Each year, 9.5 million Chinese students take the gaokao, China's notoriously difficult college entrance exam that exclusively determines which colleges graduating seniors will be accepted to. GPA, class difficulty, and extracurriculars don’t matter. A single score from a single test determines everything. Many find the pressures of such a high-stakes test overwhelming. When scores are released in mid June of each year, tens of thousands of students are disappointed with their score and have to decide, do they wait an entire year to take the once a year test to try to improve their score?

Digital marketing in China can be frustrating and confusing for international companies and institutions. Foreign websites can take a long time to load (or be blocked completely), and the deep followings and rich content that you’ve built on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are invisible to Chinese users. While it’s a complex environment, China is a remarkably deep, dynamic, and promising market. Even compared to a few years ago, China is remarkably wired society, with nearly 60 percent of its population online and 40 percent of its population on local social media.

In many countries, China is the largest sending country for international graduate students, and the landscape for recruiting these students has become increasingly competitive and complex. As more and more international universities vie for China’s outbound graduate students, its worthwhile to better understand what inspires Chinese graduates to go abroad, how they see graduate education in the context of their careers, and how international universities can adapt their recruitment efforts in light of the employment considerations of Chinese students.

Last fall, we surveyed more than 2,000 students and 28 counselors at Sunrise’s China recruitment tours to learn more about how students in tier 2 and 3 cities in China approach the college application process and find information about universities. 40.42% rely on in-school resources, presentations, and in-school counselors for study abroad information.