Long Live Liberal Arts: The BA as an Export

10/28/2009 - Part of TCBN's Education Series
As CEO of GrokChina, Kim Morrison knows the market for Chinese international students.  Interviewed by Charter Member Brantley Turner Bradley, Morrison speaks of international education as a business and how her company GrokChina is helping educational institutions recruit the best students.



TURNER BRADLEY: Okay, so Kim, what does your business do?

MORRISON: Okay, well, GrokChina works with American universities and colleges and helps them engage in China. And to understand that, you need to understand what exactly American universities and colleges are actually doing in China. And a lot people are unaware of how active American schools are in China. For example, all North American schools want to recruit the best possible students that they can out of the China market. So they’re engaged in things like working with agents, working with education fairs. But a lot of them are also strategic marketing programs and strategic marketing in the China market, and partnering with Chinese schools for the purpose of recruiting their students. Some schools actually want to expand their footprint and so they’re actually looking to offer their programs in China. To do that they have to work with a Chinese institution. Some North American schools are looking to earn revenues from things like teacher training programs, from things like licensing curriculum, running extracurricular programs and ESL programs. So there’s a whole broad range of activities that North American institutions are engaged in or want to engage in in the China market, and we help them do that.

TURNER BRADLEY: Great. So can you give us an idea size of that market?

MORRISON: Well, China as an education system is one of the largest in the world. And in terms of spending on education it’s also quite a substantial market. China has about 25 million students in the post-secondary sector, either at colleges or at universities, and that’s almost the population of Canada! They’re very busy educating a lot of kids. In terms of students going abroad it’s about 200,000 every year go abroad to study either in the United States, Canada, Australia, or the UK. The spending for each child is really quite large. If we look at Canada, as a good example, about 40,000 students go into Canada every year to study from China. From the government of Canada’s point of view, that represents not just revenues from tuition, but also export value from the students’ spend, living expenses, travel, that kind of thing. So from the point of view of Canada, just from China alone, they’re looking at about 1bn in export value. So even though we don’t like to think of international education as a business it is actually big business.

TURNER BRADLEY: Can you tell us briefly about the demand your business serves?

MORRISON: At one level we work with institutions and help them kind of bridge the gap between what they’re able to do without a field office in China and what we’re able to give them with our staff in Beijing. But at another level what we’re doing – and I think this is even more interesting – we’re helping facilitate Chinese students who want to study abroad sort of connect with North American institutions. And, you know, Chinese parents and Chinese students studying abroad, their main motivation is to try to pick the strategy that’s going to give them the best outcome after graduation. Economically, largely. They want to have really good jobs and a good future from an economic point of view. And the hope of the whole family’s point of view is that they’ll raise a certain socioeconomic status of the entire family through the education of that one child. So that what the kids are after.

From my perspective, one of the things I think is most interesting is colleges and universities play a really important role in society in terms of acculturating youth. They are vehicles for communicating certain kinds of professional culture, certain kinds of class culture, and certain kinds of “international” culture. The hope is, by Chinese students coming into the United States and Canada, which are two of the world’s most international immigrant societies, the part that will be communicated is the things that we’ve learned about – and we have so far to go still – about getting along in an international context and valuing diversity and multiculturalism. And so from my perspective, as China emerges as this global super-power, I think that this new generation of Chinese citizens who’ve been exposed to a much more international environment, I think that’s a good thing.

TURNER BRADLEY: So what aspects of the international educational landscape for North America and China do you see developing next?

MORRISON: Okay, well. International education in China has been changing a lot over the last decade or so. In recent years, one of the big changes is it’s no longer the really wealthy kids who are studying abroad. We’re seeing much more middle class kids who are able to afford to study abroad. And that’s partly because of China’s developing economy. The increased value of the RMB isn’t hurting. But it’s also the culmination of that very controversial one-child policy. We have two generations, now, of resources from grandparents to parents all being focused down on that one child. It’s enabling kids even from middle class backgrounds. There’s enough resources available within that system to be able to afford to study abroad. That’s one change that we’re seeing: that it’s not longer just the rich kids, it’s middle class kids, too.

Another one is – and this is actually a reflection of a social and attitudinal change in China, but I think it’s really important – China, not the west, is not viewed by many Chinese parents and many Chinese students as the land of opportunity. It used to be the academic elites who would leave China to go and study abroad, but these days a lot of kids in China tend dream about attending Beijing’s top-tier universities: Beijing University, Tsinghua University, Fudan. And it’s the kids who don’t gain access to those universities who begin to look at study abroad as their best second option, in terms of their long term strategy for financial success. We’re seeing now in the mix of students who are leaving China more of the 35th to 805th percentile academic performers, as opposed to ten or fifteen years ago where it was the kids who were in the top tier. So that’s another change.

Another important change is at the institutional level. For the last ten or fifteen years the Ministry of Education in the government’s been very focused, and probably rightly so, on developing their university sector and research capabilities. Just in the last couple of years there’s been a switch in focus into the vocational college and three-year college sector in China, which is a good thing. Actually the vast majority of post-secondary students in China fit into that trench: about 21 out of the 25 million. So from the point of view of our customers – North American colleges and universities – there’s a lot of opportunity there right now. And in fact we are working with an increasing number of colleges and helping them access both the vocational and three-year college system within China. And they are able to do things like license curriculum, teacher training, and those kinds of programs. And they’re earning revenues from those kinds of activities. So that’s the third thing.

I would say another thing – and I don’t know if you’d call this a trend but it’s something we’re doing more of – is working with corporations and helping pair them with a North American institution and then jointly offering some kind of program into the market. The cool thing about that is everybody wins. Education in China is very honored and very revered, and actually it gets a lot of press. So we’re able to get a lot of good PR for these organizations who participate in these programs: reputational benefit and a lot of good will. The education institution benefits because they share cost with the corporation, but also they reputationally benefit from association with industry in the eyes of students in China, who are really focused on is post-graduate appointment. And everybody shares cost. So that’s something that we’re doing we think is pretty cool.


Find out more about GrokChina's programs on their website.