Overseas study market poised for big changes, says CEO

China's overseas study and educational travel market is poised for significant changes, said Bob Gogel, CEO of WorldStrides.

Gogel runs one of the world's largest educational travel companies that every year provides education programs for more than 450,000 students and has served more than 10 million students since the company began operations in 1967.

There has been a major transformation of the China outbound overseas education market, a market which currently is close to 1 million students and growing at nearly 16 percent per year, according to a 2019 report by UBS, an investment bank.

As the market becomes more transparent and the flow of information more instantaneous, this puts pressure on operators to offer more information, higher quality, and provide more immediate service feedback, Gogel said. "Only those with sufficient scale, investment in quality, and a long-term view will survive."

With its rapid growth over the past five years, the overseas study and educational travel market indeed has been flooded with players, from agents claiming to represent overseas schools, to tour operators attempting to package travel itineraries as education, to small shops, all hoping to get a piece of the pie, he said.

How can families differentiate quality programs from the rest? "Focus on history and scale," Gogel said. "If the company has been in business and expanding for more than 10 years, it could not have sustained business unless it was providing quality." Gogel also mentioned customer reviews and safety records as a measurement of value of a provider.

More and more Chinese students are putting overseas study tours on their agenda, with more younger students opting for overseas learning experiences, he said.

The students going on study tours are becoming younger and younger, he said, adding that students aged as young as 5 will attend summer camps in China to prepare them for overseas tours, and once they've reached 12, they will start to go on study tours abroad ranging from two to eight weeks.

"We are excited by opportunities to both bring Chinese students on overseas programs as well as bring students in other countries to China to experience all the history and culture China has to offer, as one of the most important societies in the world."