While the number of students from other countries is falling, the inflow of Chinese students is holding up despite the threat of tighter immigration controls
Yifan Zhang, a Shanghai native, recently enjoyed her first taste of American life by spending the day trekking through the woodlands of rural New York state near the liberal arts college where she is starting her degree course.
Ziyi Xu, a first-year student at the University of Southern California, joined her new classmates on an outing to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers, while Lyujiang Chen, a freshman at New York University, wondered how long it would take for him to feel at home in the neighbourhood cafes, bars and restaurants that surround his new school in Manhattan.
In their different ways, the trio’s first impressions of the United States indicate why the country still holds a strong allure for Chinese students despite two straight years of falling international enrolment at US universities.
Zhang, Xu and Chen are just three of the hundreds of thousands of students pursuing their own version of the American dream despite the frequently negative portrayals of their home country – especially in the wake of the trade war – and growing concerns over immigration policy.
Last year, around 350,000 Chinese students were studying at US colleges and universities, according to the Department for Homeland Security, around a fifth of the total number of Chinese studying overseas.
However, the number of new international students coming to America dropped by 20,000, or nearly 7 per cent. That was more than double the decline of 2016, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE), a Washington-based non-profit organisation that surveyed 500 American universities.
But Peggy Blumenthal, senior counsellor to the president at IIE, said: “I do not anticipate any significant decline in numbers of Chinese students coming to the US in the near future.
“American higher education remains for many the gold standard,” Blumenthal said, noting that around half the Chinese students in the US were undergraduates.
“Chinese students and parents value the flexibility and teaching style of US colleges and universities.”
She added that the abundant research opportunities and an institutionalised emphasis on liberal education and critical thinking were also part of the allure.
