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The United States has lost its charm, maybe forever, to China’s brightest students
- More students are opting to stay home, and not pursue further studies at international universities
- While the pandemic affected the drop in numbers studying abroad, worsening ties between the two powers has also contributed
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In 1989, when structural biologist Shi Yigong got his bachelor’s degree from Beijing’s Tsinghua University, of the 2,251 students who graduated the same year, about 1,600 of them went to the United States and stayed.
This story was told in 2017 by Shi, who was vice-president of Tsinghua University at the time, in a programme broadcast by China’s state-owned CCTV.
These days, the landscape has changed dramatically. This can be seen in the latest statistics: in 2022, only 7 per cent of all Tsinghua graduates, across both undergraduate and postgraduate students, pursued further studies abroad.
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Among the 3,197 undergraduate students, 14 per cent chose to study abroad, a sharp contrast to the rate in 2017, when 28 per cent of undergraduates sought overseas education. A similar downward trend can be seen at another first-class institution – Peking University.
“In the past four years, the majority of our best students have chosen to stay in China, with fewer going abroad,” said a physicist at Tsinghua, who asked not to be named.
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He said that before 2019, nearly half the graduates from his department would opt to study abroad, mainly heading to the best-known institutions in the United States – such as its Ivy League universities – as well as Britain. However, that rate has been declining significantly.
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