The mother sat across from me at a table in a coffee shop in Medan. She was fifty-three. She ran a printing business her late husband had started. She had three children. The youngest, a son, was finishing high school. She was there, she told me, to “ask a few questions” about the Australian university programs I was representing.

I was twenty-nine. I was working at my first job in international education marketing. I had a deck. I had a script. I had the rankings memorized. I had, in the precise language of my training, the value proposition.

I asked her what she wanted to know.

She said: I want my son to be safe.

I did not have a slide for that.

I showed her the rankings anyway. I talked about graduate outcomes. I talked about the global reputation of the institution. I talked about return on investment. She listened politely. She did not sign up that day. Her son, three years later, did enroll in a different Australian institution, in a different city, in a different program. I have often wondered whether the institution I represented would have been a better fit.

What I have never wondered is whether the deck I showed her was the right artifact. It was not. The deck was selling a degree. She was not buying a degree. She was buying, in the precise language of the conversation we did not have, an insurance policy against a future she could not predict, a status marker for a family that had been climbing for two generations, and a one-way exit from a city that did not have many exits.

She was buying safety. The degree was the artifact. The safety was the product.

I have been working in higher education marketing, in one form or another, for twenty years since. I have represented Indonesian universities, Singapore-based institutions, foreign-headquartered bootcamps entering the region, and globally-ranked flagship universities running joint programs with Indonesian institutions. I have closed enterprise deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and built community programs that have touched tens of thousands of students. I have seen, from inside the marketing function, almost every failure mode the industry is capable of.

The deepest failure, the one that produces most of the others, is this: we are selling to the wrong buyer.

The Three Buyers in Every Transaction

Every international higher education transaction has at least three buyers. In most cases, none of them are the student.

The first buyer is the parent. The parent is, in the great majority of international education transactions in Southeast Asia, the financial decision-maker and the emotional decision-driver. The parent is buying insurance against an uncertain future, status in a community that measures success by the credentials of its children, and the hope that the credential will produce a life materially better than the one the parent has been able to provide. The parent is rarely in the room when the sale is made. The parent is almost never the target of the marketing.

The second buyer is the student. The student is, in most marketing materials, the ostensible target. The student is the one whose photo appears on the brochure, whose testimonial appears on the website, whose “dream” the institution claims to be enabling. The student is also, in most cases, seventeen to twenty-two years old, deciding under conditions of intense uncertainty, with limited information, with the heavy hand of parental and social pressure on every choice. The student is, in the precise language of behavioral economics, the worst possible person to make a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar decision.

The third buyer is the institution itself. The institution — the registrar, the marketing department, the admissions office, the program director — is buying a number. The institution is buying enrollment, revenue, market share, ranking position, brand visibility. The institution’s buyer is the one with the budget, the metrics, the quarterly report, the dashboard. The institution’s buyer is the one the marketing function is actually organized to serve.

When the marketing function is organized to serve the institution’s buyer, it produces materials that the institution’s buyer wants to see. It produces rankings, outcomes data, graduate testimonials, return-on-investment calculators, career services statistics. The materials are accurate. The materials are also, in the precise language of the actual transaction, irrelevant.

The actual transaction is between a frightened parent and a seventeen-year-old child, in a context of intense social pressure, in a market where the cost of being wrong is the next four years of the child’s life. The marketing function is selling a brochure. The buyer is buying safety.

These two transactions do not meet.

What the Parent in Medan Was Actually Buying

I have thought about that meeting in Medan for twenty years. I have come to believe that what the mother was buying, in the language she actually used, was three things.

She was buying insurance. Her son was, in the local economy of Medan in the early 2000s, a moderate bet. He had a high school diploma. He had no particular distinction. He had no clear vocational path. The printing business was small. The social network was local. The range of plausible futures, from a cost-benefit perspective, was narrow. An Australian degree, even an unimpressive one, expanded the range. The degree was not a bet on a specific outcome. It was a hedge against the entire distribution. The mother was not buying an education. She was buying the elimination of a tail risk.

She was buying status. This is the part that higher education marketing is most afraid to say out loud, and the part that is, in the actual transaction, most load-bearing. In the social economy of Medan — and in most of the social economies of urban Southeast Asia — the credential is a signal. The signal is not “this person has mastered a body of knowledge.” The signal is “this family had the means and the foresight to invest in a global credential.” The signal is, in the precise language of sociology, positional. The mother was not buying an education. She was buying a signal that her family belonged to a certain class of families, in a city where class signals are scarce and expensive.

She was buying an exit. This is the part that is hardest to hear, and the part that the marketing function is least equipped to address. The mother was buying, for her son, a one-way exit from a city that did not have many exits. The exit was not, in her imagination, contingent on the quality of the education. The exit was contingent on the existence of the credential. Once the credential existed, the exit was available. The mother was not buying an education. She was buying a one-way ticket.

The degree was the artifact. The insurance, the status, and the exit were the product.

The marketing materials did not address any of these. The marketing materials addressed graduate outcomes, career services, and faculty reputation. The marketing materials were, in the precise language of the transaction, a beautifully produced answer to a question she was not asking.

What This Means for Higher Education Marketing

If you accept the diagnosis — if the actual buyers are the parent and the student, and the actual products are insurance, status, and exit — then the marketing function has two choices.

The first choice is to keep doing what it is doing, with better targeting, more sophisticated attribution, more personalized nurture sequences, and a quarterly report that shows enrollment growth. This choice is professionally respectable. It is also, in the long run, a recipe for the gradual erosion of the institution’s reputation. The institution that sells a brochure to a buyer who is buying safety will, over time, accumulate students who feel deceived, parents who feel betrayed, and a brand that is increasingly disconnected from the actual transaction. The enrollment numbers will look fine for a while. The word-of-mouth will eventually be devastating.

The second choice is to redesign the marketing function around the actual transaction. This is harder. It requires the institution to admit, internally, that the brochure is not the product. It requires the marketing function to develop a vocabulary for the things the buyer is actually buying. It requires the institution to be willing to have conversations — in coffee shops, in living rooms, in WhatsApp groups — that the marketing function has historically outsourced to the website.

The institutions that are making this shift are doing three things.

They are investing in the parent conversation. They are building the institutional capacity to have the conversation that the mother in Medan was trying to have with me, and that I was not equipped to have. They are training their admissions staff to talk about risk, about status, about exit. They are building programs — pre-departure orientations, family welcome weekends, parent advisory boards — that acknowledge the parent as a buyer.

They are building communities, not just cohorts. They are recognizing that the student is not just a tuition unit. The student is, in the language of the actual transaction, a person making a multi-year decision under conditions of intense uncertainty. The institution that builds a community — alumni networks, peer mentorship programs, structured touchpoints with current students, faculty who are accessible — is the institution that reduces the perceived risk of the decision. The community is, in the precise language of the transaction, the insurance policy. The institution that provides it has a structural advantage.

They are being honest about the exit. They are recognizing that for many students, the degree is, in part, an exit ticket, and that the institution’s job is not just to provide the credential but to make the credential worth something after the exit. This means career services that are not afterthoughts. This means alumni networks that are not vanity projects. This means partnerships with employers in the cities where the students are likely to land. This means, in the language of the actual transaction, treating the student as a customer whose lifetime value is measured in decades, not semesters.

The mother in Medan was not buying a degree. She was buying safety for her son, status for her family, and a one-way ticket out of a city with few exits. The marketing function that is organized around the degree is a marketing function that has not understood its own customer.

The marketing function that is organized around the safety, the status, and the exit is a marketing function that has.

The Question I Now Ask

When I sit down with a higher education leadership team now — and I have sat with several in the last year, in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in Singapore, in Vietnam — the first question I ask is: who is the buyer?

If the answer is “the student,” I ask the second question: which student, and what are they buying?

If the answer is “we sell to anyone who can pay,” I know the conversation is going to be longer than the meeting.

The mother in Medan was twenty years ago. The transaction has not changed. The buyers are still frightened parents and uncertain students, in contexts of intense social pressure, in markets where the cost of being wrong is the next four years of a life. The marketing function is still, in most institutions, organized around the wrong artifact.

The institutions that are willing to do the harder work — to admit that the brochure is not the product, to invest in the parent conversation, to build the community, to be honest about the exit — are the institutions that will still be enrolling students twenty years from now. The institutions that keep selling the brochure will, slowly, watch their enrollments erode, their rankings slip, and their graduates — those who do graduate — tell their children a different story about whether the degree was worth it.

The mother in Medan was not buying a degree. She was buying her son’s future. The institutions that understand this will be the ones that get to shape it.