Hello again recruiters,
For all of you who joined EAIE Barcelona, we hope you had an amazing time. It's always fun to meet each other face to face during these great conferences and learn about the exciting things coming up in the industry. We are definitely looking forward to joining them next year!!
In today's post we want to share with you what we've learned surveying thousands of students across Latin America during the last few months.
It's no doubt that you guys as active recruiters know what international students go through when planning their studies. You've talked with hundreds if not thousands of them during recruitment events, webinars, you name it.
But we hope that our findings can help you understand even more what over 90% of them report as being the hardest part of their study abroad plan and how this situation could be affecting the number of students recruited by your institution.
To understand what we're talking about, let's dive into the reality of one of the students we interviewed recently. His name is Pedro and he's from Bogota, Colombia.
In 2021, he started saving money (15% of his salary as a part-time designer) to afford his bachelor's at a university in Alberta, Canada. He estimated approximately 30 thousand dollars to cover the cost of his studies. However, due to the depreciation of the Colombian peso, his program is already costing him over 10% more.
This insane volatility is forcing him to delay his application and the start of his program. In his own words: "It's super difficult to plan ourselves financially in this situation we live in".
One of the most important markets for universities in Canada and The U.S.A., Latin America has 3 out of its 6 most important currencies losing value over USD in 2022.
This can be directly impacting the number of international students applying to your university.
Unfortunately, currency depreciation is not the only problem students are suffering from. Ana Paula, from Sao Paulo, Brazil said that her bank (one of the 5 biggest in Brazil) charged her over 7% to make an international wire transfer to her university's bank account in Canada.
As you know, students often pay per semester, which means that every time Ana sends money to her school, she'll have to pay that extra fee. Imagine the amount she will have spent at the end of her 4 year program.
In other words, banks and other market circumstances are right now making your university more and more expensive. Which makes us wonder "How many students is your university missing out on because of this???"
This is the very problem we are working to solve here at Finoo.
If you would like to understand more about this and learn what can be done, send us a message and our team would love to schedule a virtual coffee.
See you soon!
Finoo's Team!
Finoo - Cross-border tuition payments made easy.