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90% Of China’s Super-Rich Want To Send Children Abroad

By YIFEI ZHANG: Subscribe to Yifei's RSS feed

American businesses and capital have been flowing to China for years, but when it comes to education the tide is reversed.

An overwhelming majority of China's wealthiest want to send their children to foreign universities, and the United States is their first choice. Ninety percent of the country's richest people have plans to send their children abroad to study, according to independent research by China's Industrial Bank Co. and the Hurun Report.

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(Photo: Reuters / Mike Segar)
Yale University's president, Richard Levin, presents a portrait of Yung Wing (also know as Rong Hong) to China's President Hu Jintao in the Chinese reading room of Yale’s library. Yung Wing was the first native-born Chinese to study in the United States.

Their Chinese Luxury Consumer White Paper 2012 reports that 9 of every 10 Chinese with assets of more than 100 million yuan ($16 million) plan to send their children abroad, while 85 percent of those with at least $1 million said they would send their children overseas for education.

Education is a high priority in China. On average, the country's high-net-worth individuals spend 170,000 yuan (about $27,000), to educate each of their children. This was the third-highest area of their spending, after travel and luxury goods.

Chinese Students Target America

The presence of Chinese students at U.S. academic institutions is growing. They have been the largest group of foreign students in the country since 2010, with 157,588 arriving between 2010 and 2011. That represents a 23 percent increase over 2009-2010. That period also saw a 43 percent jump in the number of Chinese students arriving in the United States for undergraduate education.

Foreign students contributed more than $20 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2010-2011 academic year, through living and educational expenses, according to Peggy Blumenthal, senior counselor to the president at the Institute of International Education.

Blumenthal said Chinese families see the education of their often only child -- a product of Beijing's one-child policy -- as a critical investment and consider U.S. schools the international "gold standard."

It isn't only the rich families of China, but also those in the country's quickly growing middle class, that want a foreign education for their offspring. The widespread aspiration led China to send more than 350,000 students abroad last year.

The majority go to the United States; other English-speaking countries such as Britain, Canada and Australia attract most of the rest. Switzerland is the only country among the top eight in which English isn't the official or dominant language.

Blumenthal pointed out that an American education will likely remain the leading choice for Chinese students due to its "cross-disciplinary fields and development of critical thinking. ... We have every reason to look forward to continued strong flows of Chinese students to the U.S."

India and South Korea closely follow China as countries with the second- and third-biggest populations, respectively, of foreign students in the United States.

Business and management, followed by engineering and computer science, are the most popular degree fields at U.S. schools for Chinese students.