Navitas released Round 10 of its Agent Perception Survey in July. Eight hundred and seventy agents across sixty-four countries, asked what is actually driving student decisions right now.
I read it differently than I would have six months ago. I spent just under fifteen years on the marketing and recruitment side of this sector. I now spend my time on campuses, watching what happens after a student arrives. That shift changes what stands out.
Two numbers stopped me.
- 46%
- The share of agents who now say local universities in a student's own country provide an education comparable to studying overseas — the same share say the same of offshore branch campuses.
- 82.3%
- Agents reporting students need more social and mental health support, up from 62.9% three years ago — the steepest trend in the report.
Forty-six per cent. The share of agents who now say local universities in their own country provide an education comparable to studying overseas. The same proportion say the same of offshore branch campuses. That is close to half the people advising students, telling us our academic product no longer has an obvious edge.
Eighty-two point three per cent. The share reporting students need more social and mental health support, up from 62.9% three years ago. Academic support has moved further still. These are the steepest trends in the report.
The levers we don't control
Cost of study is the number one factor influencing destination choice, in every recruitment region the survey covers. Behind it sit visa processing, post-study work rights and migration pathways.
Institutions can't set exchange rates, shorten visa processing, or legislate work rights, so the variables agents say matter most to students aren't even in the hands of providers.
The data shows students are hedging accordingly, applying to more countries, more institutions within each country, and holding a home-country back-up plan. Australia's brand still holds up well. But when a student applies to five institutions across three countries with a local option in reserve, the destination brand gets them onto the shortlist, it doesn't convert them.
The unit of competition has moved down a level from destination to now the institution, and the campus.
What the report doesn't measure
The survey contains nothing about what a campus is actually like to be on: not facilities, food, the spaces between classes. That's not a criticism, it's just a reflection of where the sector's attention sits. We measure what we can't control with precision, and we have very little language for what we can.
That's clearly a problem, because the fastest-moving numbers in the report are exactly the ones inside our control. Support needs, academic and social, up around twenty points in three years.
These are not policy problems, they're experience problems, and they play out in physical space on campus: whether there's somewhere to sit with a friend between classes, whether the campus feels alive at 4pm, whether a student who is quietly struggling has a reason to stay on site rather than go straight home.
If a local degree is now comparable, and a branch campus is now comparable, then what a student is buying when they get on a plane is the part that cannot be replicated remotely. The study abroad experience itself: eight hours a day, five days a week, physically present somewhere, with people they would not otherwise have met. And that was always the real product. It just used to be underwritten by an academic advantage we took for granted.
The cost objection
Cost is the number one driver. Institutions are working under caps and compressed margins, and campus amenity is the first line item cut. Arguing for it now may look like bad timing but I would put it the other way round. Someone will always be cheaper, and the home-country option is cheapest of all. What the survey describes is students making a value judgement, not a price one.
So, the question is not whether to spend on campus experience. It is which parts of it a student actually notices every day, which parts deliver a tangible benefit, and which parts are institutional furniture nobody sees.
I've spent the last six months on a small piece of that, across dozens of Australian campuses. It is coffee. Small, daily, and one of the few reasons a student stays somewhere ten minutes longer than they had to.
The report is worth reading in full at navitas.com/naps.