By Aisha Labi

London

With ever more universities around the world seeking to attract some of the fast-growing number of internationally mobile students, it has become a pressing concern for those institutions to understand the factors that drive where such students choose to study.

A panel discussion on Friday at Going Global, a higher-education conference organized by the British Council, Britain's international organization for educational and cultural relations, tried to help universities do so by focusing on the topic "What Do the Students Want?"

The single most important factor in influencing where students look first as they seek information about programs abroad is the guidance of friends and family members, Rebecca Loades, an associate director at the Graduate Management Admission Council, said her organization's surveys suggest. But there are regional variations. In Africa and the Middle East, undergraduates tend to look to their professors for advice, while students in Latin America are more likely to seek information from external publications.

Surveys of graduate business students reveal three key reasons behind their choice of a particular program, Ms. Loades said: quality and reputation; specifics about the curriculum, such as location and program duration; and career-related factors, such as how well a program meets specific employment goals.

Despite all the buzz about the growing influence of social media, chat rooms and blogs have had little apparent influence on students' decision making, she added.

Instant Responses Expected

Students may not be as susceptible to new media as generational stereotypes suggest, but they are products of an information age and expect virtually instantaneous responses from institutions when they ask questions and apply. Different research cited by the panel members suggests that around half of students apparently expect responses to inquiries and even applications in as little as a day.

Jazreel Goh, director of education marketing for the British Council in China, emphasized that, even within a single country, what students are seeking can differ widely. The priorities of a student in Beijing may be very different from those of one in Chengdu, 1,000 miles to the southwest. Because foreign institutions cannot easily shift their profiles on a city-by-city basis, trying to be "an apple in Beijing and an orange in Chengdu," she said, they must instead focus on emphasizing their strengths uniformly.

William Archer, founder and director of the International Graduate Insight Group, an education consulting service, said those strengths are rooted in the student experience, which is "hard wired" into an institution's reputation and is a key driver in determining choice. Institutions can build on that by seeking to engage students and alumni more in the recruiting process.

In addition to understanding why students choose to go where they do, universities should seek to grasp why students decide to go elsewhere. Rachel Fletcher, director of enrollment-management services at Hobsons, an education-services company, said universities should explore why students who are given offers of admission don't accept them, and why those the institutions are hoping to attract aren't applying, in order to better understand the students who are their targets,.

One factor may well be price. Last year, for example, as the rupee lost ground against the dollar, her company heard from American institutions asking about the steep drop in applications from India, while British institutions reported being deluged.