For decades, English-speaking universities have recruited globally while communicating only in English. Most have not thought hard enough about what that may be costing them.
GUEST COLUMN | by John Crick
I have spent most of my working life in international education. Around ten years at Study Group, another ten at Navitas, then almost six years at Enroly, where I was part of the early team. I was also based in Tokyo for three years, which gave me a useful grounding in how the mechanics of international recruitment look from the Pacific rather than from London.
During that time, I watched the sector’s relationship with language do something rather strange. Universities became increasingly global in their ambitions while remaining almost entirely monolingual in their operations.
‘Forty-odd years on, the technology to hold natural conversations in dozens of languages at once has arrived, and it is considerably less preposterous than it used to be.’
The assumption, largely unexamined, was that English was the price of entry: that a student who genuinely wanted to study here would find a way to communicate in English from the first moment of contact and that, if they could not manage the website or the initial enquiry, perhaps they were not quite ready. I found this troubling at the time, and the intervening years have done nothing to change my view.
Douglas Adams, who was right about most things, imagined a small yellow fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that you could put in your ear and instantly understand any language in the universe.
He published that in 1979. The joke was that it was preposterous. Forty-odd years on, the technology to hold natural conversations in dozens of languages at once has arrived, and it is considerably less preposterous than it used to be.
From Science Fiction to Recruitment Reality
This matters in a specific policy context. The government has set an ambition to grow UK international higher education income from £32bn to £40bn. Reaching that figure requires recruiting more students from more markets, including markets where English is not the obvious language of first contact. How universities handle that first contact has a direct bearing on whether that ambition is achievable.
Why the English-only Argument Falls Short
The argument against multilingual engagement at the enquiry stage usually runs as follows: since students will need to demonstrate English proficiency before admission, there is little reason to accommodate other languages during the early stages of recruitment. Having heard this argument from senior people at good institutions over many years, I understand its internal logic. I think it misreads the situation.
A student who is working toward the English proficiency required for admission may have a serious and well-informed interest in a particular university. They may be at IELTS 5.5 rather than 6.5, still working toward the requirement, but with a genuine question about a course or an application deadline.
They would like to ask that question in the language they actually think in. If the institution’s response requires fluent written English to navigate, that student tends not to conclude they need to work harder on their language skills. They move on to the next university on their list.
In a global competition where students are often targeting ten or more institutions simultaneously, across multiple countries, the institution that responds clearly and quickly is the one that stays in serious consideration.
First Impressions Become Institutional Reputations
I recently spent some time testing the chatbot on the website of a major London university. It misread my name. The dropdown menus consistently failed to include what I was looking for. At one point the system appeared to be checking whether I was satisfied with the interaction and kept asking me the same question until I said yes just to move on.
That is a reputational problem. A prospective student going through that experience does not just give up on the chatbot. They form an impression of the institution.
The Technology Excuse No Longer Holds
The practical argument against multilingual engagement was once reasonable. Good multilingual communications capability was expensive and technically difficult to build, and automated translation in the early 2010s had a way of turning carefully written institutional copy into something that read like a ransom note. That technical barrier has fallen substantially.
The quality of AI-driven conversations in other languages has improved to the point where objections about unreliable technology carry considerably less weight than they once did.
English will remain the language of international higher education for a long time, and nobody is arguing otherwise. But universities that expect to grow their international intake significantly while communicating only in English at the very first point of contact with a prospective student are making an assumption about the market that the government’s own ambitions put under considerable pressure.
Adams gave his Babel Fish an unfortunate footnote. He pointed out that by enabling perfect mutual understanding between all beings, it had caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in history. Universities offering prospective students the option of making an enquiry in their own language will almost certainly produce a less dramatic outcome.
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1. UK Government International Education Strategy (January 2026) https://monitor.icef.com/2026/01/uks-new-international-education-strategy-seeks-to-build-education-exports-to-40-billion-by-2030/
2. ICEF Monitor — UK international student numbers fall for second year (January 2026)https://monitor.icef.com/2026/01/uk-international-student-numbers-fall-for-second-year-especially-in-postgraduate-programmes/
3. House of Commons Library — International students in UK higher education (May 2026)https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7976/
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John Crick has over two decades of experience in international student recruitment, including senior roles at Study Group and Navitas and as part of the early team at Enroly. He is co-founder of AskEd. Connect with John via LinkedIn.
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