An organized student recruiting tour of a specific area in the world is an excellent way of introducing the name of your university to a large number of potential students. Your university's name, programs, cost, and location in the U.S. are what an international student recruiter wants to bring to the attention of interested students around the world.
One of K-State's four immediate international focus areas is the Middle East, specifically the states of the Persian Gulf, (or Arabian Gulf , depending on where you live). From February 28 through March 13, 2007, Jack Taylor, Assistant Admissions Director, and I went on the spring 2007 United States Educational Group (USEG) Middle East Tour. Along with twenty-three other U.S. colleges and universities, we participated in five recruiting fairs in five cities, and visited six international high schools for mini-recruiting fairs at each high school. In addition, we had briefings from U.S. consular officials in each city about the educational system of the country and the current visa procedures for each country.
The cities and countries on this recent tour were: Amman , Jordan ; Riyadh , Saudi Arabia ; Kuwait City , Kuwait ; Manama , Bahrain ; and Dubai , United Arab Emirates.
Recruiting tours generally focus on one area of the world—the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, Northern Asia, India, etc.—and make stops for recruiting fairs in an average of six cities. The better organized of these tours include visits with mini-fairs in international high schools.
The fairs themselves are usually held in hotel ballrooms; are well-publicized ahead of time in the local media, and take place over a three to five hour period in the afternoons of weekends, or the early evenings of weekdays. On a recruiting tour, there is no such thing as a weekend break! Tour organizers pack travel, fairs, briefings, and school visits into the most compact package possible, so university recruiters feel like they are getting the most value for the money spent.
During a typical fair session at the K-State table, the representative or representatives spend three to five hours solidly talking to high school students and parents who are interested in coming the U.S. for an undergraduate degree, college graduates who want to go on for a Master's or a PhD degree, principals of local international schools, and people involved in educational advising.
I always ship K-State materials ahead to each fair location, so that I have both overall information about K-State to hand out, and materials specific to particular majors to hand out. One of the challenges involved is to ship just the right amount. If I end up overestimating the numbers of different materials I will need, I pack what is left over with me to the next stop. If I underestimate, I always have single-page master copies of materials which I can photocopy for additional copies as needed.
I feel that our Middle East tour was quite successful: we came back with one hundred and seventeen information cards from good potential undergraduate students; made good contacts with six international high schools, whose mini-fairs were all well attended; gave out a lot of information to potential graduate students; and got a good picture of the present educational and visa situations of each of the five countries we visited.
International Pre-Admissions and Recruiting has already contacted all of the students on the information cards with more information and K-State website addresses that focus on their interests. The next step, as with any recruiting process, whether domestic or international, is to follow up on this initial information with future e-mails to let the students know we are interested in them, and that we look forward to seeing them here at K-State in the near future.