U.S. gun violence raises safety concerns for foreign students
Two students from China were among five students critically injured in a mass shooting at Michigan State University, reviving concerns that American gun violence could deter international students from wanting to come to the United States.
Three other students were killed in the February 13 shooting.
The Chinese consulate in Chicago confirmed that two of the injured students were from China. Bridge Michigan later reported that one of them, John Hao, a junior, was paralyzed from the chest down when his spinal cord was severed by a bullet. A Michigan State student who is a friend of Hao’s told the local nonprofit news publication that Hao’s parents had flown from China to Michigan to be with their son.
In a statement, the consulate warned Chinese students and other Chinese citizens in the United States to “pay close attention to the local security situation, further raise risk awareness, strengthen safety precautions and self protection, and ensure their own safety,” according to an English-language translation of the statement.
This isn’t the first time that a shooting has prompted Chinese officials to issue such safety warnings. In recent days, Chinese social media has lit up with discussions of the Michigan State incident and whether Chinese parents should feel safe sending their sons and daughters to study in the United States.
These concerns are not limited to students and families from China. A survey by World Education Services, a nonprofit international-education research company, found that two in five international students were worried about gun violence in the United States. A quarter of the students surveyed said they were worried about the possibility of gun violence on their campus.
I wrote about those findings in a November 2019 article exploring whether American gun violence would dissuade international students from coming to the United States for higher education. One student recounted her own run-in with gun crime, when bullets were fired into the San Francisco office where she was interning. Her family at home in Egypt prayed that she would be safe from a shooting, she said. An admissions director told me that the issue of gun violence was routinely brought up on recruiting trips around the globe. “It’s often the first question asked in parents’ sessions.”
After the incident at Michigan State I posted my three-year-old piece in my social-media feeds. Sadly, it’s far from the first time that a school shooting has prompted me to reshare the article since it was originally published.
Commenters were near-unanimous in their concern that gun violence is damaging America’s reputation with prospective students and their families. A Czech professor of internationalization who is a father wrote in response to my LinkedIn post that his daughter had been “pretty set” on studying in the United States but ultimately decided against it because it was “too dangerous.” (She also was worried about costs, he said.) Another poster shared his own fears as a student coming from the Philippines to the United States.
The comments had a common pessimism. A counselor at a high school characterized the response of American higher education as “shell shocked” and “resigned.” Families have long “rationalized” the decision to send their children to study here because of American colleges’ academic quality, a former college administrator wrote. Would there be a tipping point when the “ugliness and awful consequences of our gun culture” would outweigh prestige, and the United States would lose its position as the destination of choice for students from overseas? he asked.
But a Chinese graduate student at Michigan State told me he thought his classmates would continue to come to the United States. Students are factoring safety into their calculation to study in America and accepting risk, Zhenyang Xu, a second-year doctoral student in the university’s higher-education program, said in an interview. “Gun violence is not a new problem in the U.S.”
Since the shooting, Xu said, he has received many text and email messages from friends, classmates, and professors, checking in to see how he’s doing. “I didn’t realize how much I loved the community until this happened,” he said of Michigan State. “It’s made our community stronger.”