Number of Americans studying in mainland China falls sharply, but Chinese students still flock to US

US students returned to Hong Kong and Taiwan after the pandemic’s first year, but only 211 studied in the mainland during the 2021-22 academic year
China continues to dominate the country-of-origin rankings at US colleges and universities

US-China relations

Bochen Hanin Washington

Published: 1:01pm, 13 Nov 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

Tallies of Americans studying in Hong Kong and Taiwan recovered slightly after the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the number of American students in mainland China plummeted to the lowest in over a decade, according to new data released on Monday.

Only 211 Americans studied in mainland China during the 2021-22 school year, according to the 2023 version of an annual US government-funded study by the Institute of International Education (IIE). In contrast, from 2018 to 2019, there were more than 11,000 American students in the mainland.

The same study showed that Chinese students continue to vastly outnumber any other foreign group in the US. During the 2022 to 2023 school year, 289,526 Chinese studied in the US, a slight decrease from the 290,086 during the previous school year.

Mainland China’s continued dominance of the country-of-origin rankings comes amid concerns that Chinese students are subjected to greater scrutiny at US borders.

According to the Chinese embassy in Washington, during the past two-plus years, at least 70 Chinese students with legal visas were “interrogated, harassed and deported” by US law enforcement at their port of entry.

But while there has been some evidence that mainland Chinese, particularly those from non-elite backgrounds, are looking elsewhere for their studies, the US still hosts nearly double the number of Chinese students compared with the next largest host, Britain, according to the State Department.

The State Department issued about 91,000 visas this year to Chinese students, according to Brenda Grewe of the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Marianne Craven, also of the State Department, said Chinese students were a “priority and valued by US universities”, noting that China is a key country for colleges’ recruitment efforts.

How will US fare as Indian students overtake Chinese in hi-tech talent pool?

Continuing a trend from the previous academic year, the number of Chinese pursuing undergraduate studies decreased during 2022-23, to 100,349 – a decrease of 8.4 per cent.

Like last year, Chinese graduate students saw a single-digit percentage increase. From 2022-23, the number of graduate students rose by 2.3 per cent to 126,028, accounting for the plurality of the Chinese student population in the US at 43.5 per cent.

And like last year, about half of the Chinese students studied maths, computer science, engineering and other “STEM” subjects.

Meanwhile, enrolment from India, the second-largest source of foreign students in the US, reached an all-time high of 268,923 in the 2022-23 academic year, an increase of 35 per cent over the previous year.

The US has lost its charm, maybe forever, to China’s brightest students

IIE does not track Americans who are enrolled overseas for full degrees from non-US institutions, nor does it track non-credited educational experiences.

It also lacked study-abroad data for Americans available for the 2022-23 school year. But other sources indicated that the post-pandemic rebound observed for other countries had been slow to surface in mainland China.

US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said in June that only 350 Americans were studying in China.

IIE found that 120 Americans studied in Hong Kong from 2021-22, up from 32 the previous academic year. And 468 Americans studied in Taiwan during the same period, up from 100 the year before.

IIE representatives note that many countries in Asia still had strict Covid-19 rules during that period of time. China did not lift its stringent zero-Covid policies until December 2022, after rolling out massive lockdowns earlier that year.

‘They want American degrees’: China No 1 provider of overseas students to US

But the availability of programmes may also have contributed to the decline of American students. In recent years, US programmes have shifted from mainland China to Taiwan. In 2021, Harvard University announced that it was moving its popular summer language programme from Beijing to Taipei after 15 years in the country.

IIE noted in a report released earlier this year that less than 30 per cent of American institutions said they had plans to send students back to mainland China for the 2023-24 academic year. China is no longer in the top 20 of study-abroad destinations; in the two academic years before the pandemic, it was in the top seven.

But there were also signs that resources were slowly moving back to the mainland. Last week, Harvard announced it would be opening a summer study programme in Shanghai in 2024, in which students can take courses in the city’s cultural history and East Asian economics.

Burns said getting people-to-people interactions back on track was a “major priority” for him.