Foreign students applying for a place at an Australian university will receive help and advice from the moment they express interest, throughout their courses and even after they return home years later, under a radical plan by the country's main recruiting agency. IDP Education's new chief executive, Tony Pollock, said this week that students would be offered enhanced counselling and diagnostic testing while they were in their own countries. When they arrived in Australia, IDP would maintain contact with students and support them with advice, tutorial assistance and a 24-hour help line. Mr Pollock said the non-profit company, owned by Australia's 38 public universities, would also arrange job-placement services after the students returned home. He said the changes to IDP's operations meant a marked shift from the company's traditional focus on its university customers to the students it recruited. They and their families would become the centre of the company's activities. 'At any one time, there are 60,000 students in Australia who have been through the IDP network,' he said. 'There's a lot we can do to enhance their experience. 'While it's very important that we are relevant and relate to the institutions, the primary customer is the student and the families that support those students,' he said. To create an ongoing relationship with students, IDP has developed a 'technological backbone' - a sophisticated computer system to allow the company to manage its relationships with students over a long period. IDP might be involved with students and their families for several years before a decision was made about enrolling in a particular university, Mr Pollock said. So staff needed to be able to keep track of the discussions and ensure students had access to authoritative information they could not obtain from other sources. 'We want to assure people that if they come to Australia someone will take a personal interest in their whole experience, not just in bits of that experience,' he said. Mr Pollock takes charge of IDP at a crucial time. The company faced a financial crisis late last year after a sharp fall in applications from students, including those from Hong Kong, pushed it into the red for the third year in succession. Seven of IDP's 90 offices around the world had to be shut down and 60 staff, mostly based overseas, were retrenched. Despite the fall in the number of students recruited from Hong Kong, Mr Pollock said the city was too important to IDP for its centre to be closed. 'We have some 30 people working in our student recruitment office and it remains one of our most important centres,' he said. 'Hong Kong is one of IDP's longest established offices and it has played an extremely important role in developing Australia's profile in the region.' IDP was saved from collapse late in December after its vice-chancellor shareholders agreed to provide interest-free loans totalling almost A$7 million ($42.5 million). Mr Pollock said that he believed the company had a 'really great future'.
