We have been in Washington DC all work finalizing visas and working on our student brochure for the Fall 2009 student recruitment tour in the Middle East. We will be heading out to the first fair stop, Beirut, Lebanon in October and we want to welcome all the Universities, Colleges and Language Centers who will be joining us on this excellent tour!

American University in Cairo
Arizona State University
California State University, Fullerton
College of the Desert
DePaul University
Diablo Valley College
Emporia State University
Florida Institute of Technology
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Lasell College
Marquette University
Mercer University
Michigan State University Dubai
New York University Abu Dhabi
Oklahoma City University
Pace University
Parsons the New School for Design
Purdue University
Roger Williams University
San Jose State University
Savannah College of Art and Design
Stony Brook University
University of Arizona
University at  Buffalo
University of Bridgeport
University of California, Riverside Extension
University of California, San Diego
University of Central Florida
University of Colorado Denver
University of Evansville
University of Hartford
University of Iowa
University of New Haven
University of Oregon
University of Toledo
Veritas Prep, GMAT Test Preparation
Virginia Commonwealth University
West Virginia University
Youngstown State University

We do have our March 2010 Middle East and Eurasia fair dates up on our site already and encourage you to sign up soon to reserve your space for next year!

March 2010 Middle East student recruitment fair dates

March 2010 Eurasia student recruitment fair dates

This video makes me shake my head this morning:

160 pounds of mail from colleges and universities during this student’s search. Wow. While there is certainly a discussion and post in there about the OVERabundance of information thrown at high schools students in the US, what *I* thought about was how many Universities were sending viewbooks overseas? How much are you spending on mailing tons of paper across the world? Often to countries where the mail system is so poor the chances of the student receiving it in a timely manner is completely out of the question (yeah Saudi Arabia, I’m talking to you).

So are you still doing this? Are you still spending money on random direct mail campaigns? Does it work? What is your ROI? I am curious because I would think on average a University should be sending a hundred or less viewbooks to a country like Saudi Arabia each year. The rest of your budget should be spent on using the hundreds of better and more effective methods of connecting with the student on a personal and emotional level. That’s what will connect most of them to your institution and make them interested in attending.

…of course I say all this as an international student who chose her school based on its brochure and chose NOT to go to another based on theirs. Of course that was more than 10 years ago…the recruitment game has changed, and its time to give the students virtual hugs and handshakes, not just more mail.

Wassan

Finally! We’ve secured our facebook URL, took a little longer than it should have… but that was our fault for not pushing it a little more in our marketing efforts. We’ve concentrated on getting the Al Jamiat facebook fan page going, and we’re happy to be reaching almost 500 fans within just 5 weeks of having it up.

Are we friends yet?

http://www.facebook.com/usegtours

http://www.facebook.com/aljamiat

I hope you’re keeping tabs on the fun stuff going on at Al Jamiat, our student traffic continues to grow as our content increases. Let me know if you have any articles or students who would be interested in sending something in!

We saw a comment on our Al Jamiat site regarding the Iraq Education Initiative asking if the scholarship had been “canceled” due to the current economic climate…

Our initial instinct was to quickly respond with a resounding NO! That’s completely incorrect! However, in the interest of backing up our response, we sent an email to the Director of the program, to which he responded:

“This is absolutely not true. We are moving forward and the announcement to the students to submit their application is scheduled for July 15.”

So there you go folks, its time to start seriously thinking about how you’re going to recruit these Iraqi students. We suspect the in-country recruitment fairs are going to be few and far between at first.  Online recruiting will be the best way to reach these “unreachables” .

A Facebook Fan page may sound overly simple, but its a great place to start – along with a localized page in Arabic aimed specifically at the Iraqi students. A very minor marketing investment that can reward your campus with incredible new students that will truly diversify the school.

Hope you’re already a fan of our Facebook page, if not – what are you waiting for?!