Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement this week that the U.S. will begin revoking the visas of some Chinese university students studying in the U.S. puts at risk the education of some 270,000 foreign scholars across the county and more than 51,000 in California.
Students from China are the second-most numerous among foreign students studying at U.S. colleges, behind the more than 331,000 from India, making up roughly a quarter of all international higher education students in the country, according to the most-recent available data for the 2023-2024 academic year from the Institute of International Education.
And at 36%, Chinese students make up the largest share from overseas studying in California.
The news that the administration would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students left students in Beijing who lined up outside the U.S. Embassy seeking student visas feeling anxious and helpless.
“What now? Something new every day?” said Li Kunze, 18, who had just successfully applied for a visa to study as an undergraduate. He had not heard the news until he left the embassy. “I don’t even know if they can give me this visa that I just got.”
Because it was too late to apply elsewhere for his undergraduate years, Li, who plans to study applied mathematics, said he “can only brace myself,” but that “in the future, if I can avoid going to the United States to study, I will.”
“They make people too scared,” Li said.
The scene outside the embassy in Beijing captured the complicated feelings many Chinese students have toward studying in the United States. Hundreds of thousands still go each year, lured by the promise of a world-class education, and for many, a deep admiration for America’s professed values of openness and diversity. But they must reckon with the fact that many in the United States may not share that admiration.
A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said that the United States was “using ideology and national security as an excuse” to harm Chinese students.
“This politically discriminatory practice by the U.S. side exposes the lie of the so-called ‘freedom and openness’ that the U.S. has always advertised,” the spokeswoman, Mao Ning said, adding that China had communicated its displeasure to the Americans.
Even before Rubio’s announcement that the United States would begin revoking student visas, “including those with ties to the Communist Party of China or those studying in critical fields,” Chinese students and their families were uncertain about their prospects for studying in the U.S.. Two days earlier, Rubio had ordered a pause on new interviews for student and exchange visas.
In 2020, during his first term, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation banning students from certain Chinese universities from graduate study in the United States, saying those universities had ties to China’s military. The parameters of that proclamation, which remains in effect, were vague, but it has been used mostly to deny visas to those in fields such as the physical sciences, engineering and computer science, according to researchers.
But the effect of the earlier measure was relatively limited, resulting in the revocations or denials of about 3,000 visas between 2020 and 2021, according to U.S. government data.
Chinese students were by far the most populous group of international students in the United States until the 2023-24 school year, with many of those students, especially at the graduate level, in STEM fields. Though the number of Chinese students has begun to decline in recent years, amid heightened U.S.-China geopolitical tensions, interest has remained strong.
India sent 331,602 international students to pursue higher education in the U.S. in 2023-2024, a 23% increase from the prior year. China sent 277,398 students that year, a 4% decline, but remained the top country for undergraduates, 87,551, and for “non-degree” students, 5,517, who enroll in exchange, post-doctorate and visiting scholar programs.
China sent 51,131 students to California in 2023-2024, leading the 28,172 from India. 6,761 from South Korea, 5,071 from Taiwan and 3,803 from Canada. The total number of international students in those five countries accounts for more than two-thirds of the total international students in the state.
In the Fall 2024 term, the University of California enrolled about 17,800 Chinese students, including 3,627 from UC Davis, 3,492 from UC San Diego, 2,925 from UC Irvine, 2,281 from UC Berkeley and 2,208 from UCLA.
The California State University system had 750 Chinese students, including 136 at San José State, the most in the system, followed by 83 at San Francisco State, 71 at San Diego State, 66 at CSU Northridge and 61 at Cal Poly Pomona.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
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