For American Colleges, China Could Be the New Travel Ban — but Worse

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Anxiety has been rampant about the “Trump effect,” the idea that the president’s travel ban and anti-foreigner rhetoric could discourage — or prevent — top students and scholars from coming to the United States and damage the standing of American higher education globally.

But perhaps American colleges should be bracing for something even more ominous on the horizon — call it the “China effect.”

Consider this: The Trump administration in recent months has tightened rules for Chinese visa-holders in some STEM fields and reportedly has considered barring all Chinese students. Public officials, including the director of FBI, have warned of universities’ vulnerability to Chinese espionage, and Congress has threatened to withhold certain federal grants from colleges with Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-funded language centers. Amid heightening geopolitical tensions, some institutions are reconsidering their research ties in China.

And a potential economic slump in China should be raising alarms in American admissions offices, threatening to turn off the spigot of Chinese students who have flooded American campuses and buoyed bottom lines for the past decade.

To be sure, the travel ban and a number of Trump-administration changes in visa rules have complicated colleges’ efforts to recruit and hire abroad. Since the 2016 election, the number of new international students coming to the United States has fallen.

Still, the Trump effect could pale next to a chilling of the relationship between Chinese and American higher education. The connections — student enrollments, joint degree programs, and research partnerships, among others — are deep, numerous, and, often, lucrative. One in three international students in the United States is from China. A recent American Council on Education survey of colleges’ global efforts found that China was far and away the top priority.

“Institutions have gone all in on China,” says Kevin Kinser, head of education-policy studies at Pennsylvania State University and an expert in international education. He points to a number of colleges that have been reassessing their ties with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist and dissident. But their partnerships with China are too broad and diffuse to be easily severed, he says.

“It’s almost the classic example of too big to fail,” Kinser says. “With China, the relationships are existential.”

Security and Naïveté

But it will be equally hard for higher education not to get sucked into the showdown between Beijing and Washington, says Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. While the two countries disagree on much, both see innovation and knowledge as central to 21st-century power. “Universities,” Daly says, “can’t sit this one out.”

An initial target of the U.S. government has been Confucius Institutes, the language and cultural centers, funded by the Chinese government, on about 100 American campuses. Federal lawmakers have accused the centers of being hubs for espionage and propaganda arms of the Chinese government, and have pressed for them to register as foreign agents. A defense spending bill enacted last summer prohibited colleges with Confucius Institutes from using federal funds for Chinese-language training.

In the past year, more than a half dozen universities have announced they will shutter their Confucius Institutes. One of the most recent, the University of Rhode Island, directly linked the decision to close to the potential loss of federal dollars.

Not all of the closures, however, have been responses to pressure from public officials. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced it would not renew its Confucius Institute in December, after months of deliberation. The reason was academic freedom, says Mary E. Gallagher, a professor of political science and director of the university’s Center for China Studies. The structure of the institutes gives the Chinese government too much control over their programming, Gallagher says.

A recent report from the Hoover Institution, written by some of the foremost China experts in the United States, also criticized the Confucius Institutes, calling for more transparency in the contracts establishing them and for adherence to American academic standards.

Daly, who was part of the working group that wrote the report, says he expects more institutes to close. While they do fill gaps in language training on many campuses, administrators may decide they are not worth the headache, he says.

Meanwhile, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has said universities are susceptible to Chinese spying — and suggested that higher education is not doing enough about it.

“The level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues,” Wray said during a congressional hearing last year. “They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere. But they’re taking advantage of it.”

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Sarah Spreitzer, director of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, says college leaders are aware that U.S. intelligence officials have concerns. But in meetings the officials have not gone into specifics, making it difficult for universities to shore up particular vulnerabilities, she says.

ACE and other higher-education organizations have called on Kirstjen M. Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, to convene new meetings of the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council, a group of college presidents and academic leaders set up during the Obama administration to offer advice on student-visa and other security-related issues. The council had fallen dormant but was re-established last year by Nielsen. It could provide a forum for higher-education and security officials to discuss such issues, Spreitzer says.

“We want to know how we can proactively address specific concerns without having broad policies mandating” colleges’ action imposed by Congress or the Trump administration, she says.

Educators are also worried that intelligence agencies’ unfamiliarity with college and university operations and complex research could lead to overreach or mistakes, such as when federal prosecutors wrongly charged a Chinese-born Temple University professor with selling scientific secrets to China.

But Daly suggests that some of the security officials’ and lawmakers’ discomfort stems not from Chinese students’ and researchers’ gaining access to research secrets — foreign nationals have long been prohibited from working on classified projects and other sensitive research — but rather from their acquiring information that could help advance Chinese national and economic interests. Higher education’s fundamental openness is at odds with a worldview that sees China as a zero-sum competitor.

“They think, Why should American universities be training China’s top minds in things like AI when they will then just compete with the U.S. globally?” Daly says. “After all, during the Cold War, we weren’t training Soviet scientists in nuclear physics.”

Trump-administration officials could set rules that would bar Chinese students from certain fields deemed important to American interests, Daly says. That step could be disastrous for American universities. China is the largest source of doctoral students from abroad, many of whom are concentrated in critical scientific fields that attract few Americans. And, notes Daly, such a move would do little to prevent China from gaining the restricted knowledge, which is available by reading scientific journals or hiring graduates from other countries.

Feuding Governments

Still, the threats to Sino-American higher-education partnerships aren’t coming from just one side.

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has increased oversight of its universities, mandating a more nationalist curriculum and cracking down on dissident scholars. Some professors who regularly work in China or with Chinese colleagues say they have noticed a more restrictive environment there, and monitoring of foreign researchers may have increased. China also is taking a harder look at overseas collaborations. Last summer the Ministry of Education ended 234, or one-fifth, of its international university partnerships, including more than 25 with American colleges.

While the government cited academic standards and quality as the reason for the closures, there’s no reason it couldn’t shut down such partnerships for ideological reasons or as part of a diplomatic stand-off with the United States.

Students, too, could get caught up in broader political disputes. Thus far, the restrictions — or their threat — have come from the American side. In May the Trump administration began limiting the duration of visas for Chinese students and researchers in certain sensitive fields, requiring them to reapply annually. It was later revealed that officials had considered, but ultimately shelved, a blanket ban on Chinese students in the United States.

But China could also limit Americans’ ability to study there, or restrict its students from going to the United States, a move that could be financially devastating to many colleges. Nafsa: Association of International Educators estimates that Chinese students contribute $12 billion annually to the American economy in tuition, living expenses, and spin-off jobs.

There’s already some precedent for such a move: After the University of California at San Diego invited the Dalai Lama to speak at commencement, in 2017, China retaliated by banning students and scholars with funding from the Chinese government’s China Scholarship Council from attending the university.

“China can be heavy-handed, or it can find a more sophisticated way to discourage students and scholars from coming to America,” says Philip G. Altbach, former director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

In the end, though, the real, looming threat to student flows from China could be economic and personal. This week the tech giant Apple cited “the magnitude of the economic deterioration” in China as the reason for severely reducing its revenue projections.

If Chinese families have less money to buy iPhones, they might struggle with an even more expensive purchase — American college degrees. The vast majority of Chinese students in the United States are enrolled in undergraduate or master’s programs, for which they pay most costs, and sometimes all of them.

For now, there is no sign of a fall-off. The number of Chinese students enrolled at American colleges increased last year, albeit more modestly than in years past.

While their governments may be feuding, Chinese and American academics are continuing to collaborate. Indeed, Gallagher, the Michigan professor, says her university has seen an uptick in visits by Chinese delegations interested in setting up partnerships.

If anything, the current moment argues for more working with — and more learning about — China, not less, Gallagher says. “It’s absolutely critical Americans have some degree of knowledge about China, whether you think they’re our next big friend or our next big enemy.”

Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.