That’s a Wrap: Another Fair Series Becomes History That’s a Wrap: Another Fair Series Becomes History

This is an especially exciting and meaningful year for Capstone Education, a full-service educational consulting company I founded 15 years ago last month. We recently finished our fall 2024 StudyGlobal Education Fairs in Haiphong, Hanoi, HCMC, and Danang. Secondary and postsecondary institutions from seven countries, and Hong Kong joined one of more events. I was pleased with the fairs but more importantly, so were the colleagues I spoke with.

This is an especially exciting and meaningful year for Capstone Education, a full-service educational consulting company I founded 15 years ago last month. We recently finished our fall 2024 StudyGlobal Education Fairs in Haiphong, Hanoi, HCMC, and Danang. Secondary and postsecondary institutions from seven countries, and Hong Kong joined one of more events. I was pleased with the fairs but more importantly, so were the colleagues I spoke with.

As usual, the series included school visits in most cities, a welcome dinner, a country briefing, etc. It was a condensed schedule designed to enable interested US higher education colleagues to participate in the EducationUSA fairs in Hanoi and HCMC.

Our biannual fairs are organic events that involve an tremendous amount of organization, marketing, and follow-up. Planning begins months before the first fair Knowing the devil is in the details, our goal is 100% “customer satisfaction” referring to the students and parents who will attend the events and colleagues who travel great distances to represent their schools.

In addition to the “main event,” the opportunity education fairs create for students and parents to speak with colleagues directly or via an interpreter, we want them to be fun and enjoyable events that create a temporary sense of community. For example, these fairs featured two workshops, an online quiz game about the represented countries and institutions, and another offline game students played to win prizes.

Whenever colleagues ask how many attendees we can expect, I respond with numbers from past events. Unlike other companies that bus in unvetted and unqualified students and resort to other unethical means of artificially inflating attendance figures, we aggressively market the series nationwide, by city, and by institutions both on- and offline. The result is quality attendance, a comment I frequently hear from colleagues. The doors open and sometimes there’s a rush at the beginning. In other cities, there’s steady traffic for most of the four-hour fairs. Sometimes, more students and parents come later. I like to think of it as an open house.

There’s always a letdown after the last fair. We all invest so much energy in countless conversations, nonstop supervision, and doing the actual work.

The planning process has already begun for our spring 2025 StudyGlobal Education Fairs in the same four cities. We’re already looking forward to the next round of fairs and related activities.

Mark A. Ashwill, Ph.D.

Managing Director & Co-Founder