Recruiting Across Africa: Best Practices
Where will the United States’s international students of tomorrow come from? To a far greater extent than in the past, the answer may be Africa.
It is an answer dictated by demographics and a huge youth bulge—the median age in sub-Saharan Africa is 19.5 years old—that will cause African students to be a large segment of new international students.
Recruiting more African students will be vital to higher education institutions in the United States for a variety of reasons: diversifying international student populations, recruitment pipelines, and revenue sources, to name a few.
Understanding demographics and changes in mobility patterns, as well as the needs and challenges of students from a diverse continent, is critical to creating and executing a successful recruitment strategy.
Demographics and Mobility Patterns
“Africa is the new China, population-wise,” says Adina Lav, assistant provost for international enrollment at George Washington University (GW). “It is an up-and-coming market.”
The continual rise of African students studying abroad in recent years supports this claim. The share of tertiary international students deriving from sub- Saharan Africa increased from 296,393 in 2012 to 374,423 in 2017, according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
France has historically been the largest destination market for African students seeking to go abroad for higher education, given large investments and ties with its former francophone colonies—especially in North and West Africa—and low tuition for accepted students to most of its institutions. (Though last year, the French prime minister announced that tuition for non-European Union
