Two students in discussion at an international education exhibition held in Beijing last year. [China Daily]
New website helps students to pick the most appropriate establishment for their personal requirements
BEIJING: It may sound a bit risky for a three-year-old US Internet startup to launch its first international office in China, where various dot-com companies spring up every day to woo the world's largest population of netizens.
But not for Zinch. It took less than one month for the management team of the US company to make such a decision.
Zinch, a community-based college admissions portal, launched its Chinese website, Zinch.cn, on April 12 in an attempt to cash in on the country's growing desire for overseas education.
The website combines a variety of Web 2.0 and Web syndication tools to help colleges and students find one another. Students create profiles on the site, revealing different aspects of their characters instead of just test scores. Using these profiles, they can use a "shout out" function to alert colleges they are interested in and start direct dialogue with them. Colleges also have the ability to search through these profiles to reach out to students.
Zinch is the latest to join numerous firms that have sprung up in China, overseeing everything from language training to helping students fill out their application forms to study abroad.
But Anne Dwane, chief executive officer of Zinch, said there were two clear market demands for its service.
The website includes information on about 2,000 undergraduate institutions and 5,000 postgraduate programs in the US. Four people from the China team of Zinch spent the past three months collecting and putting detailed enrollment information for foreign students at different universities in the US on the website. That database makes it easier for students to search schools and scholarships, Dwane said.
The second market demand comes from US colleges, which have a hard time assessing the quality of Chinese candidates based solely on test scores.
"What we heard from the US side is: China has so many kids with great TOEFL (test of English as a foreign language) and GRE (graduate record examination) scores, but it is really hard for the admissions officer to figure out the difference between people. We think over time they will use Zinch to look at the profiles of the Chinese kids as another piece of information," said Tom Melcher, chairman of Zinch China.
More than 2 million students in the US have created their profiles on Zinch.com, the website's American version. Students can access Zinch's service free of charge.
The company makes money from advertisements placed by about 800 colleges in the US. But Dwane declined to disclose the exact revenues of the company or whether the company has broken even.
China is currently the world's largest supplier of international students, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
As college graduates in China are finding it increasingly difficult to land a job, many Chinese students and, more importantly, their parents feel that a foreign degree and English fluency is the key to a desirable, well-paid job upon return.
The country's rapid economic growth, together with a currency that has risen by more than 15 percent against the US dollar over the last five years, is also making overseas education more affordable to Chinese students.
That explains the fact that in 2009 alone, 229,000 new Chinese students went abroad to study, a year-on-year increase of 27.5 percent, despite the economic slowdown, according to figures from the Ministry of Education.
The business of informing and exporting Chinese students has grown into a thriving and lucrative industry since most of the students are self-financed.
Because of the language barrier and unfamiliar application processes, many of the students are not confident enough to finish the entire application and visa process themselves, which has created the market for consulting agencies.
On the other hand, social networking sites (SNS) targeting these students have also prospered. These websites provide platforms for the students to share their application experiences.
66xue.com is the one of the largest SNS for studying abroad in China.
The website, which currently has about 270,000 registered users, is going to launch more interactive functions this year, such as a forum where students can rate foreign universities based on their own application experiences.
It will also provide a job-hunting guide for returned Chinese students, said Wei Xiaoliang, president of 66xue.com.
"The natural advantage of foreign companies (such as Zinch) is they can do better in building relationships with overseas universities. But we can find more 'local' solutions to better serve the market," Wei said.
San Francisco based-Zinch plans to add enrollment information of universities in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to its website in the near future due to Chinese students' great interest in colleges in those countries, Melcher said.
The company now has 14 employees in China and has hired about 30 people in the US.
"It is possible that the China team will be bigger than the US team one day," Dwane said.
Anne Dwane, CEO of Zinch, said there were two clear market demands for its services: both students and colleges.[China Daily]
