Leading Into Africa

For the 2010 academic year, Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid for the University of Rochester, pitched a radical idea to his provost: Recruit 10 students from Africa tuition-free in hopes that it would position Rochester as a home for a burgeoning African student population decades later. Last year, the university enrolled nearly four times that number, with about 700 applications coming from students across the continent.

His story has been eyed keenly by some in the international recruitment community, where admissions officers have warily watched the slowing of the growth of full-tuition-paying students coming to the United States from China. The number of Chinese students studying in the United States—by far still the largest cohort of international students—rose 8 percent in the 2015–16 academic year. But that rate has been steadily falling since the beginning of the decade, when the number increased nearly 30 percent over the previous year, according to statistics from the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report.

Africa isn’t the only potential alternative source of international students, of course, but its quickly growing middle class represents a largely untapped market. To be sure, recruiting from the continent’s 54 countries and more than 1 billion people requires a new playbook, creative partnerships, and a willingness for making a long-term investment, Burdick and other senior international officers said. But it’s a gamble that SIOs are increasingly willing to take.

“China in 1975 was racked by famine and closed from the world,” Burdick said. “We don’t