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Return to Bulletin Home - October 2007 |
ICEF China Workshop Grows by 85%: A Market Report from Beijing Few education markets in the world are growing or changing as quickly as China. The past ten years have been marked by explosive economic growth, a dramatic rise in the numbers of Chinese students studying abroad, and an unprecedented expansion of China's domestic education system. In the process, China has become a key engine for the global demand for education, as well as a bona fide competitor to more traditional destination countries in the international education marketplace.
The first thing to know about China is that the economic boom is real. The economy is growing at roughly 8% each year, and Chinese cities—Beijing and Shanghai of course, but also lesser-known megacities throughout this vast country—are lined with construction cranes and new development. This Chinese moment, post-WTO and pre-Beijing Olympics, is fast-paced, intensely competitive, and rich with opportunity. These key features of the Chinese market were all very much in evidence at the just-concluded ICEF China Workshop in Beijing (October 17-19). The China Workshop has already established itself as the largest of ICEF's regional workshops, with 536 participants from 54 countries this year. This represents an 85% increase in attendance over ICEF's 2006 Asia Workshop in Shanghai. With its emphasis on markets throughout the region, the ICEF Asia Workshop will return to its traditional home in Singapore in April 2008. The 135 education institutions at this year's workshop in Beijing included 42 universities from China—of which nearly half were among the country's 100 key universities as designated by the Chinese Ministry of Education (see "Expanding Chinese Higher Education" below). The contingent of Chinese universities also included five of the country's 20 top-ranked institutions of higher learning, including both Tsinghua University and Fudan University. Among the 311 participating agents, China was the leading contingent, followed by agents from Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan. "Education providers have remarked on a significant improvement in the quality of agents at this year's workshop," says Tiffany Egler, manager of ICEF's Agents Department. "This reflects both the greater maturity and sophistication of the study abroad market in China, but also that we took some additional steps in selecting agents this year. Local ICEF staff in Beijing played a role in further screening of agents and then provided more extensive orientations for agency staff once they had been selected."
As with most other aspects of the education market in China, educational agents are subject to government certification and oversight. There are 398 officially licensed agencies in China, and agents continue to play a key role here as the government sees qualified agents as an important mechanism by which students and their families can be properly supported in their plans to study abroad. With roughly 20% of the world's population, it is no surprise that China is the leading source of international students for many major destination countries, including the United States, the UK, and Australia, and an increasingly important student market for destination countries throughout Asia and Europe. Estimates of the total number of Chinese students studying abroad reach as high as 380,000, and the Ministry of Education reports that Chinese students are enrolled in 109 countries around the world. The demand for education in the country is massive, with more than 20% of the Chinese population aged 15-29 and with a red-hot economy raising the standard of living and driving career opportunities. As a result, education has been a major area of priority for the Chinese government in recent years, resulting in dramatic increases in funding to boost the capacity of the Chinese education system and also to raise the quality of the country's leading institutions (see below). In fact, government policy has had far-reaching effects in terms of:
The government's new investment in the education system runs to the many billions of dollars, and the effects have already been profound. As the New York Times recently reported, "China has already pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees fivefold in 10 years."
The Ministry of Education reported earlier this month that there are now 25 million students enrolled in Chinese universities, and ministry statistics indicate that the number of new students entering Chinese universities each year has risen from approximately two million in the year 2000 to 5.4 million today. These figures represent the largest domestic post-secondary enrollment anywhere in the world. The ICEF China Workshop has adapted the tried and true workshop model to the evolving market conditions in China in two important ways. First, the workshop focuses both on Chinese students going abroad to study and also students coming to China from around the globe. This reflects the important fact that China is not only the world's largest supplier of international students but now also a major study destination as well. The gap between the numbers of outbound and inbound students has been closing steadily in recent years. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of foreign students studying in China has more than tripled to 162,000. The majority of these (74%) come from Asia, with significant percentages also coming from Europe (13%) and the Americas (10%). China's growing share of Asian transnational students is particularly noteworthy given the very important role the region plays in shaping worldwide enrollment trends (see "Asia Fuels International Student Market Growth", ICEF Bulletin #2, September 2006). In addition, the China Workshop features not only education provider-agent appointments in the one-to-one meetings, but also appointments between education providers. This reflects the prevalence and importance of joint programmes and other linkages between Sino and foreign institutions. There are now several hundred such institutional linkages in China, a number of which are approved to confer foreign degrees. They operate under Ministry guidelines implemented in 2003-2004 and are supported by government as a means of further expanding the domestic capacity in China's higher education sector.
The areas of greatest demand among Chinese students are language learning (historically, English language studies but increasingly this extends to a wider range of Asian and European languages), business studies, and programmes in sciences and technology. Given the significant demand at all levels, institutions and nations from around the world are actively marketing their programmes and capabilities in China. Education fairs remain a key marketing strategy and the ICEF China Workshop was scheduled in conjunction with the 2007 China Education Expo. The annual Expo delivers large-scale exhibitions in seven Chinese cities, attracting hundreds of exhibitors and 100,000 students. The ICEF China Workshop will again be scheduled just prior to next year's Expo to allow participants the advantage of attending both events. Expanding Chinese Higher EducationThere are more than 4,500 higher education institutions in China, including universities, colleges, institutes, and vocational colleges. The majority are public, but there is an increasing number of private-sector institutions in China as well—a trend that is supported by the government as a means of further expanding the country's domestic education capacity. There are several domestic systems for ranking Chinese universities, all of which are conducted independent of the government. In addition to an annual ranking of world universities produced by Shanghai Jiaotong University, there are several other organizations that publish domestic university rankings. The rankings employ varying methodologies and so a unified ranking of Chinese universities is difficult to observe. However, the top six universities in the country—Tsinghua, Beijing, Fudan, Zheijiang, Nanjing, and Shanghai Jiaotong—appear to be consistently ranked throughout. Beyond these independent ranking systems, the government has also embarked on a major programme of investment and expansion in the higher education sector. These initiatives date back to 1995 when the government announced its plan (the so-called "211 Project") to develop a network of 100 "key universities"—the notion being that these institutions would be eventually be strong enough to be ranked among the world's best universities. The emphasis in the 211 Project is very much on the sciences and technology, and the programme has also triggered a major government initiative to recruit foreign-trained and foreign-resident Chinese scholars back to academic posts at key institutions in China. In later years, a smaller group of key institutions—the so-called "985" universities—have been targeted for further government support through billions of dollars in additional grants. Broadly speaking, the government's approach to expanding the higher education seems to target the key institutions in the 211 and 985 groupings for quality improvement, and to rely more on the institutions outside of this elite group in order to expand the number of available university spaces for Chinese students. |
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