Chinese parents, known for giving their children an academic edge, used their holidays to boost higher education in the city-state. This trend created a mini ecosystem around the visits, creating business opportunities for hotels, bus and travel companies.
Many travel agencies in China tried to take advantage of this. Xiaohongshu, the Chinese Instagram-like app, contained more than 170,000 posts tagged with #SingaporeUniversityTourStrategy. Advertisements for such tours – offered for as much as 2,388 yuan ($340) – started making the rounds on apps, tour platforms and e-commerce sites such as Taobao and 8Pig. Some even went as far as offering consultancy services to help people settle in Singapore.
Singapore universities have had to resort to crowd control measures on campus after attendances surged in recent months ahead of Golden Week – the week-long holiday marking China’s National Day. So much so that students took to online forums like Reddit to complain about disruptions to their classes, overcrowding on campus buses and cafeterias, and rude etiquette.
The National University of Singapore has restricted access to dining halls and other locations for tourists between September 30 and October 7, according to a statement from the students’ union seen by Bloomberg. Earlier this year, Nanyang Technological University began charging a fee for tour groups, and also made plans to give campus buses priority over buses carrying visitors.
While a temporary inconvenience for universities, the interest signals a shift in Chinese parents’ preference for college education in the city-state. As well as NUS and NTU ranking highly in university ratings such as the QS World University Rankings, some parents cited Singapore’s easy visa regime as a draw, as well as being closer to home and affordable to travel. “I just wanted to take the children to visit, and in the future, if they have the opportunity and willingness, they can study at this university,” said Alice Zhang, 35, who visited NUS during Golden Week together with her two children. “In China, demand for academics is slightly higher.” Singapore’s two main universities do not publish a breakdown of admissions figures by nationality. Both NUS and NTU have made a data request to the country’s Ministry of Education The ministry, in turn, pointed to a 2022 parliamentary response stating that the number of international students at bachelor’s level has remained around 10% in recent years, without providing information on nationality.
Visiting prestigious universities at home and abroad has long been a favorite pastime for Chinese families with young children during winter and summer vacations. Top colleges in China such as Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing are teeming with teenagers during the summer holidays, while travel trips aimed at Chinese to the east and west coasts of the US would also include stops at Ivy League schools such as Yale and Harvard in their itineraries .
Oscar Du, a master’s student at NTU who organizes one-hour tours for 300 yuan per person at the university, said he usually encounters middle-class families with younger children in primary school, many of whom are from Shanghai. “Many of them would like their children to like these universities so that they have the motivation to apply for them,” Du said.
