A Trump administration announcement Wednesday that it would “aggressively” begin revoking visas for Chinese students confronts universities across the U.S. with the prospect of a hit to their finances and talent pool.
The move comes on top of a push to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students as part of the president’s battle with the school. The Trump administration has also paused new student-visa interviews while it prepares new measures to vet applicants’ social-media accounts, according to a State Department cable.
American universities significantly increased their enrollment of Chinese students in the years following the 2008-09 financial crisis, when many suffered budget shortfalls. Typically, Chinese undergraduates pay full tuition, a critical source of revenue for universities.
One in every four international students comes from China, and Chinese students form a particularly large share of the student body at top U.S. schools. After they graduate, many assume key roles in U.S. science and engineering endeavors.
A big decline in Chinese enrollment could severely cut into schools’ bottom line and damage U.S. competitiveness, say U.S. experts. “The economic costs are apparent,” said Yingyi Ma, a sociologist at Syracuse University who studies international students in the U.S. “The talent cost has even graver consequences.”
Scrutiny of students from China has intensified in the months since President Trump returned to the White House. In the past few months, Republican lawmakers have called for a halt to student visas for Chinese nationals as well as stripping them of access to national labs over national-security concerns.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday the U.S. will revoke visas of students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. Many Chinese students had already started looking elsewhere. For the past six years, the U.K. has been the most popular studying-abroad destination for Chinese students, according to a recent report by New Oriental Education & Technology Group.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Thursday condemned Washington’s action as politically motivated and discriminatory.
Biggest buyer
China was for years the No. 1 supplier of international students to U.S. universities. More international students now come from India than China, though China still sends the most undergraduates.
That means China remains the largest buyer of education-related services, including spending on tuition and books, from the U.S., at $14.3 billion in 2023, 21% more than the $11.8 billion spent by students from India, and more than six times as much as students from South Korea, another major supplier of international students to the U.S.
In 2023, education-related services made up 5% of U.S. services exports to the world, while they were 31% of service exports to China.
Studies have shown that suspending visas for foreigners undermines U.S. innovation. In the 1920s, Congress introduced a country-specific quota system that cut immigration to the U.S. by more than 80%. As a result, fewer foreign scientists came to the U.S., which led to a sharp decline in inventions, according to research by New York University professors published in 2020. The damage persisted into the 1960s, their paper said.
STEM drain
Suspicion has ramped up in particular around Chinese students studying science, technology, engineering and math, the largest chunk of Chinese students in the U.S., as the U.S. and China lock horns in an escalating competition over technological and geopolitical supremacy.
Sen. Jim Risch (R., Idaho) in January characterized every STEM student from China as an “agent of the Chinese Communist Party.”
A select House committee on China, which last week demanded information from Harvard about its partnership with Chinese entities, earlier this year asked six universities for information about the schools’ Chinese graduate students in STEM programs, such as their alma maters and funding sources, and questioned their involvement in federally funded research.
Student groups dispute a contention lawmakers have made, that Chinese STEM students rush to take their know-how back to China after graduation, saying that despite pressure they have faced, many go to great lengths to be able to remain. In 2023, 83% of the Chinese STEM graduates who obtained their doctoral degrees between 2017 and 2019 were still in the U.S., well above the average rate.
Of the top 15 American universities by STEM programs that publish their international student profiles, Chinese students are the largest foreign student group at all but one university and make up nearly half at six.
Steven Kivelson, a Stanford University theoretical physicist, in an April virtual event called China the single most important pipeline of talent. “All of this is very much at risk now,” he said.
Write to Shen Lu at shen.lu@wsj.com, Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com and Ming Li at ming.li@wsj.com