SINGAPORE (Bloomberg): When millions of Chinese flew abroad for the Golden Week holiday, not all plans involved visiting museums, high-rolling in casinos or relaxing on a beach - many ended up touring university campuses in Singapore.
Chinese parents, known to go the distance to give their children the academic edge, used their vacation to size up higher education in the city-state.
The trend spawned a mini ecosystem around the visits, creating business opportunities for hotels, bus and travel operators.
Many tour agencies in China sought to capitalize on this. Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram-like app, featured more than 170,000 posts tagged to #SingaporeUniversityTourStrategy.
Ads for such tours - offered for as much as 2,388 yuan ($340) - were doing the rounds on apps, tour platforms and e-commerce sites like Taobao and 8Pig. Some went as far as offering consultancy services to help people settle in Singapore.
Singapore universities had to resort to crowd control measures on campus after visitor numbers swelled in recent months leading up to the Golden Week - the week-long holiday to mark China’s national day. So much so that students took to online forums like Reddit to complain about disruptions to their classes, overcrowding on campus buses and cafeterias, and impolite etiquette.
The National University of Singapore curbed access to dining areas and other venues for tourists between Sept. 30 and Oct. 7, according to a students’ union statement seen by Bloomberg. Earlier this year, the Nanyang Technological University began charging a fee for tour groups, and also laid out plans to prioritize campus buses over those carrying visitors.
Although a temporary inconvenience for the universities, the interest signals a shift in Chinese parents’ preference toward college education in the city-state.
Besides the fact that NUS and NTU figure high in university ratings like the QS World University Rankings, some parents cited Singapore’s easy visa regime as a draw, and also because it’s closer to home and affordable to travel.
"I just wanted to bring the children to visit, and in the future, if there’s the opportunity and they are willing, they can study in this university,” said Alice Zhang, 35, who was visiting NUS during the Golden Week along with her two children. "In China, the academic demand is a little higher.”
Singapore’s two main universities do not release breakdown of university admission numbers by nationality. Both NUS and NTU directed a request for data from Bloomberg News to the country’s education ministry.
The ministry, in turn, pointed to a 2022 parliamentary reply that said international student numbers in undergraduate level has remained at around 10% in recent years, without providing information on nationality.
Touring prestigious universities both at home and abroad have long been a favorite pastime for Chinese families with young kids during winter and summer vacations.
Top colleges in China like Beijing’s Peking University and Tsinghua University are teeming with teenagers during summer holidays while travel tours targeting Chinese to the US east and west coasts would include stops at Ivy League schools such as Yale and Harvard in their itineraries.
Oscar Du, a Master’s student at NTU who conducts hour-long, 300-yuan-per-pax tours at the university, said he typically encounters middle-class families with younger kids in primary school, with many hailing from Shanghai.
"Many of them wish their children will start liking these universities, so they have the motivation to start applying for them,” said the 27-year-old Du, who hails from China’s Yunnan province. Visitors he encounters also typically visit other universities in China and overseas to start exploring options for their child early, he said.
For many, Singapore compares favorably to the US as a much safer place to study and to Australia as a cheaper place to stay.
"I just wanted to let my son experience the atmosphere of a university,” said Wen Wen, who was visiting NUS with her 8-year-old son. The 38-year-old from Chengdu was yet another tourist during the Golden Week who hoped her son would enroll in NUS one day.
"Chinese universities are very good too but everyone there works too hard. It’s too competitive.” - ©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
