An increasing number of Chinese students have put U.S. visa obstacles, along with social instability and climbing tuition fees, into perspective, and moved on to other global destinations for higher education as well as institutions at home, industry professionals have observed while looking back on 2019.

“Chinese students’ enthusiasm for American higher education has been dampened by the U.S. administration’s visa policy, which has delayed or denied entry to many of them, especially those aiming for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees,” said Annabelle Ding, admission representative at Columbia University School of Professional Studies, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

According to the non-partisan think tank Migration Policy Institute (MPI), new international student enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities dropped for the third year in a row, and the number of student visas issued to Chinese applicants went down by 54 percent in fiscal year 2018 from fiscal year 2015.

Not incidentally, the United States reportedly saw an increase of only 1.7 percent for Chinese students in fall 2018, the lowest in a decade. “Recent U.S. policies have affected its image and reputation, obstructed its exchange with other countries, and undermined its own interests,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters in November.

“Today, it is all the more important for us to create positive conditions for the exchange of students as well as people-to-people ties with an open and inclusive attitude,” Geng said.

Lindsay Zou founded offerbang.io to provide career education for international students and professionals, after dabbling in Wall Street as a financial executive upon completion of her schooling years in New York and Beijing.

“I’ve met Chinese students hurt by visa delay or denial. As a consequence, the upcoming ones are overshadowed. Seeing the hardship of studying and job-finding in the United States, they’d rather stay in China for higher education, relinquishing their overseas plans,” she said.

Lan Yang just won his master degree in computer science at Pace University this year and found a job as a product and user interface/user experience manager. Some of his Chinese friends and classmates were not as lucky as him. “As I know, you have to wait longer to get your student visa, which worries not only the students themselves but also their parents. For those who are still planning their studying trips to the United States, it is an omen clearly spelt — they react in no other way but jump to a conclusion that America is unfriendly toward Chinese students,” he said.

Months earlier, top universities like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Yale, Harvard and University of California, Berkeley voiced their concern that their government’s visa policy created a “toxic atmosphere” and ran counter to their doctrine of openness and transparency. Chinese students had always been welcomed by U.S. universities previously.

For the 10th consecutive year, China remained the largest source of international students in the United States in 2018-2019 with 369,548 students in undergraduate, graduate, non-degree and OPT programs, a 1.7-percent increase from the previous year, said the IIE report.

International students contributed US$44.7 billion to the country’s economy in 2018, an increase of 5.5 percent from the previous year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

(Xinhua)