A new study by the University of Illinois shows there’s a potentially lucrative market in tours of U.S. colleges for Chinese students.
Joy Huang, professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the university, conducted the study. While tour itineraries focused on Ivy League schools remain popular, competition for admission and rising tuition has opened up new markets including tours to highly ranked public universities in the Midwest and elsewhere.
“These short-term overseas tours and summer camps are a very important market for the tourist industry in the Midwest,” Huang said. “They are also a very good recruiting tool for universities and a way to ‘audition’ potential foreign students—who usually pay much higher tuition than domestic students.”
In 2013, more than 300,000 young people from China participated in overseas study tours. But by summer 2015, the number of Chinese teens who traveled abroad on these types of trips grew to more than 500,000 annually, according to the study. Organized by travel agencies and high schools, the two- to four-week trips to the U.S. and other developed countries typically cost Chinese families $5,000-$8,000.
Huang co-wrote the study with Qian Li, then a doctoral student at the university, and their paper appears in the Journal of China Tourism Research. To learn more about why Chinese teens participate in the tours and the factors that influence families’ decisions to send their children on these excursions, the researchers interviewed 30 Chinese adolescents who had traveled on a group study tour within the prior three years and 20 of their parents. Similar to the grand tours undertaken by wealthy young men in ancient Europe, the study tours typically include sightseeing and an assortment of educational and cultural enrichment experiences, as well as social and recreational activities.
Researchers concluded that tourist agencies and universities that want to appeal to college-bound Chinese teens offer diverse itineraries with a mix of educational, social and recreational activities that immerse visiting teens in campus life. The itinerary might include attending classes and sporting events, hosting talks that enable visitors to ask questions of current students and housing the visiting teens in college residence halls. Marketing campaigns aimed at the parents of these teens, however, should highlight the educational benefits and career opportunities available to students who attend the colleges they will visit, Huang said.
