ForeignAdmits: AI-powered platform for Students aspiring to study Abroad

Good education is valued worldwide in all societies and India is no exception to that. Universities worldwide have seen a constant rise in the number of Indian students enrolling for a course. With the rise in population and the aspiration to avail best of the world’s education for a bright future the task of choosing the right field of education followed by choosing the right university is a daunting task. The amount of information available on the internet and the number of universities providing quality education worldwide makes the decision-making process even harder.

Current scenario of foreign education segment in India is primarily occupied by traditional consulting companies and startups working on commission model for admissions into universities. These firms have limited expertise on mentor network and information processing. This operating model lacks personalization and tends to have more bias and misses out on the importance of RoI and career growth for candidates. It becomes increasingly difficult for consultants operating in traditional way to investigate the data deeply and then make a great decision about courses, colleges, universities, geography, jobs and immigration for every candidate in a personalized manner.

Streamline the process leveraging AI

ForeignAdmits is an Ed-Tech and a personalized mentorship platform for higher education aspirant aiming to study abroad and build their career. The platform helps students and working professionals with personalized, data centric and unbiased guidance using AI and assistance through admission and career with its massive mentor-network from top international universities and Fortune 500 companies. It also assists universities with its AI assisted student recruitment services reducing the cost of outreach for universities by 90%.

The company is proud to be India’s most trusted abroad studies and admission assistance platform. Key factors that distinguishes ForeignAdmits from the traditional players in this sector are:

• 100% online services. No need to visit any local office. The company operates completely digital.
• ForeignAdmits takes in the detailed profile of applicants and using its AI tool it maps the applicant’s profile with potential fit and successful careers and creates a clear & personalized roadmap of achieving that career goal with a blend of online and offline courses from top universities.
• The AI tool also investigates the RoI concept very closely and thus suggests the best fit plans as per skills, budget, long term and short-term goals and career interest of the applicant. Such experience of data centric guidance with experiential guidance helps the applicants to land up with not just a best fit good university but also with a suitable career helping them clear off their education loans and progress further.
• The platform has over 150 mentors from top international universities and Fortune 500 companies mentoring over 6000 students and working professionals.
• The platform provides a mobile app where applicants can create their profiles, search for target mentors and schedule consultation calls.
• The platform provides an e-book “A to Z of American Grad School Applications” which can be downloaded by the subscribers

Multiple products to choose from…

Student needs, aspirations, budgets, career choices are going to be different making the overall decision-making process unique and different for each applicant. ForeignAdmits provides a range of exclusive plans to choose from:

• Career Mentorship
• Profile Evaluation
• College Selection
• Guidance for Management and Masters (STEM) courses
• PhD Guidance
• Bachelors Guidance
• Document Preparation Support
• Admission Guidance
• Scholarship Guidance
• Resume Expert Review

The leaders and the growth story

ForeignAdmits was founded in 2018 by Nikhil Jain and Ashwini Jain, two IIT postgraduates. Nikhil Jain is the CEO & Founder; Ashwini Jain is Co-Founder & COO Sarthak Agarwal is Co-Founder & CTO. Nikhil is a graduate from IIT BHU Varanasi. Ashwini is a graduate from IIT Bombay and postgraduate from Purdue University. Sarthak is a graduate from IIT BHU Varanasi from Computer Sciences.

The founders valued the importance of quality education and felt every aspirant should get the best education that leads to creation of great leaders in the world. This strong feeling led the founders to give shape to the idea leveraging modern technology.

The founders believed in handling customers one at a time with a purely personalized approach and that has helped the company build the tools and platform in a customer centric manner. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Communities on Facebook, Quora and WhatsApp played a key role as well to reach out to more people. Also, the team’s consistent efforts of guiding through live mentorship sessions via YouTube had helped to build a trust among users.

Being a 100% remote and online company, the business operations are very efficient and flexible. It has also helped us lower our operation cost and helped our team members join in from practically any part of the world. ForeignAdmits invests a lot in upskilling, training and mentorship of the team members to constantly keep them updated with newer and better information and skills. Communication, commitment, creativity and culture are valued a lot.

Overcoming the challenges

Being an entrepreneur in the education sector especially in India has its own peculiar challenges:

• Education is being perceived as solely money-making business
• Profession of teaching is undervalued
• Dearth of good teachers, tutors, trainers, educators, mentors, academicians and professors who have a sound understanding of their subject knowledge and are doing more towards the education and societal development
• Lack of proper attention by the government to the education sector
• Large amount of information available on the internet
• Current market players follow the traditional commission based operating model with a lot of inefficiencies and lack of personalized and unbiased decision-making process
• Startups operating the traditional way lose focus on value creation due to pressure from investors

ForeignAdmits believes with the ‘Customer First’/‘Student First’ approach and consistent value creation coupled with strong KPIs like customer success measure, referral measure and word of mouth measure, they can overcome all the challenges and continue to grow at a good pace.

The CEO’s day

As ForeignAdmits is a remotely operated company, a regular day for the CEO is busy with a lot of calls and queries from students and mentors on the app or emails. Planning the task schedule, meeting with the marketing, sales and operations team is part of a daily schedule.

Nikhil Jain has also ensured to keep a separate slot for resolving new queries of students and helping some underprivileged candidates as per the company’s vision to enable access to quality education for all.

Achievements

ForeignAdmits is proud of some of its greatest achievements so far:

• Continuous organic growth mostly supported by word of mouth and the content.
• ‘Student First’ mentality has helped enormously for the growth and good loyalty development among students.
• ForeignAdmits students have got into top-notch colleges like Duke University, CMU, etc. with scholarships.
• ForeignAdmits has achieved to create a sense of awareness among 5000+ students and working professionals and guide them further in their journey for studying abroad for a better career.
• ForeignAdmits has been awarded as top 50 impact startups in India in 2019 by BSE, Mumbai.
• ForeignAdmits has been lately featured as top 75 startups in India to showcase their idea on National Television, Doordarshan (DD Chandana) under a government supported project- Startup Junction.
• Nikhil Jain has been recognized as Top 30 under 30 by Brainfeed magazine in higher education segment.

The company aims to become an international platform guiding overseas education aspirants and universities for right fit career with an unbiased and transparent approach and be the world’s best career coaching & admission assistance company that provides end-to-end excellent guidance to students & universities with the help of data and technology.