Gavin Newton-Tanzer, CEO of Sunrise Education, told The PIE News that running recruitment tours has become a significant part of the company’s operations, as educators are trying to engage directly with potential Chinese students and diversify their recruitment strategy.

“We work with 417 schools, explicitly on the extra-curricular side,” he detailed, noting that they have many more international school partners for the US college tour part of their business.

“There are schools that don’t need to work with us for extra-curriculars but would love to have a group of 25 universities come to visit them in a second or third tier university,” he explained.

A typical recruitment tour may be 10 days long and visit six or seven cities. The cost to an institution is around US$10,000 but they will get to visit 14 or 15 schools and meet around 2,000 students.

Newton-Tanzer said that his company worked with any universities that recruit for English degrees. “The US is definitely the majority, followed by Canada and then the UK.”

He explained that many schools felt the need to provide more exposure to international study options for the students.

Some schools would employ college counsellors who might expect a commission on referrals, but this would more likely to be schools where the counselling function was less sophisticated and they had hired an ex-agent just to fill the role.

“I usually tell universities to just say no,” said Newton-Tanzer. “Schools we work with cannot do that. There’s a lot more information available and a lot more transparency [now].”

And Sunrise specialises in tours to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, simply because, in Newton-Tanzer’s opinion, “My general rule is, if you’ve heard of it, its probably not somewhere you need help with. If you’ve heard of it, you’ve sort of missed the trend.”

He elaborated, “Go to place that you haven’t heard before, go meet the international schools, develop relationships with the counsellors. Try to be as sincere about it as possible.”

You can also read our PIE Chat with Newton-Tanzer here.