowledge, skill, experiences of student recruitment and organization of client meeting are highly required. Student recruitment needs to be stimulated and such perception that recruitment is needed when facing difficulty in student recruitment only should not exist”.
Can not rely on reputation for student recruitment
“They only do student recruitment if the number of student is insufficient”, this perception can be reconsidered. Such perception will lead to a thought that student recruitment is the last thing to do and only important when there is insufficient number of students. This perceptual deficiency derives from previous subsidy mechanism; allocation of student is the responsibility of the State, the schools only take charge of providing training.
However due to current market mechanism, when education becomes a commodity where there exists competition in terms of quality, student recruitment is a regular, continuous activity.
It can be seen that foreign schools regularly hold client conferences primarily aimed at recruiting students. They do so not because there is no application so that they need to go to Vietnam for student recruitment, they do so because that activity is inherent and a must. Especially in art, leading professors in the world tend to come to different counties through teaching program and recruit the students. In fact, they are recruiting students like “panning for gold” in search of world talents, thus cultivating reputation for themselves and for the school.
It is time for the universities, colleges, vocational schools to change their thinking, perception to see student recruitment as a necessary and regular activity in the search for learners. There is nothing that can be described as embarrassment in conducting student recruitment but doing that can actual show the schools’ professionalism and their adaptive ability into the market.
During a talk on a television show, Dr. Tran Ngoc Anh – lecturer of Indiana University (U.S) said, university education is actually a market where consumers and recruiters have relatively good understanding of education quality. However, education in Vietnam in general, secondary education specifically does not function in compliance with market principles, but in the future, it must work according to market principles.
Talking about market mechanism, product promotion, advertisement and searching for consumers are integrated parts of the process. Even if the product has excellent quality but if it is not widely promoted it may be unknown in the market and surviving in severely competitive market will become a difficult problem.
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