There isn’t comprehensive data on return rates among more recent arrivals, but a mix of statistical indicators and anecdotal evidence points to a sea change in decisions about whether to stay. In 2017, a record-setting 480,000 students returned to China after studying abroad. China’s Ministry of Education estimated in 2016 that return rates had risen to 70 to 80 percent beginning around 2013.14 Those numbers were approximately in line with the results of a survey on the postgraduation plans of Chinese students at Purdue University in Indiana: 57 percent planned to return to China after a few years in the U.S., while 9 percent wanted to return to China immediately and 13 percent hoped to stay in the U.S. indefinitely (21 percent said they didn’t know).15
Those shifting return rates reflect both a push (away from the U.S.) and a pull (back to China). A main factor pushing students to return is the increasing difficulty in obtaining H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill foreign citizens who have found a job in the United States. The United States caps the number of new H-1B visas each year, entering all applicants into a lottery that picks the lucky winners. Recent years have seen a steady rise in applications, while the 85,000-visa cap has remained unchanged. That means Chinese graduates who found jobs in the U.S. have seen their odds of “winning the lottery” to obtain a visa steadily fall.
But that push to return to China isn’t always as blunt as a visa rejection.
“When I graduated from college, I believed in American dreams: I can get a good living, a good future in America, we follow the rules, and blah blah blah,” Tim Lin told me. “But when we start to work we realize there is a glass [ceiling] for Chinese students.”
Tim bumped up against that glass in his first job out of college, at an accounting firm in San Jose, California. What initially looked like a promising gig quickly fizzled over cultural barriers. Tim felt lost during Sunday football parties with the firm’s partners, and what he saw at management levels told him the deck was stacked against Chinese and other Asians when it came to promotions.
Earlier generations of Chinese graduates often had to swallow their pride and stick with these jobs; their H-1B visa, and chance of obtaining a U.S. green card, depended on it. But China’s economic transformation and the wealthier family background of many of these students have changed that calculus. An American degree is no longer the golden ticket out of an impoverished country. For many of these students, especially those who are heirs to a successful family business, their earning potential is higher in their home country.
That reversal of fortunes is changing the way these students approach their time at school. In many places, the undergrad lifestyles of Chinese students in the U.S. are starting to resemble that of many Americans: a time to cut loose, have fun, and explore.
“They are enjoying the time studying there,” observed Tim. “They’re not pursuing some better life. They can have a better life back in China.”
“HIGHER EDUCATION HOLOCAUST” OR “UPWARD-MOBILITY MACHINE”?
Not everyone was so happy about these changes. In a 2014 editorial titled “UCSD Is Selling Our Seats to the Rich,” the student newspaper of Southwestern College, a community college in San Diego County, railed against the rise in foreign enrollment at the University of California, San Diego. Between the freshmen classes of 2007 and 2013, UCSD had multiplied its Chinese admissions by a factor of eight, from 258 to 2,099.16 The newspaper’s staff accused UCSD of perpetrating a “higher education holocaust” by simultaneously accepting progressively fewer transfer students from the local community college.
“UCSD flat out does not want Southwestern College students,” the editors wrote. “We do not bring in as much cash as foreign students. Guilty as charged.”
The accompanying cartoon showed UCSD’s chancellor sitting at a desk with overflowing boxes of applications labeled “out-of-state” and “foreign,” casually dropping applications from Southwestern College students in a paper shredder.
“UCSD has all but sealed shut the doors for first-generation college scholars from working-class families, most of them under-represented minorities,” the newspaper’s staff wrote. “No one here is accusing UCSD of intentional racism, but discrimination does not always burn crosses and wear hoods.”
Criticism of growing foreign enrollment also came in the more measured tone of a report from the California State Auditor. That report ran with the self-explanatory title “The University of California: Its Admissions and Financial Decisions Have Disadvantaged California Resident Students.” It accused the UCs of padding budgets by lowering admissions standards for out-of-state and foreign students, all while making things harder on local students.
“Despite a 52 percent increase in resident applicants, resident enrollment increased by only 10 percent over the last 10 years while nonresident enrollment increased by 432 percent,” the report stated.
The report took particular umbrage with a 2011 decision to change official admission standards for nonresidents: instead of requiring that they “generally be in the upper half of admitted students,” the UCs now only asked that nonresidents “compare favorably to California residents admitted.” As a result, between 2009 and 2014, additional tuition generated from nonresident enrollment (the amount over and above what local students pay) rose from $325 million to $728 million.17 During that period, the percentage of UC students from California had fallen from 89 to 81 percent.18
The California State Auditor used much of the remainder of the report to criticize the financial management of the UCs, accusing them of insufficiently adhering to recommendations from previous audits and paying excessive salaries to UC administrators. It recommended the legislature amend state law to cap nonresident enrollment at the UCs, and to make continued public funding for the system contingent on not exceeding those caps.
Predictably, UC leadership was not happy. In a strongly worded letter to the auditor, UC president Janet Napolitano rejected the fundamental premises of the report, arguing that the UCs essentially had no choice but to massively increase nonresident enrollment. She pointed out that the UCs have three main sources of funding: state appropriations (which were cut by 33 percent); resident tuition (which causes student protests when raised); and nonresident tuition (which the UCs increased to make up the difference). Using the auditor’s own estimate of $728 million in additional nonresident revenue, Napolitano argued that eliminating this sum would mean a 20 percent tuition hike for all local students.
Beyond pleading helplessness in the face of budget cuts, the UC response argued that it had actually expanded enrollment for disadvantaged students. From 2007 to 2016, the UC system increased its percentage of underrepresented minorities (17 to 25 percent), first-generation college students (36 to 42 percent), and Pell Grant recipients (a proxy for low- and middle-income families, 30 to 38 percent). At UCSD, the school charged with perpetrating the “higher education holocaust,” those three categories of students all held steady or increased.19
Those stats earned the UC system national recognition in The New York Times’s annual College Access Index, a ranking of schools “doing the most for the American dream,” based on tuition, enrollment, and graduation rates for low- and middle-income students. UC schools dominate the rankings, taking the top five spots in 2015 and 2017. The Times dubbed the UC system “California’s Upward-Mobility Machine.”
Yes, Chinese students were entering the UC system, but their tuition dollars were also a source of fuel that kept the machine running.
BLACK CATS ON SKYPE
It wasn’t just the sheer number of Chinese students that was causing frictions on American campuses. It was also how they got there.
Troubles first surfaced at USF during freshmen orientation in 2012. The school had begun ramping up Chinese enrollment a few years earlier, but some members