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China’s college boom has helped boost US postgraduate education and local economies in college towns, according to a new study. The country’s massive higher education expansion – which lifted annual undergraduate enrolment in China from about 1 million in 1999 to 9.6 million by 2020 – resulted in waves of students going abroad and produced measurable effects inside US universities, according to a team at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The study said that for every 100 graduates in China, about three or four went on to study in the US – most of them in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) master’s programmes – helping to fuel an expansion in related courses at American universities. For every 100 Chinese master’s students, US universities added about one new STEM master’s programme, the study found. The study appeared to contradict claims made by some American politicians that Chinese students were “crowding out” their US peers. Last year Vice-President J.D. Vance told Fox News that wealthy foreign students – “some Chinese oligarchs paying US$100,000 a year” – were taking places from “middle-class American kids from the heartland” at the country’s best universities. But the researchers said the influx had helped create more places for American and other international students, describing the pattern as “crowding in”. “Our results reveal a notable pattern of crowd-in effects. Each additional Chinese master’s student is associated with an increase of approximately 0.26 American master’s students,” the team wrote in their working paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. The benefits were not just seen on campus, the study added, saying that college towns with greater numbers of Chinese students saw faster job creation and stronger local economies as a result of the money they generated. Denis Simon, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, said the study was “novel” for showing how domestic education policy in China could have international spillovers. By combining China’s college admissions records with US visa and university data, the researchers were able to quantify how Chinese education policies rippled across borders, he said. “It offers a valuable empirical piece to argue that China’s higher-education expansion has not only benefited China domestically, but also had meaningful effects on US higher education and local economies, reinforcing the ‘globalisation of talent and training’ dimension of Sino-US relations,” Simon said. Chinese students were part of a broader global flow of students, but “their sheer scale and their concentration in STEM fields make them uniquely consequential for cross-border educational and economic outcomes”, the researchers wrote. They warned that recent policy shifts, including stricter visa rules for study and postgraduate work as well as the increased scrutiny of Chinese applicants, could “dampen the crowding-in effects they generate for other international and American students, further hurting college town economies”. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the White House planned to “aggressively” revoke visas for Chinese nationals in sensitive research fields or those tied to government-funded programmes, citing national security concerns. In 2023, Chinese students contributed around US$14.3 billion to the US economy, according to Reuters. But the following year saw a sharp fall in the number of students – from 370,000 to around 277,000 – raising concerns that US universities would face a funding shortfall as a result.
