International office recruits students in 15 countries

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Professionals who staff the office of International Enrollment Management (IEM) under the vice provost for international education are among the best-traveled-and sometimes the most tired-members of the UB community.

Jionardi Hindrawan, director of IEM, and Steven Shaw, assistant director, are the university's principal international-student recruiters. Their job calls for them to spend a great deal of time representing UB at overseas recruitment events for students who want to study in the United States. Since the office was established last year, Hindrawan and Shaw have participated in 35 such events in 15 countries in Asia, the Middle East and North America.

In consultation with the Office of the Provost and the deans, IEM has developed a strategic plan designed to increase and diversify international enrollments. While maintaining or increasing enrollments from Asia-the source region of most of the university's international students-IEM also is developing markets in the Middle East, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

"What we want to achieve," says Tim Rutenber, acting vice provost for international education, "is a sustainable, diverse and balanced population of high-quality international students from all over the world."

Hindrawan and Shaw are assisted by colleagues in the Office of International Education, the English Language Institute, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Graduate School. The recruiters have spent time in Argentina, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, Oman, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Although the job may sound exotic, the recruiters say overseas recruitment typically involves many hours standing behind a table in an overheated exhibition hall, talking to hundreds of interested students in the course of a long day, then flying to another city the next day to do the same thing again. The pace is hectic, exhausting and may stretch over a period of several weeks.

"The crowds at some venues, particularly those in Asia, are very, very large," says Hindrawan. "A recruiter from a popular school is mobbed continuously from morning to night by groups of 20 or more young people interested in getting information or in applying for admission."

Nevertheless, Rutenber says the direct person-to-person approach continues to be the best way to recruit overseas students.

"In the last decade, overseas recruitment drives have become imperative, even for universities like UB that have a long, successful history of attracting large numbers of excellent students from abroad," Rutenber explains. "The reason for this is that the recruitment of university students has become a highly competitive global enterprise.

"International students are important institutional assets, not only for the economic contribution they make, but also for the important role they have in research, teaching and the cultural life of their host campuses."

The number of international students coming to the U.S. continues to increase-more than 481,000 in 1997-98, according to the annual census conducted by the Institute of International Education-but the number of institutions trying to enroll the best students from overseas has grown even more rapidly.

"The schools competing with UB are not only peer universities and colleges in the United States," Hindrawan says, "but institutions in Australia, Britain and Canada. These schools have recently undertaken aggressive, well-organized international recruitment campaigns aided by government and immigration policies that particularly favor the enrollment of international students."

Although competition from foreign institutions has made international recruitment more challenging, UB has been exceptionally successful since 1995, the year the university first participated in overseas recruitment events. By last fall, the international undergraduate enrollment at the university reached 423-an increase of 58 percent over 1994 figures. International graduate students now number 1,504, an increase of 13 percent since 1994.

"So far this year, the number of international applications we've received suggests that enrollments will again be up significantly in the next academic year," Hindrawan says.