GUANGDONG — Affluent Chinese families are increasingly directing their children’s summer education spending towards domestic academic preparation as tougher job prospects reduce the appeal of overseas university pathways.
A survey of 277 affluent families by parenting and education platform Babazhenbang found that 84.5 per cent paid for subject-specific tutoring during this year’s July-August school holiday, up from 80.7 per cent last year, as reported by South China Morning Post.
The proportion spending more than 60,000 yuan during the break also doubled to 9.4 per cent, with mathematics, English and examination preparation among the most popular choices.
Average spending on these tutoring activities stood at about 24,000 yuan.
Kent Cai, founder of international education consultancy Zhejiang Newway, said families abandoning overseas education were increasingly redirecting their resources towards domestic tutoring.
“Once they switch to the domestic education track, competition becomes even more intense, so parents are willing to spend more on tutoring to increase their sense of certainty,” he said.
Despite increased spending on tutoring, overall expenditure on summer education programmes fell to a three-year low of 61,100 yuan this year, compared with 69,000 yuan in 2025.
Only 12.5 per cent of families spent more than 100,000 yuan on summer education activities, broadly unchanged from last year but significantly lower than the 39.4 per cent recorded in 2024 and 26.7 per cent in 2023.
Meanwhile, 15.5 per cent spent less than 10,000 yuan, the highest proportion recorded in recent years.
Overseas travel and summer camps also saw a decline.
The proportion of children in the survey who travelled overseas during the summer dropped to 19.8 per cent from 28.2 per cent last year, while just four per cent of families spent more than 60,000 yuan on overseas summer camps, down from 7.4 per cent.
The trend comes as fewer Chinese students pursue overseas education.
China’s Ministry of Education recorded 570,600 students going abroad last year, well below the 703,500 peak recorded in 2019.
Chen Zhiwen, a member of the Beijing-based Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy, expects the decline to continue, although he does not foresee a sudden collapse in demand.
He attributed the shift partly to tighter visa policies in Western countries, geopolitical tensions and improvements in the quality of Chinese universities.
Chen also said younger Chinese people were increasingly confident in their own country and therefore less likely to regard studying abroad as automatically more desirable.
The changing preferences are also being felt by international and bilingual schools in the Yangtze River Delta, including Shanghai, where recruitment has become more difficult, Cai said.
He added that costly pre-university summer programmes in Europe and the United States were also losing their appeal among Chinese families.
Families still pursuing international education spent more on average this summer, at 78,600 yuan compared with 43,600 yuan among those focused on domestic education.
However, Babazhenbang found that the spending gap between the two groups was narrowing as parents reassessed their children’s education priorities.
Most of the children surveyed were middle or high school students from major Chinese cities, with nearly 60 per cent enrolled in international education programmes in China and the remainder following the domestic education system.
