Restoring Student Agency in Global College Decisions
Welcome to The Brief by Global Edvocate. Twice a month, I share insights at the intersection of global education, law and policy, and innovation. I bring a sharp mind, a soft heart, and a quiet storm, speaking with intention on what is defining and redefining our field.
Two weeks ago, I talked with a high school student in Chennai whose mother is a doctor and whose father is an engineer. They hope she will follow in their footsteps, as many parents do when they have invested so much in education. She said she hates her stream, wants to study music, and asked me what she should do.
These conversations happen often. While I tell students that at U.S. institutions, they can choose their major, switch their major, and suggest they have a conversation with their parents about their passions, I know my response is naïve and driven by my own cultural background. It isn't that easy. The tension between individual choice and family obligation isn't simply a matter of Eastern versus Western values, but about economic survival, social mobility, and generational sacrifice.
After sharing the best answer I have, she and her classmates began playing South Indian classical music. The transformation was immediate. Her entire presence changed when she held her instrument. Yet it isn't for me to make that decision for her, nor is it entirely hers to make alone. This is the paradox of student agency in global education: how do we honor both individual aspirations and collective responsibilities?
Perhaps the bigger question is whether U.S. education should be the default aspiration at all. Why do I assume this student should leave India to study music? There are outstanding conservatories in Chennai itself, and throughout Europe and Asia, often at a fraction of U.S. tuition costs. Yet here I am, a U.S. university administrator, perpetuating the assumption that American education is the ultimate goal, an assumption not only I, but many in our field, fall into, even though excellent and affordable options exist worldwide. We should be helping students explore options globally that might better serve their goals and budgets rather than funneling them toward the most expensive option by default.
Last week, in a session at an international education conference, the audience of counselors, IECs, and university representatives were presented with two scenarios for advising a student. Forty minutes of discussion ensued about the roles of counselors, parents, agents, and universities. These roles were relevant because that’s who was in the room; however, the student's own decision-making process didn’t receive as much attention as it deserved. It made me think how we, perhaps, have designed students out of their own futures.
I’ve spent almost two decades in global engagement and been involved in nearly every type of recruitment. I've watched the erosion of student agency become normalized, institutionalized, and, most troublingly, profitable. I’ve seen the industry shift from emphasizing intercultural exchange (however imperfectly realized) to openly prioritizing profit. Private equity now owns some of the biggest players in the field. Pathway programs are often not what they seem. Commission structures push students toward poor fits. Aggregators offer quantity over quality. In some regions, the agent network extends so far that even local shopkeepers serve as subagents, collecting commissions for referrals. We've constructed an international education market where every stakeholder benefits from student passivity, except the students themselves.
The Architecture of Disempowerment
The systematic removal of student agency operates through multiple, reinforcing mechanisms:
Family Investment and Cultural Complexity
In many contexts I’ve observed, including South and East Asia and increasingly in parts of the U.S. with rising tuition, education represents the family's single largest financial investment, often requiring loans against property or decades of savings. This economic reality creates an ownership transfer, where financial investment translates into decision-making authority. This isn’t limited to Asia, but I do see familial pressures take center stage more so than in the United States.
A family in Mumbai who mortgages their home for their child's education isn't being tyrannical, they're taking an existential risk. When a student tells me they want to study film instead of engineering, we're actually discussing whether their family will have retirement security, whether younger siblings will have educational opportunities, and whether the family's social standing will rise or fall.
The question isn't whether families deserve a voice. Of course they do. The question is how we create space for student agency within these very real constraints. How do we help students navigate between their own dreams and their family's sacrifices without dismissing either as invalid?
The Counselor's Dilemma
High school counselors and Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) face their own structural pressures. Their professional reputations, and in the case of IECs, their business models, depend on prestige admissions. When an IEC’s website and LinkedIn page both feature a wall of university logos (the more prestigious, the more prominent), students risk becoming symbols in a reputational performance rather than individuals with their own trajectories.
Here is what I struggle with: in a world where parents judge counselors by Ivy League admissions, how can we expect different behavior? If I tell counselors to "forget rankings," I'm asking them to risk their livelihoods (and I risk sounding like sour grapes, if I’m honest). U.S. News and World Report rankings are flawed, and there are very valid criticisms of these rankings. One criticism is they incentivize universities to generate applications from unqualified students just to lower acceptance rates, among others. Yet parents treat these rankings as gospel.
What's the alternative? We need new metrics that capture what actually matters: student-institution fit, support services for international students, career outcomes aligned with student goals, and mental health resources. Who creates these metrics? Who validates them? How do we convince families to value them?
The Agent Industrial Complex
The agent system operates on a fundamental conflict of interest that we've normalized through years of practice. I've seen contracts where agents receive 15% of first-year tuition which is business as usual. I've been presented with one suggesting 40%.
Here's a specific example: pathway programs. These programs, marketed as bridges to university admission, often function as profit centers that exploit student vulnerability. Students pay premium prices for remedial coursework at for-profit entities loosely affiliated with universities. The pathway provider profits whether students succeed or fail. The university gets plausible deniability about admission standards. The agent gets commission on both the pathway and eventual university enrollment. Everyone wins except the student who spends two years and $100,000 US to end up where they could have started at a different institution or maybe just applied directly to another institution instead of through a pathway, had they had more choice.
Yet, and this is crucial, in many regions, agents are the only source of information about international education. In rural Karnataka or western China, without agents, many students would have no access at all. The problem isn't agents per se; it's the commission structure that makes student welfare incidental to agent income. Imagine government-funded education advisors or NGO-run counseling centers or universities investing in direct outreach rather than commission-based intermediaries.
The Platform Economy
International recruitment platforms promise to democratize access, but in reality they often replace old barriers with new ones. These platforms create new forms of information asymmetry while claiming to solve old ones. Students believe they're seeing objective matches when they're actually seeing paid placements. The algorithms are opaque, the financial relationships undisclosed, and student data is harvested without meaningful consent.
The platforms defend themselves by arguing that before them, only students with sophisticated counselors or expensive consultants could navigate global options. They've replaced one form of gatekeeping with another: now students only see universities that pay to play. A student in rural Indonesia searching for computer science programs doesn't see the best fits for their profile; they see whoever paid for prominence that quarter. The old system was exclusive; the new one is deceptive. At least expensive consultants were transparent about being paid advisors. These platforms present themselves as neutral resources but in practice function as commissioned sales engines.
Worse, they've made universities lazy. Instead of genuine outreach and relationship building, we purchase students like commodities. Clicks replace conversations. The platforms profit whether students succeed or fail, whether they find good fits or expensive mistakes. They've inserted themselves as middlemen in a relationship that should be direct, extracting value while adding friction disguised as efficiency.
Institutional Complicity
Universities are not innocent victims but active initiators of and participants in this system. We set recruitment targets, measure success through enrollment numbers, and celebrate yield rates. Our international recruitment teams are often evaluated on quantity, not on whether students find programs that align with their goals.
I've been in sessions on how to "capture" more students from emerging markets. The language itself reveals our orientation: students as resources to be extracted rather than individuals to be served. Individual recruiters often want genuine and honest conversations with students but face institutional pressure to justify every expense through enrollment numbers.
At many universities, international students subsidize domestic students. If those universities advocate for reducing international enrollment to prioritize fit over volume, they are effectively arguing for higher tuition for domestic students or reduced services. If our international strategy depends on enrolling students who won't thrive, what does that say about our educational mission?
So, What Can We Do?
For Counselors: Redefine Success
High school college and career counselors could be powerful catalysts for change, if freed from their own systemic constraints. Having spoken to hundreds of counselors over the years, it must start here.
Counselors and IECs are uniquely positioned to advocate for student agency. They know their students, understand family dynamics, and navigate cultural complexities. But they need structural support to implement the following:
Develop alternative metrics: Instead of celebrating rankings, highlight programs that excel at supporting international student success. Which universities have the lowest international student dropout rates? Which provide robust mental health support in multiple languages? Which have strong career outcomes for international graduates?
Create parent education programs: Workshops on how careers are changing with AI, why liberal arts education leads to successful careers, and how student agency correlates with long-term success. Use data and examples from their own cultural context, like successful entrepreneurs who studied philosophy and engineers who became artists.
Build transparency coalitions: Band together to demand that agents disclose commissions, platforms reveal algorithms and commercial interests, and universities publish international student success data. Collective action protects individual counselors from retaliation.
Document student stories: Keep records of students who thrived when they had agency and struggled when they didn't. These narratives, properly anonymized, can be powerful tools for shifting parent and institutional perspectives.
Understand who benefits from a student’s college choice:
Edtech platforms appear neutral to a counselor or student because they make it easy for the counselor to enroll a student on their platform. This is problematic in itself as it takes away student consent. On the other side of the coin, universities are paying for inclusion on these platforms. Student agency is removed entirely, and they are only given access to the universities who choose that particular platform. There are so many platforms out there, it is impossible for all universities to be included, so students are presented with options based on a lottery of choice by unknown administrators at universities who are sold a concrete number of enrollments regardless of whether the student would actually be successful at their institution.
Agents are paid commission by universities. Are their students and parents working with agents? Would they tell the counselor? Which universities have agreements with agents?
I recognize that most counselors are overworked and under-resourced. These suggestions require institutional investment in counselor training and support which is another cost the system seems unwilling to bear. Yet even with these constraints, small changes can begin to shift the culture.
For Universities: Structural Change
During the session I referenced earlier, one of the questions was: should the university rep be more transparent about uncertainties, even at the cost of losing the student? Absolutely, yes. Transparency is important for a variety of reasons. Universities must move beyond performative student-centeredness by:
Being transparent in admission standards: Be clear about what makes a competitive application. Stop accepting application fees from students with no realistic chance of admission.
Disclosing all financial relationships: Every agent agreement, pathway partnership, and platform contract should be public. Students and families deserve to know when advice is influenced by commercial relationships.
Investing in pre-enrollment education: Offer workshops on decision-making, major selection, and navigating family pressure. Make these available in multiple languages and time zones. Use our own faculty's expertise on human development and decision science.
Tracking the right metrics: Measure success by persistence rates disaggregated by recruitment channel, student satisfaction with major choice, and alignment between stated goals and outcomes. When agent-recruited students have lower graduation rates, address it.
Supporting student voices: Train current international students to serve as honest peer advisors. Protect them from retaliation if prospective students choose other institutions. Pay them fairly for this work.
For the System: Structural Reform
Regulate agent compensation: Some countries cap agent commissions. Others require disclosure. The U.S. market is largely unregulated. This must change.
Develop ethical platforms: We need recruitment platforms that prioritize fit over volume, transparency over algorithmic opacity, and student agency over platform and institutional profit. This might mean non-profit platforms, open-source algorithms, or regulatory oversight.
Create agency indicators: Develop assessment tools that measure student agency in the admissions process. Not as selection criteria, we shouldn't punish students for systemic pressures, but as a way to identify who needs additional support.
Prioritizing student agency might reduce our international enrollment in the short term. That's a price worth paying for the long-term sustainability of global engagement and the integrity of our educational mission.
As I write this, I wrestle with contradictions in my own position:
When I encourage the student in Chennai to "follow her passion," am I imposing Western individualism? Music might feed her soul, but engineering might feed her family. Who am I to say which matters more?
When I criticize families for controlling decisions, I'm speaking from a position of privilege. My parents could afford to let me choose. Many cannot. Is agency a luxury good?
When I advocate for transparency, I know it might discourage first-generation students who already doubt they belong. Will perfect information create more equity or less?
Some students or families tell me they prefer clear directives to overwhelming choice, that agency feels like burden and not freedom. There's a difference between choosing to follow guidance and never being offered the choice at all though.
I don't have clean answers, but I believe we must hold these tensions rather than resolve them too quickly.
This June, six weeks after my father died, I came across a letter he had written me on the occasion of my first birthday that I had never seen before. In it, he shared a lot of advice, but one section is particularly relevant to this discussion: "You will discover sooner or later that nearly everyone you will ever meet bears careful watching…. Most people that want something will definitely have a greedy reason for it and your success in many areas will depend on how quickly you develop the instinct to put yourself in their shoes."
His advice returns to me daily as I navigate this industry. Every platform, every agent, every ranking system, every university has motives that may not align with student welfare. But so do families. So do counselors. So do I.
The question isn't whether we can create a system free of ulterior motives. We can't. The question is whether we can create one where student agency is valued alongside, and not sacrificed for, other interests.
The Political Economy of Change
This change is difficult: the current system is highly profitable. Agents generate millions in commission. Platforms secure venture capital funding based on volume. Universities depend on international tuition revenue. Even families benefit from the clarity of having decisions made for them rather than with them.
Changing this system requires acknowledging that student agency is bad for business, at least in the short term. It means longer recruitment cycles, more complex conversations, and potentially lower yields. It means telling some families that their child isn't ready for international education if they can't articulate their own goals. It means walking away from lucrative agent partnerships that prioritize volume over fit.
Here’s what twenty years in this field has taught me: the students we fail to serve authentically today become the alumni who disengage tomorrow. The real cost of eroding student agency is generational. But more than that, they become adults who never learned to author their own lives, who move from living their parents' dreams to their employers' expectations to their own children's demands, never asking what they themselves want.
I'm not naïve about the odds. The system I've described generates billions in revenue and employs thousands. Private equity isn't divesting from education platforms because of an op-ed about student agency. Rankings aren't disappearing. Commission-based recruitment is expanding, not contracting.
But I've also watched this industry transform entirely in two decades, from paper applications to AI-driven matching, from small family agencies to venture-backed platforms and sprawling agent networks. Change happens, just rarely in the direction of student welfare. What if we redirected even a fraction of that innovative energy toward supporting student agency rather than extracting value?
I may be an idealist, but I'm an idealist with hiring authority, budget discretion, and partnership decisions. So are many of you reading this. We make choices every day that either perpetuate or challenge this system. Even if we can't dismantle it, we can create pockets of resistance. Programs that prioritize fit, partnerships that value transparency, metrics that measure what matters.
The real measure of our commitment to global education isn't how many students we enroll or where they rank. It's whether those students own their choices, shape their paths, and emerge capable of navigating the complex tension between self and community, aspiration and obligation, freedom and responsibility.
In an interconnected world facing complex challenges, we need graduates who can think independently while collaborating across difference, who can honor their roots while growing beyond them, who can navigate between multiple valid perspectives without losing their own voice.
That starts with how they choose their education. Everything else is just marketing.