A carefully designed recruitment and selection procedure using contracted agents will provide educational institutions with more clarity and certainty. This procedure is also in the interest of the international student, because a good and trustworthy agent will be able to provide potential students with the information they need to make a decision. Based on Rutgers’ advice, the National  Commission Code of Conduct has started exploring opportunities for cooperation between educational institutions and contracted agents. The exploratory study should support educational institutions in their efforts to improve the quality of the recruitment of international students by contracted agents. The goal of the exploratory study is: to effectively shape the cooperation between educational institutions and contracted agents

In order to find out exactly what the needs of educational institutions are, it is important to first obtain a clear picture of any difficulties that the educational institutions are experiencing. It is also useful to discuss successful experiences of cooperating with contracted agents. To this end, several interviews with employees of educational institutions will take place. If you would like to share your best practices, questions or concerns about working with agents, please contact the office of the National Commission via info@internationalstudy.nl. For the purposes of this exploratory study, it is important to apply a relatively narrow interpretation of the role of the contracted agent, with an explicit focus on the recruitment and selection activities of the contracted agent.

The demand from the field and the results of the exploratory interviews will be elaborated in a number of themes. These themes will then be shared with stakeholders in the form of online and offline workshops. You will be provided with practical information about these thematic sessions after the exploratory interviews. The National Commission hopes that this will result in an interesting series of thematic sessions where stakeholders can share and discuss their experiences with each other.