Episode 7 - The Education Edition

Studying abroad: China’s outbound international education sector after 3 years of Covid -19.

The past several years have seen a dramatic shift in the global landscape of outbound international education, with China being one of the countries at the forefront of this movement. In 2018, Chinese students accounted for over 40% of all foreign enrolments worldwide – an impressive figure considering that just three decades ago, only about 5%. What does 2023 and beyond hold for overseas Chinese students? 

Transcript

Hey, I’m Jimmy Robinson, and you’re listening to Insight China, a China marketing podcast brought to you by PingPong Digital.

It’s been a while since our first season, so we’ve tweaked the formula a little bit, including our brand-new name – Insight China. In each episode, we’ll be giving you our deep dive insights into a different area of the Chinese market, followed by a quick lowdown on the biggest Chinese marketing news stories you need to know. We’ll also have the odd special guest joining us throughout the year. Catch new episodes on all major podcast platforms every month.

Intro (episode)

We’re starting this new series by focusing in on a subject that’s always been at the core of what we do at PingPong Digital: education. Specifically, China’s outbound education sector. But why education and why now?

Well, after three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, China is finally opening up, and that is going to have a major impact on the education industry around the world. Despite the difficulties caused by quarantines and closed borders, the pandemic hasn’t dampened Chinese students’ desire to study abroad – in fact, if anything, Chinese students will be keen to get out of China and experience other countries again or get a new degree to boost their job prospects to beat the economic slowdown.

But Chinese students have changed a lot over the past three years, and universities can’t just dive straight back into the way things were done before. So in this episode, I’ll walk you through what’s changed, why it matters, and what universities need to do differently to get the attention of Chinese students. 

Just a quick note before we dive into this topic: China’s Covid policies were changing quickly at the time of recording and some countries had even started reimposing Covid testing requirements on travellers from China, so the situation may be different by the time you’re listening to this, but you can always contact us at PingPong Digital to get the latest updates. 

Deep dive

Like any topic from over the past couple of years, any discussion of education in China has to start with the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s Covid timeline has been very different to most of the rest of the world. China closed its borders and locked down cities at the start of 2020, and by around June 2020, the domestic spread of Covid had basically been contained – what many referred to as “zero Covid”. Some international travel resumed, but only a couple of flights were allowed in from each country every week severely limiting who could enter and exit China. 

Throughout 2020 to 2022, however, even the smallest Covid outbreaks were usually met with strict lockdowns, sometimes of whole cities. As late as October 2022, the 20th Party Congress basically committed to keeping up zero Covid, but then at the end of November, a fire in a residential building in Urumqi that killed 10 people provoked protests around China about overly harsh policies, and the government gradually started to dial things back. 

So as of recording, most of China’s zero Covid measures have been removed, and a lot of people in China have caught Covid as a result – I would say somewhere around 60-70% of the people I know in China, especially in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, have had a dose of Covid since December. 

Covid disrupted many aspects of daily life in China, but the three that are most relevant to our discussion today are: employment, international travel, and, of course, education. 

Many parts of the Chinese economy took a kicking before the country decided to open up this year, particularly the service sector, and this has put a lot of pressure on the employment market. If they have the means, some people have started to think about retraining in a new industry or getting a foreign degree to give an extra boost to their CV. 

Of course, international travel was pretty much off the cards for most of the last three years. Flights were rare due to the circuit breaker mechanism, which saw flights cancelled for several weeks if a certain number of positive cases were found on board, and even if you could find (and afford) a flight to where you wanted to go, you’d have to face up to 21 days of hotel quarantine when you got back to China. But many people were put off travel anyway by a State Media narrative that painted China as the only “safe” island in an ocean of Covid. 

Finally, the massive move to online learning and lack of flights during the early years of the pandemic has put a lot of Chinese students off applying to overseas universities. After all, why pay top dollar for a programme in the US or UK if you’ll be stuck taking classes on your laptop in your bedroom in China in the middle of the night, and still paying the same fees? Joint education programmes with Chinese universities – such as the University of Nottingham Ningbo or Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University – have gone some way to helping with this, but then universities in China often ended up moving online anyway if even a couple of Covid cases were found in the city. 

So it’s been a tricky couple of years, to say the least!

But some of the changes to the study abroad market in China can actually be traced back before the pandemic. In recent years, there has been an ongoing cultural shift in the way young Chinese people view success, a push back against the extreme pressure they face at school and in the first few years of their careers. It’s basically a similar thing to what has been called “quiet quitting” in the West, but Chinese internet users have, of course, come up with a load of tongue-in-cheek terms for it. 

For example, you’ve got the closest analogue to quiet quitting, “lying flat” (tangping), which means only working as much as you need to, being content with what you have, not participating in society/the economy in the way they want you to.

Then there’s “involution” (neijuan), a redefinition of an anthropological term from the 1960s, which young Chinese people use to mean the feeling that if you don’t work hard or participate in Chinese society you won’t move forward, but then when you do work hard you don’t see results

But despite all of this, the demand for study abroad opportunities has demonstrated surprising resilience. Pandemic or not, the factors that have traditionally made Chinese students interested in studying abroad have never really gone away, whether that’s the assumption, right or wrong, that overseas returnees get the best jobs and the highest salaries, a desire to avoid China’s rigorous rote-based teaching methods or simply parental pressure. 

I’ve been really happy to see that UK higher education has weathered the pandemic particularly successfully, and we’re attracting more Chinese students than ever. There were over 143,000 students from China in the UK in 2021, more than a third of the total number of international students.

In fact, the UK has overtaken the US as the most popular destination for Chinese students, with the UK seeing a 1.4% rise in the number of Chinese students between the 2019/2020 academic year and the 2020/2021 academic year and the US seeing a 15% decrease during that same period. In a 2021 survey by New Oriental, 44% of respondents expressed an interest in studying in the UK, compared to 32% in the US. 

Brand USA has suffered in China because of unfavourable visa policies, the tense geopolitical atmosphere, and safety fears caused by issues such as gun violence. This has affected the ability of US universities and colleges to attract Chinese students, which has opened up a window of opportunity for UK higher education. The UK kept issuing student visas throughout the pandemic and Chinese students are also attracted by the fact that a master’s degree from a UK university only takes one year. UK universities have also recognised the importance of good digital marketing to attract Chinese students, with 100% of the top 100 UK universities on WeChat, which I’m happy to say PingPong Digital played no small part in! The US lags behind this with less than 50% of the top 100 universities on Chinese social media.

A lot of UK universities have also been really successful at finding a niche and marketing hard in that niche on Chinese social media. This means that even lower ranked universities, if they’re known for excellence in a particular field like fashion or medicine, can build up really strong awareness with Chinese students.    

This connects to another change that we have been seeing in the China study abroad market, which is that students are increasingly savvy about what they want to study and where. Students are no longer sticking a pin in the top 10 of the Times Higher Education or US News rankings and saying “that’ll do”. That’s not to say that rankings aren’t important, because they definitely are, but more and more students are thinking “vocationally” about how their overseas education will serve them in the future and, crucially, whether it represents good value for money. 

At the same time, we’re seeing an increasing number of people taking career breaks and going abroad to pursue postgraduate education and executive education, either to consolidate their current career or to retrain or re-skill. 

So where do we go from here?

As China re-opens, the next couple of years, particularly the next six months, are likely to bring a lot of uncertainty for higher education around the world. To make sure that they’re ready to win back Chinese students, universities need to work smarter, not harder, and there are a number of steps they can take. 

The first step is to reassess your digital marketing strategy.

It’s no secret that you need to be on WeChat and Weibo if you want to connect with Chinese students. But what kind of content actually attracts their attention? It’s not enough to just be on Chinese socials sharing news and announcements these days; you’ve got to create content that really celebrates what your university or school is all about to stand out from the crowd. It also helps to show that you understand Chinese students and their culture, which you can do by celebrating festivals like Chinese New Year. 

But you also don’t need to limit yourself to Weibo and WeChat. Q&A/knowledge sharing platform Zhihu, which is a bit like China’s Quora, is a popular place to find out about universities and the study abroad experience, while Xiaohongshu can be a great tool for “softer” brand building and image cultivation.

Another thing that I have started to encourage universities to do is to reassess their course offering in relation to Chinese students. Which of your courses are the most popular with Chinese students? What can you do to improve them? What subjects are popular with Chinese students at other universities, and could you create new courses in those subjects? Specialised courses in fields like tech or pharmaceuticals could be taught in partnership with big Chinese companies to help drum up interest in the industry.

As I mentioned earlier, this can really help universities that don’t place highly in rankings like QS or Times Higher Education to stand out and build a name for themselves. 

It also relates back to what I was talking about earlier with Chinese students getting more practically-minded in their approach to choosing a course, and it’s worth looking into skills-based courses targeted at Chinese students.

So in conclusion, the main thing I’d like higher education providers to take away from this discussion is you can no longer rest on your laurels when it comes to attracting students from China. Countries like the US and the UK will always be popular with Chinese students, and high-ranked universities will always get a lot of applications, but there’s no doubt that the field is getting smaller and more competitive. It’s really key to stay up to date with what Chinese students want, what they’re talking about, what they’re interested in, and make your recruitment strategies flexible based on that. 

Of course, it goes without saying that PingPong Digital is ready and waiting to help you with this, and in fact, I’m going to talk a little bit more about our new approach to education in just a second. 

Three things from China

Now it’s time for my round up of the China news you need to know this month.

Obviously, the biggest news is China’s covid policy 180, from zero covid to apparently just “let it spread.” At the time of recording, China has downgraded Covid-19 from a Category A infectious disease (the highest level) to a Category B, meaning that people who catch it no longer need to be quarantined – including travellers from abroad. Most cities have already gotten rid of the need to have a negative test to get into restaurants and other venues, and the health code looks to be going the same way. While this is definitely good news for companies and educational institutions looking to go into business with China, it will cause a lot of uncertainty in the short term. 

Next, China is known for having its own tech ecosystem, one that’s pretty separate from the rest of the world, but recently, some of the biggest Chinese tech companies have been making a push into the West. We’ve all heard of TikTok and Alibaba, but now e-commerce platform Pinduoduo has joined the fray with a shopping site called Temu targeting the American market. I personally find the design of the site a bit messy, but there are loads of products on sale and they are definitely cheap, which could be a challenge to sites like Amazon. 

Finally, the China release of Avatar: The Way of Water on 16 December didn’t revitalise the Hollywood-China relationship in the way that many hoped, taking just $57 million at the box office in its opening weekend. To be honest, that would be a good number if Avatar 2 wasn’t one of the most anticipated films of the decade from one of the world’s most famous directors. We’ll see how many Hollywood blockbusters get the go ahead for release in China in 2023, and if movie companies are going to keep trying to break the Chinese market.

Company update

While I’ve got you here, I want to tell you about an exciting new update from PingPong Digital. In order to best serve our education clients, we have decided to launch “Beyond Education,” a new brand that will expand on the services our clients have already had so much success with to help education providers go the extra mile in a changing post-pandemic education market.

We’ll be building on our existing expertise to offer services in new areas such as course design, digital product development, online and offline student community management, events, and much more.

In addition to a decade of experience, our new brand will be supported by our proprietary analytics software, which we have been working on for almost two years. With the data we can extract utilising these tools, we know we can create many more success stories for our partners over the coming year and beyond.

I’ll be talking a lot more about this brand in the coming months, so be sure to keep an eye on our Pingpong Digital socials for more information.

Outro

Thank you for joining me to discuss the past, present, and future of Chinese students studying abroad.

While the situation right now is bright for higher education in countries like the UK, Canada and Australia, especially with China likely to lift the last of its Covid restrictions in the near future, there is some evidence that the number of Chinese students who want to go abroad to study will peak soon. Changing attitudes and the increasing competitiveness of Chinese universities will mean that universities around the world will need to work harder and smarter to attract and retain Chinese students. 

So what do universities need to do? To recap, develop a more creative, holistic digital marketing strategy on newer platforms like Xiaohongshu; create new courses that fit with the changing interests of Chinese students; and explore skills-based training.

If you’re a returning subscriber, we’re glad to still have you with us, and if you’re a new listener, we’re looking forward to exploring more China insights with you. If you liked the episode, please remember to subscribe, and if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to get in touch with us on Twitter or LinkedIn at PingPong Digital.

I’ll be back next month to talk about China’s post-Covid reopening in more detail, look at how countries should be preparing for the return of Chinese tourists, and review some of this year’s best Chinese New Year marketing campaigns.