Had the COVID-19 pandemic never occurred, Yang Lili, a student from Hubei Province, would be preparing for her doctoral degree dissertation at Oxford University in the U.K.

The truth is, she cannot return to her campus and has been learning online since she came home for the Spring Festival holiday earlier this year. University of Sussex student Zhang Zhou chooses to stay in Brighton on England’s south coast, but he too is worried. Being the first in his class to wear a face mask, he and other Chinese students have applied to their school to take online courses out of safety concerns.

Today, China has the largest number of overseas students in the world, with some 1.5 million in learning and researching programs abroad. With only slim prospects of returning to the campus, some scholars have proposed to allow overseas students to transfer to domestic universities of similar rankings.

Some U.S. universities with close ties to domestic colleges have better choices for their students. NYU Shanghai recently announced that their campus will welcome 3,100 Chinese students originally bound for the campuses in NYC and Abu Dhabi in the fall semester, who will join 1,700 students on the Shanghai campus. Likewise, Cornell University also said their international students can choose to study temporarily at local universities in a dozen countries, including Tsinghua and Peking universities in China.

But those are the lucky few.

Of the nearly 14,400 students polled in an online survey by news portal ifeng.com in mid August, about 63 percent said they could not return to school in fall, 67 percent said they were unsatisfied with online learning, and 22 percent said they were considering the option of learning at a domestic university.

Back in May, Ni Minjing, a Shanghai education official, submitted a written proposal to the national Political Consultative Conference session, calling for a transfer system for overseas students to domestic universities.

The proposal has caught the attention of many, including Lu Xiaodong, a researcher with the Graduate School of Education, Peking University. “We had precedents of transferring between schools, which has now become an urgent necessity that needs to be taken into consideration,” Lu said.

China’s Ministry of Education in 2016 issued a series of regulations concerning the management of college students. One article stipulates that students faced with special difficulties that hinder them from continuing their schooling, such as diseases, may be allowed to transfer to another school.

“Some overseas students are facing the high risk of being infected with COVID if they stay abroad, and some others find it difficult to pay their tuitions since the pandemic has dealt a blow to their family financially,” he said. “Theoretically, we shall allow these students to transfer to a domestic college.” (Li Dan)