Millions of Chinese have dreamt of attending Harvard University. Harvard Girl, a how-to manual published in 2000 by the parents of one successful applicant, was a national bestseller. Georgia Institute of Technology, a prestigious university in Atlanta, has enjoyed less name-recognition. Yet this is fast changing: the number of Chinese applicants to Georgia Tech has surged from 33 in 2007 to 2,309 last year. Some applicants are from the best schools in China, and all are ready to pay around $44,000 (Rs.27.2 lakh, yearly fees and housing costs) — the equivalent of nearly ten times the average annual disposable income of China’s urban households.

The ambitions of Chinese students are shifting: no longer are they attracted just by the glittering names. Pursuit of education abroad is becoming an end in itself. Universities far less renowned than Georgia Tech are reaping the benefit. More than 800,000 Chinese went abroad to study at all levels in 2012 and 2013. In those two years, they made up more than a quarter of the 3 million who had done so since China began opening to the outside world in 1978. In end 2013, nearly 1.1 million Chinese were studying abroad, according to the ministry of education — more than three times as many as a decade earlier. China has long been the largest source of foreign students enrolled in higher education globally, with its share rising steeply. Since 2009 China has provided the most enrolments not just to the English-speaking countries of the developed world but also to numerous others including France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Japan and South Korea.                   

Several converging trends explain this. One is growing demand for education beyond the compulsory nine years. In 2011, nearly 25 million Chinese were enrolled in senior secondary school (the level feeding into universities), more than twice as many as in 2000.

Another trend is growing middle-class wealth: many more Chinese families can now afford to send their children abroad. They prefer a well-rated university overseas to a second-tier option at home.

American universities, keen to take on fee-paying Chinese students, have helped this by lobbying the government to issue more visas. They send teams to China’s best secondary schools to encourage applicants. Some American campuses have set up courses to help newcomers from China improve their English.

Families who know from early on that they want to send their children overseas can enroll them in private courses at publicly funded schools. The courses, costing as much as 100,000 yuan (Rs.10 lakh) a year, prepare students for the entry exams used by American universities. Schools offering them include elite ones such as Beijing No. 4 High School and the army-linked Beijing Bayi High School. The education authorities have murmured disapproval, but have not yet tried to ban them. Such programmes are aimed at an upper crust whose members they might be reluctant to annoy (President Xi Jinping’s daughter went to Harvard). Four of five of China’s wealthiest people — those with assets worth more than 10 million yuan — want their children to study abroad, according to Hurun Report, a Shanghai-based firm.

But the aspiration to go abroad extends far beyond the party’s members and their families. And despite a slowing economy, disposable incomes will continue to grow fast. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons they will double in urban areas by 2020 compared with ten years earlier. A recent escalation in official efforts to stem the influence of Western political thinking on Chinese campuses will only fire ambitions to leave.

(Excerpted and adapted from )