Read this in “Inside Higher Education” the other day. Apparently they have, as of June, already restricted Chinese visas for some graduate STEM programs and were discussing ending visas for Chinese undergraduates to study in the US.
Espionage? Visa restrictions? Impact on internationals and the elites? Thoughts??
I doubt the elites will have trouble finding other full pay applicants, but this could hurt other schools needing full pay students. The idea has been shelved… for now. Who knows…
If it was all current and new, it would impact all of the schools because you wouldn’t be able to react to the loss of upperclassmen and graduate students. Over time they would adjust and the impact would be felt by lower tier schools.
I think they would have received a lot of calls from friendly Governors. Take Wisconsin for example, there are over 3,000 students from China a UW-Madison alone.
Given how many of the top officials’ children attend US colleges, one has to wonder if this one measure - pausing on student visas - would have been much more effective in gaining concessions than the trade war and tariffs have been. As an owner of a manufacturing business, I can assure you the universities have no more at stake and to lose than businesses, farmers and manufacturers are losing with the tariffs.
Allowing foreign nationals to study at our US universities is a privilege and should be one of the many tools considered when we attempt to negotiate issues with foreign countries.
Methinks the ‘espionage’ really means intellectual property theft. IP theft is a big issue, particularly in China. 60 Minutes had a segment on this a couple of years ago if I recall.
And yes, it definitely is all part of the trade (negotiation) dispute.
I was under the impression (podcast? article? word of mouth?) that some states are strangling their public universities of funding. Some publics U’s are under a lot of pressure to get more money for their budgets and they do this, in part, by accepting more full pay OOS and full pay international students.
We are in Illinois and had a kid at UIUC. The state of Illinois has big money woes that have affected the public university system. The number of Chinese students has swelled at UIUC over X amount of years. The acceptance rate at UIUC has gone down as more & more applications come in.
I wish the state schools were adequately funded and were set up to educate the population of the state they are originally chartered to serve. I don’t think ending Chinese student visas will fix that particular problem.
I do think, perhaps in light of the reported intellectual theft (Chinese stealing US intellectual property), that denying the visas could indeed be a chess move in the mission to get China to play fairly.
It’s very personal. Nasty, but IMO would be highly effective. As it is, very few of the leaders of either country are directly and materially impacted by the trade war, so although they intellectually know it “hurts” some of their citizens, they don’t personally feel the pain. But finding out your favorite son can’t go to Harvard? Ouch. That makes for a very personal, very painful impact for the leaders… nothing like your surly teen staring daggers at you from across the dining room table. No matter how tough a leader these people are, everybody feels pain when their kids hurt.
U of Colorado has done the same thing as UIUC, internationals are now getting to be a larger number of
our students too. Its not the same high % of Chinese at CU Boulder as there are at UIUC, though.
UIUC has the most Chinese Nationals who are undergrads of any school in the USA. There
is a separate Chinese subculture at UIUC, and its certainly hurt Illinois families who now have to pay private or OOS tuition at places like Ohio State or Purdue that accept more American kids.
It would be nice fund our US public universities another way, perhaps, or find a way to diversify the international students, a bit more.
The voters in Illinois (and Colorado) could fix this, though, by writing a law that requires a bigger % of UIUC enrollments to be Illinois residents. We don’t have the political will to do the right thing, though, I bet.
Less non-white immigration (the probable intent, since Russian students are not mentioned despite the supposed reason being national security).
Lower trade surplus in services (i.e. not selling as much undergraduate education to those outside the US), giving a higher overall trade deficit.
Lower supply of inexpensive research labor (PhD students).
Less research if alternative sources of PhD students are not found.
Less "brain gain" (some PhD students stay long term in the US).
Budget-strapped universities have to find replacements for international undergraduate student tuition money. (Though the state universities among them already have to deal with political backlash from state residents who resent international students' presence while not wanting to fund additional subsidized-tuition in-state seats.)
Impact - fewer Chinese students who are Americanized, who develop an appreciation for the US, learn the benefits of living in a Democracy, who potentially can bring reforms back to their country, who become advocates for reform in China, etc.
The fact that Miller even sold it as potentially impacting unversities that were critical of Trump says all that I need to know.
My husband works at a medical school, but the labs at the med schools rely on PhD or MD/PhD students for research. He says there’s a big shortage of Americans willing to go into biology/medical research. I can’t blame them - funding via the NSF and NIH has shrunk so much it has become increasingly difficult to get grants.
It’d impact Midwestern universities by cutting needed funds. As a result, these states would have to increase tuition A LOT or increase taxes by a lot to fund higher education. Another problem is that about (or even more than) half stem graduate students, ie , TAs, are international. Not all are Chinese but there’d be a huge shortage of instructors for freshman and sophomore year classes in the sciences.
Then, there’s the soft power issue : when students study in a country, they take on some of that country’s worldview and develop a taste for that country’s products. When they go home, they can become advocates for that country’s or that country’s way of life. It’s a very powerful tool since the ‘defenders’ and ‘purchasers’ are disseminated geographically. China understood this very well since it’s now surpassed the US in offering undergraduate scholarships (full ride and full tuition) to top students from developing and middle income countries. In several countries, Chinese TV has become more popular than American tv, for instance. The Chinese concept of a restricted, censored internet (with its tools such as weibo) is gaining influence in the world.
This is one of the stupidest ideas. The Chinese undergrads mostly attend publics (because of somewhat lower tuition) and second/third-rate privates. The highly sought-after elite privates accept very few Chinese undergrads (e.g. Harvard only accepted a handful this past year). The few that were accepted may either be brilliant or highly connected (i.e. children of high government officials or business tycoons). This is not unlike what Harvard (or its peers) is doing for applicants from this country (minus the diversity). One of the purposes is, clearly, to build influences when these students graduate, whether in this country or elsewhere. If we ban these students, either state taxes or tuition would have to rise in those publics. And I agree with @websensation that some of these second/third-rate privates would go out of business as a result of demographic trends and competitions from online platforms without these full-pay students.
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In addition to not delving into political policy, unless one has suddenly developed psychic powers, relating a person’s views need to be limited to what s/he has said/written without accompanying analysis/interpretation. So no “He thinks…” or “He means…”
There are about 350,000 Chinese students studying in US and vast majority of them–probably over 90%— are full pay… A typical Chinese student attends a second tier school like U of Syracuse, U of Conn, etc, at a price tag of $70,000/yr. I know this because I have seen their I-20s. My guess is that very few families on this board making less than $35,000/yr would even consider such options. Yet such is the typical profile of a Chinese student studying here that it brings $20B/yr into the local economy. BTW, since such spending occurs inside the US border it does not show up in the trade data.
As far as Chinese kids attending schools like Harvard I can also speak of personal experience–my kid knows every single one of them in her freshman class, about only ten of those, and I have met some of the families too. I think as Harvard new president Bacow said in his inaugural speech last week Harvard was lucky to have these international students. Out of the ten extremely bright Chinese freshmen seven or eight of them are pursuing humanity studies and one of the families donated $16 million dollars.
The notion that all of these Chinese families who decided to spend $70k to $16m on their kids’ American education would suffer a great loss is just ludicrous to say the least.
When I was traveling in China last year and asked a family why they chose to send their daughter to study sociology at U of Syracuse for $72k/yr while they could have done the same for half price in Canada, Britain or other countries, their response was that they just had a more favorable view of US higher education and US in general. I am not sure how many of them would hold such views now.