Skip to main content

Great Britain - Empowering the World's Youth

According to the OECD, the UK's share of all 'international mobile higher education students' decreased from 10.8% to 9.9% between 2000 and 2009. In other words we are gradually becoming less competitive, losing out especially to the likes of Australia (5.1% in 2000 to 7.0% in 2009), Canada (4.6% to 5.2%), and New Zealand (0.4% to 1.9%).

Isn't it about time UK plc started marketing itself professionally to wealthy Chinese and Indian parents rather than leaving it up to individual cash-strapped institutions whose messages will be both weak and inconsistent?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find sectors where the UK still excels internationally. Admittedly we're pretty good at some things (engineering, financial services, medical research, even agriculture - we have some of the most fertile land on the planet), but we're no longer world leaders in very much - except what is becoming known as the Knowledge Sector (Higher Education and discrete areas of R&D), and Media (marketing communications, and cultural stuff like music, TV, art, theatre and movies).

My proposition is that we combine these two strengths by using one to help sell the other, instead of moaning that British kids are being squeezed out of British unis by foreign kids - WHO ARE HELPING TO PAY FOR OUR KIDS TO BE EDUCATED AT ALL. British Higher Education is scalable. It is not a case of either domestic or foreign students!

So the plan is rather than hope each academic institution will be able to make an impression on every wealthy (or simply ambitious) Chinese and Indian parent to send them their increasing numbers of precious children, why don't we combine our marketing expertise to make a big impression on every target parent that the UK collectively offers:

  • Safety (stable government, safest roads in the world, multi-cultural, strongly secular)
  • 800 years of education excellence and globally recognised reputation
  • The home of the English language
  • Accessibility (more flights to more cities than any other country on Earth)
  • Many of their own community already here
The world's largest marketing services corporation is British (WPP), and we boast an incredible array of marketing communications expertise and talent which we already export widely. Instead of letting Chinese (etc) parents arrive at their own conclusions about where to send their darlings, why don't we take a leaf out of Australia's book and use our extraordinary marcoms skills to market the benefits of a UK education - and not just UK Universities, but all UK commercial educational institutions, including our public schools, and specialist colleges and academies?

So Minister Willetts, how about: 
  • Big fat punchy campaigns aimed at wealthy Chinese and Indian Parents selling UK Education:
    "Great Britain - Empowering your Children".
  • Make the British Council answerable to the DTI and not the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
  • Remove all obstacles for foreign students to study here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat