From China to America. Then What?

Max Whittaker for The Chronicle

By the time she got the official news, Wendy Wu already knew.

The lottery had happened weeks earlier, the annual drawing held by the U.S. government to award H1-B visas, the work permits for highly skilled foreigners. The tech company that had hired Wendy as a software designer after she graduated from Michigan State University had agreed to sponsor her, and although there were two applicants for every visa, she was optimistic about her odds. “I’m a happy person,” she says. “I think the best version of the future.”

But as the weeks ticked by, her confidence faltered. The phone call, when it finally came, was a formality.

When she had arrived five years earlier from Guangzhou, China, she had crammed everything she needed in just two suitcases. Now the life she had built in America was a lot harder to pack up. “I couldn’t leave,” she says, “with two suitcases.”

Over the past decade, an unprecedented number of young Chinese students — nearly 330,000 in the past academic year alone, the largest influx from a single country ever — have come to study on American campuses. For these students, and for the families who invest, sometimes everything, in their education, an American degree has been seen as a golden ticket. A ticket, they hope, to help them stand out in the hypercompetitive and overheated Chinese job market. Or a ticket out of a country where both the political future and the air are often opaque.

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As more and more Chinese students have begun to collect diplomas from American colleges, however, these expectations have met a sometimes less than rosy reality. As Wendy discovered, staying on in the United States can be tough, even for talented graduates in sought-after fields — and the recent election results don’t seem to offer much promise for the easing of immigration restrictions.

What’s more, here in China, a foreign degree hasn’t always conveyed the hoped-for advantage. For all the Western-educated entrepreneurs and bilingual businessmen in Shanghai and Shenzhen, there are those who have returned from abroad to under- or unemployment. One of the biggest challenges? The sheer number of returnees, some 400,000 last year, and growing. The surge, one of China’s leading think tanks recently concluded, has meant fierce competition for the still relatively small pool of internationally focused jobs.

While the flood of Chinese students to American colleges isn’t likely to dry up anytime soon, recruitment could be affected if graduates return home with less than they bargained for. Much of the conversation in the United States is about outcomes and the value of college, after all — why should Chinese students and families be immune to such concerns?

All those golden tickets American colleges have been printing may be showing a little tarnish.

Wendy had two weeks to figure out her future.

All international students are allowed to work in the United States for at least one year after graduation, through a program known as optional practical training, or OPT. But Wendy’s year was coming to a close. She had banked everything on securing an H1-B. She had just days to figure out a Plan B.

This wasn’t the first crisis she had dealt with since going to America. A year earlier, after graduating with honors in creative advertising from Michigan State, she had gotten an offer from an ad agency in Minneapolis. To start working, though, international students must get a special work-authorization card from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Wendy’s card was lost in the mail.

Frantic, she called every local post office and mail-transit center. Nothing. Finally she searched online, found the postmaster general’s personal email address, and sent a plea. An assistant called back, and three days later her work card arrived. The same day, the company, saying it couldn’t wait any longer, rescinded the job offer.

Still, she eventually landed on her feet, and with an employer in Austin, Tex., who was willing to sponsor her for a work visa.

[Buy a reprint of this article and two more exploring the relationship between Chinese students and American colleges.]

But for all Wendy’s optimism, the odds of winning the H1-B lottery have been getting longer. The cap on the number of visas granted annually, 85,000, hasn’t been raised in a dozen years. Meanwhile, the number of applicants has continued to increase. In 2014, when Wendy was in the lottery, there were 172,500 candidates. For the 2016 lottery, 236,000 people applied.

Because the federal government doesn’t distinguish whether the H1-B applicants had been on student visas, it’s difficult to know how many of them graduated from American colleges. Under federal law, student-visa applicants are not supposed to intend to remain in the country after graduation. But there’s every reason to think that, like Wendy, many hope to land jobs and do just that. In the past decade, the number of recent graduates in the OPT program has shot up by 254 percent.

By contrast, international enrollments, while at an all-time high, rose 79 percent in the same period.

Last year there were more than 52,000 Chinese graduates on OPT alone. One in every six student-visa holders from China is, in fact, working, not studying, in the United States.

Zhou Na for The Chronicle

Even for those who don’t want to stay in the United States long term, getting some work experience can be critical. Much like their American counterparts, Chinese employers are looking for on-the-job know-how, not just study skills, in their new hires. As more graduates return from overseas, real-world connections and a familiarity with the American market can matter just as much as the degree itself.

The trouble is, while Chinese students are hungry for American work experience, American companies aren’t necessarily looking to recruit them. Especially for smaller firms, the paperwork involved in hiring an international student can seem burdensome, and the legal costs of sponsoring that worker for an H1-B, about $5,000, are prohibitive. What’s more, in today’s political climate, the appearance of favoring an applicant from abroad may be a nonstarter for some companies.

For all the talk of a global marketplace, with few exceptions American employers don’t see an advantage to an employee who speaks a second language or brings knowledge of another culture. Instead, the international graduates who have the best chance of getting hired, especially long term, are those with specialized expertise in areas like accounting, engineering, or information technology. Better to have SQL on your résumé than Mandarin.

“If there are 100 jobs for American people, for you there are 10,” said one Chinese student in the midst of a job search. Said another who was preparing to go back to China, “I feel like there’s a glass ceiling for me here.”

Some colleges are trying to help their international students. The career-services office at the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, publishes a manual for employers on hiring international students, both full time and as interns. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign holds a career fair for international students and for Americans looking to work abroad.

But most graduates, like Wendy, find themselves on their own. Her employer said she might be able to get hired on at its Chinese subsidiary, though at a salary far less than she made in her current position and with no guarantee that she’d be able to transfer back to the United States.

Her boyfriend, Joe, a fellow Chinese graduate of Michigan State, had gone through the H1-B lottery two years earlier. Though he’d been successful, he had warned Wendy to have a backup plan. Now he made her an offer: Let’s get married. She wouldn’t be able to work, but she’d be able to stay.

Wendy thought about it. Unlike many Chinese students, she hadn’t come to the United States set on staying. She had arrived as a raw 18-year-old, and America had formed her as a person. Her life, personally and professionally, was in the United States. “It would be hard adapting, changing again,” she says. “Everything I learned here ultimately will be thrown away.”

She loved Joe and knew he loved her. But though they had been friends for years, they had been dating for only a few months. Marriage was a big decision, a forever decision, she thought. “Marriage should be two independent people who are perfectly fine on their own but decide to build a life together. I don’t want to be the dependent in a marriage.”

She said no. There had to be another way.

When William Luo started at the University of Vermont in 2010, Chinese students were few and far between there — just 35 undergraduates in a student body of nearly 10,500.

Arriving early for a summertime bridge program, William and his Chinese classmates got the warmest of welcomes. They met with the mayor and the governor and that most iconic of Vermonters, Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Few people William knew had studied abroad, and he had a sense he was part of something special. “It felt like we had the golden chance.”

Flash forward to December 2014. William had returned home to Shanghai, after graduating from Vermont and earning a master’s in finance from the University of Birmingham, in Britain.

Everywhere he turned, it seemed, were others who had studied overseas. He had counted on his foreign credentials to give him an edge when applying for jobs. “At first I was thinking study abroad is a privilege, an advantage, but now. … " It wasn’t so clear.

In fact, the Chinese Ministry of Education says about three-quarters of Chinese students who go to college overseas return to China.

If they do, they’re likely to pass through the doors of the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange, a quasi-governmental organization that supports international study. Che Weimin, the center’s deputy director general, started its foreign-degree verification service in 1991, shortly after he returned from studying in Britain. Today the service is so popular that Mr. Che, greeting a guest, opts to take the stairs to the sixth-floor offices in Haidian, Beijing’s university district, rather than try to squeeze onto one of the overtaxed elevators.

Despite signs at the entrance urging visitors to take a number, there are throngs two and three deep at many of the clerk windows that line the floor’s perimeter. Degree verification isn’t compulsory, but it’s sought by many employers who want assurances that unfamiliar foreign institutions listed on the résumés of prospective hires are on the up and up — and by recent returnees who want to prove their bona fides. A generation ago, the trickle of Chinese students who went abroad mainly attended a select group of research universities. Now, Mr. Che estimates, the center processes about 100,000 student records a year.

Zhou Na for The Chronicle

The heated competition for jobs isn’t just about surging volume, however. The Center for China and Globalization, a Chinese research organization, notes that returning students tend to congregate in a handful of first-tier cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. And they are massed in a relatively narrow number of fields — a quarter of all Chinese students at American colleges are business or management majors, while 20 percent are studying to be engineers.

Taken individually, these decisions are sound. Families, after all, have spent hundreds of thousands of yuan to educate their only sons and daughters, to get them into the best schools, to send them abroad. They want to make good on their investment. The country’s cosmopolitan eastern metropolises offer the greatest professional possibilities. In China’s booming economy, what could be more promising than a business career? But the result is 400,000 graduates a year, all grasping for the same ring.

There are also whispers that the caliber of the students who go abroad today doesn’t meet that of earlier years. Actually, these aren’t whispers — stories of haidai, or seaweed, so called because they cannot find success at home or abroad, are a staple of Chinese news coverage. Some graduates say they have had to fight perceptions that their time overseas was just one long vacation.

“I thought their English would be better,” says one Beijing-based human-resources director. “After four to six years, I thought they’d be like native speakers.” Maybe, she speculates, with so many Chinese students going abroad, it was easy for them to lapse into Mandarin with one another.

William chose Vermont, in part, to avoid that temptation. He had studied English for 10 years but felt that if he didn’t immerse himself in the language, he’d never really speak it.

And he wanted, he says, to learn America. He roomed with a student from Queens, N.Y. Though he studied business administration, he pushed himself to take classes outside his major. He was the only Chinese student in his American-politics section, writing his final paper on lobbying — not something that happens in Beijing’s People’s Congress — during the failed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. He found himself thinking differently about gay rights after a professor in another course talked about the effect of Vermont’s same-sex-marriage law on his own life.

William talks of his experiences in accented but fluid English, reaching easily for metaphor and peppering his conversation with slang. So he was at first perplexed, then frustrated, when filling out an application for a banking job in China. English-speakers wanted, the job description said. The online form asked if he had taken the national English exam for college graduates and, if so, what his score was. William looked for a third option, to note that he had studied in an English-speaking country, but there was none. He’d had to prove his English proficiency just to get into an American college, and he was proud of how far he’d come in four years away. English was one of his greatest assets, but without having completed the national test, he felt sure his application, likely one of thousands, would be passed over.

Zhou Na for The Chronicle

Seemingly minor hiccups like that can trip up Chinese students searching for work back home. Word-processing programs and document sizes in China are different, so a résumé formatted in Word might not properly scan in automated résumé-collection systems. Prime hiring season for college seniors is in the fall, after those studying abroad have returned to campus; many Chinese companies demand in-person interviews. And foreign-educated students often have American-sized — i.e., inflated — salary expectations, not least because of all their families have spent on their degrees.

Other misalignments are more fundamental. Western employers expect prospective workers to talk about their individual achievements and accolades, to sell themselves. In China, where, even at multinational firms, many of those doing the hiring are local, the emphasis is on teamwork, and such talk can come off as boastful. Career-services offices at American colleges, used to helping students apply for jobs in Chicago, not China, may be giving graduates improper guidance. An adviser at a Midwestern university with a large Chinese population says he realized he was going to have to rethink his coaching and workshops for Chinese students after visiting the country for the first time.

Even as it modernizes, the Chinese economy still operates very much on personal connections and relationships, or guanxi. Because going abroad can disrupt those networks, staying put can have its advantages. About half of Chinese-educated students find a job before graduation, while those returning from overseas typically take about six months to find a position, according to Lockin China, a job-placement firm.

Back at his parents’ home, William tried to stay positive as his job search stretched on. It was difficult, though, when his phone would buzz with messages from friends. “I got the job!” they wrote. “What about you?” Yeah, what about me? he wondered.

Finally, after six months, he got his break. He heard from a friend who worked at a state-owned company that made overseas investments, mainly in the energy sector: It was hiring. The requirements: A master’s in finance, check. Fluency in English, check. Overseas study or experience preferred — check!

Bypassing the initial application process, his friend sent William’s résumé straight to HR.

Wendy had always assumed she would go back to school, eventually. But after she turned down Joe’s proposal, she realized, eventually was now.

Scrambling, she enrolled at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco, using all her savings. For her the for-profit art school was a way station, a means to extend her student visa while she applied to more-rigorous academic programs for the following fall. She took classes in web development and animation, figuring they could help in a future job hunt.

She’d decided she wanted to study human factors and ergonomics, a discipline that marries psychology and engineering to understand how people relate to their environment and to better design products and systems for human use. Most people associate ergonomics with workplace cubicles, but experts in human factors do everything from helping to design the controls in airplane cockpits to figuring out the most effective time for doctors to give patients crucial post-operative medical advice.

Pursuing an engineering degree was a strange turn of events for someone who’d never been much good at math or science. Wendy’s struggles in those subjects, much weighted in Chinese university admissions, were one reason her parents had decided she should study abroad. Her mother, in fact, had wanted to send Wendy overseas for high school, knowing that her creative, headstrong daughter chafed in the regimented Chinese classroom. But her father had balked at the idea of Wendy’s leaving home so young — “I have only one child!” he cried — and so she had stayed in China until college.

Human factors appealed to Wendy’s itch to understand how the world around her worked, and how to improve it. “My high is when I make things better,” she says. “That’s what makes me happy, gets me out of bed in the morning.”

She was accepted to a master’s-degree program at San Jose State University. Even before she started classes, in the fall of 2015, she set her sights on one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious employers, a company that for all intents and purposes does not exist in China: Google.

That Google’s search engine is so ubiquitous worldwide makes its absence in China that much more remarkable. It has been shut down there for more than six years by China’s notorious internet censors, all but inaccessible to the average Chinese citizen.

It’s such restrictions, which have tightened under President Xi Jinping, that motivate a growing number of Chinese families to hope overseas study could lead to a life abroad, although most understandably hesitate to say so directly. “Before I went out, we had Facebook,” says one graduate who is applying to get a work visa to stay in the United States. “Now we are more cut off.”

Wendy, too, is circumspect about her home country. “Looking at it right now,” she says, “people do want accurate information, but they’re breathing toxic air. Priorities, right?”

Of course, the political environment in the United States has, in recent times, itself seemed poisonous, especially around issues of immigration and otherness. During last year’s election campaign, Donald J. Trump repeatedly vowed to build a wall to keep immigrants out, and across America’s struggling industrial heartland, many voters voiced anger at foreign competitors who, they said, were stealing their jobs.

Educators have been particularly concerned that such rhetoric, and Mr. Trump’s victory, could scare off international students and their tuition dollars. But Wendy says she thinks her vote, if she had one, might have gone to the Republican real-estate developer. She didn’t trust Hillary Clinton and the business with her private email server. Nor, like many millennials, did she buy into the idea that electing the first female president was reason enough to vote for Mrs. Clinton. And she doesn’t disagree entirely with Mr. Trump’s stance on immigration — illegal immigration.

People who overstay their visas or sneak across the border are, as she sees it, trying to do an end run around the system. With Mr. Trump, “there might be some change and pushback on illegal immigrants, which I think is a good thing.”

She had come to the country legally, paid her taxes, and followed its laws. It frustrated her to be labeled a job-taker, an interloper. In fact, a recent lawsuit, filed by a group of high-tech workers, accuses foreign graduates in the optional practical training program of snatching opportunities that would have gone to Americans.

Wendy found such anger misplaced. Thousands of technology-sector positions, she says, are going unfilled, and workers from overseas are helping meet the demand. (Whether or not there is a talent drought in the high-tech work force has, unsurprisingly, become embroiled in political debate.)

Besides, she wasn’t looking for a leg up. When, at the end of her first year of graduate school, she won a coveted Google internship, she knew she had earned it, through perseverance, focus, and hard work.

“This is a competitive market. Nothing’s handed to you,” she says. “Stop arguing about where I am. Look at how I got there.”

It was a Sunday night, but William was in his office.

Part of his job was to track news coming from the United States that might be relevant to his company’s investments, and that weekend, not long after the presidential election, had brought plenty of it. He was trying to parse the president-elect’s statements on energy policy, which could be a boost for his firm’s American clean-coal and shale-gas projects. On the other hand, what to make of Mr. Trump’s bellicose pronouncements about possible tariffs on Chinese goods? And then there was the matter of the call earlier in the weekend with Taiwan’s leader, upending decades of diplomatic protocol.

“I don’t know what’s next,” William said. He deadpanned, “Make America great again.”

There were so many unknowns. But the same could be said for China and its future.

After years of breakneck growth, there are signs that the country’s economy is slowing. It certainly is changing.

A generation earlier, an overseas returnee like William might have gone to work at a Western company looking to prosper in China. Last year, though, Chinese investment abroad was greater than foreign investment in China. Companies like the internet behemoth Tencent and Alibaba, China’s answer to Amazon, now hold recruitment sessions on American campuses.

Likewise, for years, the prize jobs in China had been with the government. Now fresh graduates are heading to investment banks, consulting firms, even start-ups. In incubator offices off one of Shanghai’s busiest streets — complete with open floor plan and beer keg — a young engineer who is developing an app for maternal and infant health explained that most of his classmates who’d remained in the United States were working for large companies or established technology firms. “Those who want to go out on their own,” he said, “come back to China.”

Perhaps as should be expected in a country where capitalism and centralized control coexist uneasily, the government has gotten into the start-up game, raising 2.2 trillion yuan, or nearly $340 billion, in venture-capital funds. Recruiting back “overseas talent” is a part of its broader efforts to spur a more innovation-driven economy, China watchers say.

Still, for many returning students, the culture shock of adjusting to the Chinese workplace has, at times, been nearly as profound as what they experienced going to the United States years earlier. The head of design at a Beijing robotics firm, recently back from California, says he is exasperated when his team members bite their tongues during brainstorming sessions. “I tell them when they speak frankly, I think we get a better solution, but they all just stare at me,” he says. “It’s the Chinese way to want a meeting to be smooth, in harmony.”

Another graduate of an American college, who works at a multinational company but with mostly Chinese colleagues, says he was taken aback when his co-workers plied the department’s most junior hire with menial tasks like making photocopies or running out to get dinner, on top of his regular work.

Critical discussion, challenging authority, open debate, all the values drummed into them in the American classroom are at odds with China’s hierarchical, deferential work culture.

But HR specialists at Chinese job-placement firms say that while foreign-educated employees may have a rockier start, there are signs that over time they outperform those from local universities. The graduate at the multinational firm, for example, has been promoted twice in little more than a year on the job. As more students return from overseas and move into senior positions, could that change the atmosphere and practices in Chinese workplaces? It remains to be seen.

William says he, too, has had to make adjustments, to learn not to be so “direct” when giving his opinions. But he enjoys his work and thinks it’s a good fit with his background. He has no complaints. Well, just one: His job is in Beijing. His family — his parents and his new wife — are in Shanghai.

William met Claire four years earlier, on a summer vacation from college. When he returned to campus, they struggled with the distance but sustained their relationship with marathon video chats every weekend. “I have a fate with her. She has a fate with me,” he says. “I promised her I will come back to Shanghai after I graduate, so she waited for me.”

In a way, she is still waiting, although a two-hour plane flight is a big improvement over 7,000 miles apart. Claire, who studied law, has a good job in Shanghai, and William tries to visit once or twice a month. After a couple of years, maybe he will be able transfer there.

This fall, the couple took their honeymoon, driving Highway 1 along the California coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was Claire’s first time in America; she loved outlet shopping.

William hadn’t been back since graduation. “I think I am getting old,” he says. He thought about how life might have been different if he’d stayed in the United States, if only for a few years. He and Claire have talked about the possibility of moving back if he were offered a transfer, although she was hesitant. What work would she do, he joked — run a Chinese restaurant?

But maybe the opportunity was still there. “She thought about it, and she kind of agrees,” he says, “if I have the chance.”

This time, getting married felt right to Wendy.

Both her parents and Joe’s were visiting for the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, and they decided to have a no-frills ceremony on February 6 at San Francisco City Hall. A Monday, but the dates were auspicious. Wendy promised her mother they would have a formal Chinese wedding back in Guangzhou — whatever her mother wanted, so long as she planned it.

She had never told her parents the full story about her struggles in America, just the glass-half-full version. I have the opportunity to go to graduate school, she had said three years earlier; not, In two weeks, I could get kicked out of the country. They worried too much. “If my mother knew the hardship I went through, she would drag my ass back to China to protect me.”

Now, though, things truly were looking up. In June she would graduate from San Jose State. She was talking with Google about a full-time position and had interviewed with Microsoft, too. As an engineering graduate, she’d be able stay and work via OPT for three years. Not that it mattered. Joe, a developer at Amazon, was in the process of getting his green card. They had bought a place of their own, in suburban Fremont. When she wasn’t trying to secure institutional-review-board approval for her thesis, she was negotiating with her mother over wedding-bed linens.

At 1,400 square feet, their new home was big enough to grow into. One day there would be a baby. And in the back of her mind, Wendy thought about her parents. They were only in their 50s now, but there would come a point when they could no longer take care of themselves. She, like Joe, like most Chinese of her generation, was an only child. Would she care for her parents in California, or would she one day return to them in China?

To stay or to go: It’s the decision that thousands of young Chinese must make. They go to America in pursuit of a degree, a better life. But years later, where best to lead that life? In the country that cradled them as children? In the one that welcomed them into its classrooms? Or neither?

For Wendy, it was the path she was on, to always be straddling both countries, both cultures. “I see myself as Chinese, but I’ve been here for so long I see myself as American,” she says. “I can see myself having kids here and growing old here.”

“Maybe there’s some middle nationality, Chi-merican.”

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.