They found a very receptive audience in the admissions offices of American public universities. Public funding for higher education has been shrinking for several decades, but during the financial crisis of 2008 that steady decline turned into a sudden plunge.
California was a prime example of the trend. Between 2007 and 2012, California state support for public higher education (including the UC system and the parallel California State University system) dropped by $2 billion, a cut of over 30 percent.7 School administrators scrambled to make up the difference, but lawmakers proved indifferent to their pleas, and any attempt to raise tuition was met with protests. Henry Brady, dean of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, described the dilemma facing these schools.
“You’ve got a budget constraint, costs are going up, state funding is going down or staying steady, and you’re not allowed to increase tuition,” Brady told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re producing a Cadillac education for the cost of a Chevy, and the state’s saying you should do it at a motorcycle price. At some point you have to ask, ‘What’s realistic?’”
With their backs up against the financial wall, public universities quickly began ramping up out-of-state and international student enrollment. The logic is straightforward: these students often pay around triple the tuition of local students and generally receive no financial aid. During the 2014–15 school year, local undergraduate students at UC Berkeley paid roughly $13,328 in tuition, with 55 percent of those local students qualifying as low-income and thus paying no tuition at all. Their out-of-state and international classmates put down $36,833 for the same education and were generally excluded from public financial aid.8 Theoretically, every Chinese student who enrolled could effectively subsidize the tuition of two of her California classmates.
The stage was set for the great Chinese student boom.
Between 2008 and 2012 Chinese enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities grew by over 20 percent every year, according to the Institute for International Education. By 2013, total Chinese enrollment was more than triple the levels before the 2008 financial crisis, and during the 2017–18 school year, China set a record with over 360,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The country had vaulted past India as the top source of international students in the United States, and by 2017 accounted for more students in the U.S. than the next five countries combined.9
Big state schools, many of them in the Midwest, absorbed the largest number of Chinese students. The University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign emerged as the unlikely leader in total Chinese enrollment—the school went from hosting just 37 Chinese undergraduates in the year 2000 to enrolling nearly 3,000 by 2014.10 Flagship public campuses in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio all followed the same pattern, throwing open their doors to students from across the Pacific.
But at a statewide level, California led the nation with more than 60,000 students from the People’s Republic. Between 2007 and 2017, Chinese enrollment at the ten campuses of the University of California system (UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.) multiplied by a factor of nearly ten.11 At the start of the 2017–18 school year, 22,325 Chinese students were enrolled across the UC campuses, more than double the number of African American students in the system.
FERRARIS AND CHINESE TAKEOUT
And when these students arrived, many of them did so in style. Professor Stanley Kwong had a front-row seat to the changing demographics of Chinese students. After greeting those first Chinese students at Princeton in 1978, Professor Kwong had spent the intervening thirty years as a global marketing executive for IBM. Following his retirement from IBM in 2009, he returned to academia as a professor at the University of San Francisco (USF), a private Jesuit school near the center of the city. Professor Kwong was beginning to see more and more Chinese students in his marketing classes, but it was their after-hours activities that attracted the most attention.
At the time, Professor Kwong frequently appeared as a guest on local Cantonese radio stations, discussing Chinese economics and politics. Many of his listeners lived in the Richmond neighborhood abutting USF, a quiet part of town home to many elderly immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Beginning around 2013, Professor Kwong started to get more callers in his radio programs complaining about one thing: the sound of Ferrari engines at night.
As students from mainland China increased at USF, Chinese restaurants in Richmond began adapting to the new patrons, swapping out Cantonese seafood dishes for the spice of Sichuan cuisine. They also expanded their hours, with some staying open until three a.m. to catch the students returning from a night of karaoke. The bustle of normal business was one thing for elderly neighbors, but these late-night crews often announced their presence by gunning their engines.
“If a Ferrari is driving in your neighborhood,” Professor Kwong told me, “you notice that because of the roar, right?”
Chinese students were by no means universally rich. Many middle-class Chinese parents had worked hard and saved up for decades to give their kids a chance to study in America. Some of those students spent two years at American community colleges, often working side jobs on nights and weekends, for the chance to transfer to a place like UCLA.12 Even among students from wealthy backgrounds, most opted to keep a low profile and blend in on campus. For many of their families, a diploma from a top U.S. college stood right at the intersection of an up-by-your-bootstraps American dream and deeply held Confucian values about the paramount importance of education.
But the Ferrari-driving cohort were the most noticeable to outsiders, in part because of how different they appeared from the humble PhDs of generations past. Tim Lin had arrived in America just as the transition got under way, and College Daily documented the shifting profile of Chinese students on American campuses.
“Ten years ago nobody bought Mercedes, BMW, or luxury brands,” Tim Lin told me on my first visit to his office headquarters. “They bought second-, third-, or even fourth-hand 1995 Toyota Corollas. But right now, it’s 2015. We see a lot of students fly first-class to the U.S. When they arrive in the U.S. they’ve already bought the [luxury] car. They ask the students who are already there to buy the car first and just give them the car at the airport.”
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?
It wasn’t just money that separated these Chinese students from their predecessors. They were also younger, less academically elite, and far less likely to stay in the U.S. long-term.
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, very few Chinese students enrolled in U.S. undergraduate programs. Instead, the vast majority of Chinese students at American universities were pursuing graduate studies, often PhDs in technical fields. These scholars represented the cream of the academic crop in China: products of prestigious institutions like Tsinghua or Peking University, with a track record of excellence that gained them entrance to top American research programs.
And when this group earned their degrees, they almost always stayed to work in the country. One study by the National Science Foundation showed that of Chinese students who had earned PhDs in the United States from 2002 to 2004, 86 percent of them were still in America a decade after graduating. That retention rate was tied with India for the highest of any country, and nearly triple the 32 percent stay rate of South Korean doctoral recipients.
But after 2008, all of these markers began to shift. More Chinese high school students began applying directly to U.S. colleges. They were not necessarily the highest-performing students at their schools, but rather students who could afford to enroll in international high school programs. In 2011, the number of Chinese undergrads in the UC system surpassed the number of graduate students for the first time, with that milestone replicated at the national level a couple years later.13 Within a few years of earning a bachelor’s degree, many of these students returned to China.
Chinese people who study abroad