2023 Annual Report: education aggregator sub-agent networks

AgentBee monitors and reports on the publicly available information on aggregator sub-agent networks, drawing on the information available on aggregator websites. This is our 2023 annual report.

The chart below shows the historical growth of the sub-agent networks of selected education agent aggregators up to December 2023. It covers only a selection of the main aggregators because including them all makes the chart too busy and difficult to read. The first chart includes LCI Group. Its reported sub-agent network of over 15,000 skews the scale of the chart, so LCI is removed in the second chart.

With LCI Group

…and without LCI Group

More aggregators…

There are now a significant number of businesses operating an education agent aggregator model. The table below adds those that we could not fit onto the charts above.

Aggregator Table

Just a few years ago it seemed that the education agent recruitment market may come to be dominated by one, or at most a handful of big players. That outcome now seems less certain. Check out: Crossing the edtech moat: aggregator disaggregation.

Points to note…

The sheer size of LCI’s agent network. At 15,000 sub-agents it is almost twice the size of the next largest sub-agent network (Adventus.io at 8,000). And it was even bigger at the start of the year. LCI’s reported agent network dropped from 20,000 to 15,000 between January and December

ApplyBoard reduced its sub-agent network from 10,000 in July to 6,500 by the end of the year. See – ApplyBoard cuts 3,500 ‘Recruitment Partners’

In the first half of the year KC Overseas reported a decrease in sub-agent numbers from 9,000 in January, to 3,000 in July. By December it reported a jump of 500, back up to 3,500 sub-agents. See – Ups and downs in aggregator sub-agent networks.

Shorelight reported a significant drop in sub-agent numbers from 7,000 in January to 3,000 in July, and then remained steady at that level for the remainder of the year.

Adventus.io added 1,000 sub-agents over the first half of the year (from 7,000 to 8,000) and now has the second-largest sub-agent network in the market.

No numbers…

Some aggregators do not provide information about the size of their sub-agent network on their website – or at least not that we could see. Aggregators in this group include:

Working with education education agents?

AgentBee’s education agent due diligence solution supports educational institutions to implement best practice education agent due diligence processes.

Educational institutions can use it to:

protect students – conduct initial and ongoing due diligence checks on education agents.
protect your brand – detect cases of unauthorised agents using your institution’s name, logo or other IP without permission.