Globalization has had an ongoing and significant impact on postsecondary education, with international student migration as one of the most visible markers. Education agents have emerged as middlemen in international student recruitment industry, mediating the admissions process on behalf of their institutional and student clients. The commission-based model within which most agents operate has prompted concern about whether agent profit and not student welfare drives decision-making in the search process. While agents have become ubiquitous in international admissions, little is known about their impact of their involvement on the outcome for their student clients.The purpose of this study was to learn more about the role of student choice in the agent-mediated Canadian postsecondary search process. The setting of this study was eight postsecondary institutions in one Canadian province. A qualitative research methodology was used, and 23 currently enrolled international students were interviewed over the course of five months. The central research question was: What is the experience of international students involved in an agent-assisted Canadian postsecondary search process? Study findings identified several push and pull factors (Mazzarol & Soutar, 2002) and key reference groups that catalyzed student interest in education abroad and influenced initial goal construction. Respondents readily identified both affordances and limitations that they associated with hiring an agent. Students typically hired agents to compensate for the time, knowledge, connections, and expertise they and their reference groups lacked. Commission-based agents primarily influence student choice-making by offering a severely constrained set of institutional and program choices. Migration-minded students were frequently willing to subordinate concerns about institutional fit, as any earned postsecondary qualification provides a glide path to permanent residency. Respondents frequently employed creative strategies to gather additional information that could be used to verify or expand upon what their agents told them. Nearly all respondents indicated satisfaction with the search outcome, although this was correlated with the degree of institutional or program undermatching or mismatching they had experienced.The results of this study have implications for students, postsecondary institutions, and policymakers, which are presented. Limitations of this research include the setting (several postsecondary institutions in one Canadian province), the number of respondents (23), the qualitative approach, and the underrepresentation of undergraduate students in the study sample. Directions for future research include inquiry into the experiences of students who did not use agents; students who used agents but did not persist to graduation; and the experience of students who used agents to apply to Francophone postsecondary institutions in Canada.
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