" … Nine of 10 prospective Chinese visitors to the United States want to tour a university, according to a survey last year of several thousand by Attract China, which helps hospitality companies woo them." …
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/next-stop-harvardland.html
A about a week ago, I was eating breakfast with my son on Nassau St. in Princeton. A tour bus pulled over, and a big group of South Korean tourists came out, many of them seniors in suits.
Given that Harvard and MIT are some of the most well-known universities in the world, if I were a tourist I’d probably be curious to visit too.
Pretty much the same when I was in the Bay Area last week: only it was two busses that pulled into Stanford’s oval. Asian kids were in suits/blazers, and stood out like a sore thumb on a hot day in PA when most other kids were in flip flops, shorts and tank tops. 
There’s free bikes for everyone?
I visited Oxford when I was in the UK.
When I am visiting DS in Somerville, I have to drive through Harvard Square. There are ALWAYS groups of Asian tourists looking at Harvard. When the groups look like they are high school age, I want to roll down my window and shout at them, “Maybe one of you will get accepted, maybe none.” The obsession with “Harvard or bust” makes me crazy. I sort of get it, but I happen to be in the know. There are a number of great colleges in this country where you can get as good an undergrad education, if not better, than you can get at Harvard.
Practically everyday at UCLA there are tour groups and in all honesty there are more Asian tourists and students groups than other other ethnic group … .UCLA is something like 90% Asian student body (diversity UCLA??) but they do stick out. Recently, apparently a famous Indian actor or music star (I forget which) was on campus and a friend of mine of Indian descent said it was funny to watch - there was only a large group of Indian students following him around.
Maybe the attractiveness of the school to the kids was due in part to the much more relaxed dress code there compared to being dressed by their parents.
Most of Stanford University is not actually within the city limits of Palo Alto.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg06_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1093 says that the domestic undergraduates are 35.1% Asian (and 32.4% white, 20.9% Latino, 5.5% multiracial, 3.0% black). International students make up 11.8% of undergraduates.
Stanford is a city.
Stanford is a “city” for postal address purposes, but is actually part of unincorporated Santa Clara County. (A few parts of the Stanford University campus, like the medical center, are within the city of Palo Alto.)
Same of these Asian tourists like to photograph themselves (or their kids) with the students attending prestigious universities they are visiting. Make you feel like a rare antelope in some nature preserve. Nothing beats being asked for a photo op when you just rolled out of bed and are running late to class.
I hope none of them want to bring back a trophy antelope;)
@CCDD14 My daughter has been asked for photos a couple of times but only when she is wearing her Princeton sweatshirt.
The top Ivies and Stanford are huge for the Asian market. Along those lines, in a reciprocal gesture (one no doubted also placed as a strategic business move) it is no wonder that inn 2013, Stevenn Schwarzman committed $100 million and is personally leading a campaign to raise an additional $300 million to endow Schwarzman Scholars, a fully funded master’s degree program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of China’s top academic institutions, which modeled is modeled on the Rhodes Scholarship. Word is that many of these students will then be directed for graduate school at Yale…
A trophy tiger?
to iheartucla- according to collegedata, Asians are the biggest group at ucla, making up 35% of the students.
Certainly a disproportionate number based on U.S. population, but far from 90%
I have to laugh when many people from less diverse areas of the US make these type of comments–so, while a third of the student population is sizable, it is no where near 80-90%–racial hyperbole.
Perhaps that may be that perception is skewed because many people in the US are accustomed to places with 60-80% white people, with relatively small numbers of other people around. So when one looks at UCLA with 32.4% white undergraduates, the perception of it “being taken over by minorities” may be exaggerated due to it being so different from the “white = default” norm in much of the US, even though there are still substantial numbers of white undergraduates at UCLA.