Getting into the right university is hard. Students lack guidance and orientation in the university application journey. Today 1.7 out of 5 million international students turn to agents for help, but receive poor and impersonal service that is also very expensive. All agents are human – meaning the market is restricted by human efficiency, error and repetitiveness. The market is non-transparent, fragmented and heterogeneous.
Universities globally spend €3.4 billion on agent commissions because they lack resources and knowledge to recruit internationally themselves. But there are over 16,000 agents globally and they don’t know who to trust. Often, universities work with 100+ demanding agents at one time resulting in high management effort.
Unispotter moves online, under a single app, all the fragmented information provided by traditional agents. Unispotter claims control and transparency for its users, making the complex admission process accessible to anyone, from scouting to enrolment, just like Monster.com did for the job seeking market two decades ago.
Unispotter transforms higher education admission and disrupts the education agent marketplace. Unispotter is a mobile platform designed to match the right students with the right universities. Unispotter is about delivering the changes needed to meet the expectations of universities and prospective students alike in the most efficient manner possible – by replacing traditional agents with a transparent, digital, automated, mobile app delivering end-to-end recruitment support services. This change is supported by two vital digital trends today: mobile internet penetration will double by 2022, and smartphone penetration will reach 70% that year. Already, 52% of students globally use their smartphone to research universities. Unispotter will enable users to get access to information and get in direct contact with universities, while universities will have the tools in hand to reach potential applicants worldwide actively, in a single source.
Unispotter is part of the solution to the problems addressed by the European Unions’ Strategic framework on Education & Training 2020 by ensuring access to higher education, international student mobility, and brain gain in Europe. The ministers of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have agreed to double the proportion of students completing a study or training period abroad to 20% by 2020. One of the ways to achieve this proposed by the EC is to ‘encourage student entrepreneurs and innovative university-business cooperation’ – conditions meet by Unispotter. Students and researchers from non-EU countries are also recognised by the EC as “vital contributors to growth and competitiveness with their knowledge and skills”, and the EC understands the need for clear information to attract these students. Unispotter will help remove accessibility barriers for student mobility by providing a global solution for all.
