How can we monitor education agents more effectively?

Education agent-based international student recruitment is gaining popularity in a number of countries. Even though many of the issues related to this recruitment mode have been widely discussed, significant gaps persist in universities’ and other educational institutions’ understanding of how best to manage their agent relationships. A new study examines one of the key underlying issues in ethical education agent management: how educational institutions can monitor their education agents. It is reasonable to assume that if universities and other educational institutions had the full ability to observe education agents’ activities, agents would be more likely to behave in a manner required by the client institutions. In the same way, agents’ awareness of institutions’ limited ability to observe their behaviour means that we can expect more agent misconduct. Of course, there are other ways to incentivise agents to work in educational institutions’ best interests, such as pre-contract due diligence, the use of contracts and financial incentives.