English has dominated global higher education for decades, but the competitive landscape is shifting. Universities that have not noticed are already losing prospective students before those students even make contact.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined a small yellow fish you could put in your ear that would instantly translate any language in the universe. It was one of his finest jokes, partly because it was so obviously ridiculous and partly because it touched on something genuinely human: the wish to be understood without the enormous effort of learning someone else's language first.
Adams published that in 1979. Forty-odd years later, voice AI can hold a fluent conversation in over seventy languages, drawing on a knowledge base you define, at any hour of the day or night. The underlying idea has arrived rather sooner than most science fiction suggested it would.
The reason this matters for international education is straightforward, though it doesn’t always get talked about plainly. English has had an extraordinary run as the language of global higher education, for reasons that are partly historical and partly the compounding effect of success attracting more success. British, Australian, Canadian and American universities have benefited enormously from being able to recruit globally while operating entirely in one language.
That position is under more pressure than it has been for some time. Countries across Southeast Asia are developing their own high-quality English-language programmes, which reduces the imperative to go abroad for an English-medium education. For students in parts of Asia, Africa and South America, China has become an increasingly attractive destination. Mandarin is a language worth acquiring for pragmatic reasons quite apart from any interest in Chinese culture or politics, and China has invested heavily in making its universities compelling to prospective international students. The competitive landscape for English-speaking destination countries is more complex than it was twenty years ago, and nothing about the trend suggests it will simplify.
In that context, there is a particular kind of institutional thinking I find puzzling, having encountered it often enough over two decades in this industry to know it’s genuinely widespread. It goes something like this: since prospective students will need to demonstrate English proficiency before we accept them, there is no particular reason to offer them a multilingual experience at the point of enquiry. If they cannot communicate in English when they get in touch, perhaps they aren’t the right candidates anyway.
The problem with this is that a student working toward the English proficiency required for admission may have a sophisticated and genuine interest in a particular institution, a question they need answering before they commit to the application process, and a preference, entirely reasonable, for asking that question in the language they actually think in. If the institution's digital front door requires fluent written English to navigate, that student doesn’t typically conclude they need to work harder on their language skills. They look at the next institution on their list. In a competitive global market for international students, that is a costly assumption to keep making.
The technology argument against providing multilingual engagement used to be reasonable. Building a genuinely good multilingual customer-facing system was expensive, complicated and prone to going wrong in embarrassing ways. That has changed. Voice AI can now hold natural, accurate conversations in dozens of languages, draw on verified institutional content to answer questions correctly, and do all of this continuously. The cost of deploying this kind of capability is a fraction of what it would have been five years ago, and the quality has crossed the threshold from impressive-but-rough to genuinely useful.
What remains is a question about whether institutions are paying attention to the shift happening in the market around them. English will remain central to international higher education for the foreseeable future. But the assumption that you can recruit globally while engaging only in English, at the very first point of contact with a prospective student, is one that gets harder to justify each year.
Adams gave his Babel Fish a somewhat unfortunate footnote. He noted that by eliminating all barriers to communication and enabling perfect mutual understanding between beings, it had caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in history. I am reasonably confident that offering prospective students the option to make an enquiry in their own language won’t have quite the same effect.
By John Crick
