As China’s students breathe new life into study tourism, has US gone off their radar?

July has been the busiest month in recent years for Kent Cai, taking the jet-setting Zhejiang native to international cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Macau, Jakarta, and Sydney, where he has hosted a total of six overseas study tours for more than 150 Chinese college students.

Following China’s lifting of travel restrictions early last year, students have gradually become more willing to splash out on such tours like they did before the pandemic. But in light of changes in visa policies and global inflation trends, the United States is not as enticing as it used to be.

Instead, industry insiders say Chinese students are increasingly exploring their options in Asia and other Western countries such as Britain and Australia.

“Last year, many public schools and parents were still worried, so 2024 is actually the first time since the pandemic that many mainland students have been willing to go abroad for study tours,” said Cai, founder of Ningbo New Way, which runs tailor-made study tours and exchange programmes in Zhejiang province.

Cai noted how his overseas study tour and exchange business has doubled from last year and returned to the pre-pandemic level of 2019.

The market size of China’s study tourism industry was 147.3 billion yuan (US$20.3 billion) in 2023, compared with 152.3 billion yuan in 2019, according to a report issued last year by the Beijing-based consultancy Guanyan Tianxia, which looked at the expected development of China’s study tourism industry through 2030.

And this month, a report by iiMedia Research predicted that the industry’s market size would reach 179.1 billion yuan this year and surpass 300 billion yuan annually by 2028. It also said that two-thirds of surveyed parents were very willing to let their children participate in such tours.