Chinese primary school students visit the city hall of San Francisco during a summer camp tour. (Photo: Li Qian/GT)
Increasing salaries, anxiety about education lead to latest fad
○ More and more well-paid Chinese parents are sending their children abroad for education during the summer holidays
○ The study tour market lacks supervision which can pose safety risks
○ Some parents send their children abroad just to show off
China's urban middle class are under growing peer pressure to send their kids on expensive study tours abroad which have become the latest fad.
Recently, a post titled "A monthly salary of 30,000 yuan could not afford [my] child's summer holiday" has been widely circulated on social networks in China.
The author's friend, a senior manager who earns 30,000 yuan ($4,502) a month, complained that she has dared not buy new clothes recently because the summer holiday is coming and so are big travel bills generated by her daughter.
Beijing residents on average made 7,706 yuan a month in 2016, according to the municipal bureau of statistics.
The mother says her daughter's education cost a total of 35,000 yuan over the summer holiday, including 20,000 yuan for a 10-day US study tour and other training classes which altogether cost 10,000 yuan.
The post, which quickly went viral, was criticized by many who said that only wealthy people can suffer from these kinds of problems. Others questioned whether spending this much money on a child's holiday is necessary.
Regardless of these criticisms, the post shows how much money middle-class families are willing to spend on their children's education, as well as the anxiety they feel over the subject. These well-educated and well-paid people usually have high expectations of their children and are therefore easily persuaded to part with their cash.
Besides the extra-curricular classes which are within the reach of most urban families, there is evidence that more and more parents are sending their children abroad for study holidays in the hope that this will make them stand out from their peers.
The firms organizing these trips say that the children will expand their knowledge and horizons while traveling on these package holidays, which cost from 30,000 to over 60,000 yuan. These trips are seemingly becoming both a status symbol for parents and a symptom of the anxiety sparked by comparing their children with others' offspring.
"It is doubtless that the anxiety over education exists in Chinese society and families are burdened, but if a monthly salary of 30,000 yuan could not support a holiday, there must be irrational comparisons going on," Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told the Global Times.
Luxury global study
Sunny Wang, a senior manager at a newspaper in Beijing, just sent her 11-year-old daughter to Vancouver, where the girl will stay for five weeks. In the Canadian school, her daughter will not only have English classes but also visit museums, climb mountains and go swimming. At night and at the weekend, the girl will follow the schedule of her host family.
According to Wang, the trip has cost them a total of 65,000 yuan, 35,000 yuan for the tuition and flights, and an extra 30,000 yuan because her husband insisted on chaperoning their daughter.
Tens of thousands of Chinese students, from primary to high school, have joined such study tours abroad, which are organized by education centers, schools or families themselves.
In 2014, the number of students traveling abroad for education purposes reached nearly 350,000, and the number reached 500,000 in 2015, continuing to grow by 40 percent every year.
Such educational holidays are common among families living in Beijing and Shanghai. For instance, in Shanghai, it is reported that nearly 90 percent of all the students at international bilingual schools went abroad to study this year, with many heading to different countries every summer.
The most favored countries are the US, the UK, Germany, France and Australia.
These trips are so popular that some families are left disappointed. For example, a primary school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, had 30 places on its tour to Australia but the names of 60 students were entered. The school interviewed the students in English and only allowed the best students onto the trip.
