Published biweekly, the COVID-19 education team sentiment snapshot highlights information drawn from a survey conducted every two weeks in an effort to gather on-the-ground intelligence from our education team to assist all our stakeholders (students, Universities, Agents, etc.) in preparing for the uncertainty surrounding the ongoing COVID-19 situation. This snapshot presents the insights from a survey conducted with our education team in India from September 7 – September 20, 2020, and captures how the sentiments have evolved in the past two weeks.

We surveyed 40 of our in-country representatives for various Universities across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America

Key Findings

 Education Team Outlook

• Uncertain (22%)  2%
• Neutral (52%)  4%
• Positive (21%)  3%
• Negative (5%)  3%

Student Outlook

• Uncertain (42%)  5%
• Neutral (35%)  1%
• Positive (20%)  7%
• Negative (3%)  1%

Education Stakeholder outlook

• Uncertain (27%)  7%
• Neutral (50%)
• Positive (18%)  2%
• Negative (5%)  5%

Agent Outlook

• Uncertain (28%)  13%
• Neutral (57%)  12%
• Positive (10%)  1%
• Negative (5%)

Overall Sentiment of the Education Market

• Uncertain (30%)  8%
• Neutral (52%)  10%
• Positive (13%)
• Negative (5%)  2%

Top Student Queries

• The major focus of the education team these past two weeks have been Student Counselling (78%), Conversion (68%) and Planning (56%).
• The Education Team indicated spending 60-80% of their time these past two weeks on Planning, Engaging students and stakeholders and Conversions.
• 40%of the team has also organised more than 5 online interactions in the past two weeks alone to engage all the stakeholders. 36% of our team also participated in panels in the past two weeks.
• For reaching out to students for undergraduate programs, 42% of the education team is focussing on special agent events,28% by career platform for schools and 18% on career seminars by counsellors
• We continue to notice a high number of Deferral/refund related queries/requests (78%) and Visa related queries (76%), Students are again increasingly raising queries regarding University’s preparedness for COVID-19 (67%).
• In order to address these challenges, institutions are providing quick/regular updates to the students and our agents suggest 55% of the institutions have also startedoffering online start while 28% have started offering a hybrid delivery of programs, for the upcoming intake. 
• 20% of the institutions that our education team support has opened their campus in August’20, while 48% institutions are planning the same for September this year. 16% team also suggests that their institution will not open for fall this year.
• 28% of the education team suggests 20-40% of their pipeline will start online in 2020 and transition to campus next year.
• 25% of our team suggests 40-60% of their pipeline are open for an online start in 2020 and transition to campus next year.
• The education team suggests that the United Kingdom (32%), New Zealand (28%) and Canada (22%) have done a good job of managing and communicating around the impact of COVID-19.