By Ian Wilhelm

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle

Two issues dominated international education in 2013: a potential slowdown in the flow of foreign students to the United States and a heated debate over whether global partnerships threaten academic freedom.

The former is perhaps of most concern for campus leaders because of the financial boon foreign students bring to cash-strapped colleges. In 2011-12, the latest year data were available, 764,495 people traveled to the United States for study, contributing some $21.8-billion to the economy in tuition and living expenses. China had the most students at American colleges, sending more than 190,000. While the total number of international students continues to rise, college recruiters point to several signs that the overseas pipeline could be weakening.

The first hint of trouble came from the Council of Graduate Schools, which said in April that international graduate applications rose only 1 percent, the smallest growth in eight years. What’s more, after seven consecutive years of double-digit increases, the number of Chinese applications to graduate programs fell 5 percent. Debra W. Stewart, the council’s president, described the decline in applicants from China as “disturbing” and “precipitous.”

Worries about a possible decline have also been fueled by fallout from the Boston Marathon bombings in April. The death of Lingzi Lu, a Chinese graduate student at Boston University, in the attacks—and the increased scrutiny of student visas in their wake—may contribute to a perception that the United States is unsafe and unwelcoming to visitors, said some university administrators.

Ms. Lu was not made a target because of her nationality, but her death focused new attention on what is a common concern for overseas students: violence in the United States. Last year, when the British Council, the British government’s educational and cultural arm, polled students around the world about the most important factors in choosing a country in which to study, safety ranked among the top five. In the same survey five years earlier, it had barely registered. After the April bombings, some American college recruiters said they were being asked more questions about safety by prospective students and their parents.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security required border agents to conduct additional reviews of student visas. The move came after news that a Kazakh student, who was accused of hiding evidence for one of the bombing suspects, had been permitted to enter the country on an invalid student visa.

Questioned Alliances

But as many fretted about making sure the international-student market remains strong, new questions were being asked about whether such global ties have drawbacks.

New York University, for one, had to respond in June to complaints from Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident who was a visiting fellow at the university at the time, that it had asked him to leave under pressure from China. The blind human-rights activist warned that the request was a sign of China’s growing influence on American universities. “Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime,” he said in a written statement.

NYU, which is building a campus in Shanghai with support from the Chinese government, dismissed the allegations as “fictional.” But the episode highlighted the complicated, and somewhat tangled, relations American universities will have to negotiate as they work more deeply in China, which has limited protections for academic and political speech.

“It ain’t exactly American-style academic freedom,” said Cary Nelson, a past president of the American Association of University Professors, about the scholarly environment in China.

Another incident put a spotlight on international challenges to university collaborations. In February, the London School of Economics and Political Science abruptly canceled an academic conference on the Arab Spring that it had planned to hold in the United Arab Emirates, where several American universities have campuses and programs. It made that move after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on the neighboring kingdom of Bahrain—where a protest movement was harshly repressed with the support of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—be dropped from the program. The scheduled presenter, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a scholar on Arab politics at the London School of Economics, was denied entry to the country.

Weighing the Gains

To be sure, many administrators and professors say problems for Western universities working in other countries are to be expected and don’t diminish the value of establishing deep international links. According to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, there are some 200 foreign branch campuses operated primarily by universities from Australia, Britain, and the United States.

“If universities decided they could only go to countries with the same cultural and political values, they wouldn’t go abroad at all,” said Warren Fox, executive director for higher education at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, a Dubai government agency that accredits and regulates foreign higher-education institutions. “And I think they should, because of the benefits to students and to universities.”

Elsewhere in the world, the internationalization of higher education triggered other controversies. In Europe, steps to increase the use of English in university teaching, in part to attract more foreign students, were hotly debated. In France, a government plan to allow its universities to teach more classes in English was met with fierce opposition in Parliament, though it was eventually approved. And an Italian court said the Polytechnic University of Milan, one of the country’s top institutions, had to halt ambitious plans to make English the primary language of instruction for all graduate and many undergraduate courses.

But back in the United States, discussions will most likely be dominated by the value—and liability—of foreign branch campuses in 2014 and beyond. This fall two high-profile international efforts will welcome their inaugural classes: NYU’s program in Shanghai and Yale-NUS College, a liberal-arts institution in Singapore that Yale is helping to develop with the National University of Singapore. Both will offer supporters and critics an opportunity to see just how well American higher education can be transplanted to foreign lands.