Over 200 Chinese Students to Receive Funding to Study in US

About 240 students from China will receive financial support to pursue their master's or PhD degrees at several universities in the United States, according to plans unveiled by the China Scholarship Council (CSC).

Students will be selected among the most excellent, and their master's or doctoral studies will be jointly financed by CSC and the seven US partner universities, South China Morning Post reported.

These seven universities are the University of California (UC) Irvine, the University of California, Davis, the University of California Riverside, Dartmouth College, the University of Notre Dame, Temple University, and the University of Tennessee.

China has been the US's largest source of international students for many years. Despite tense relations between the two countries, especially in recent years, Chinese students remained the largest international student body in the US in the 2022/23 academic year.

According to the Open Doors 2023 Report released last November by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education (IIE), China was still the leading market, sending a total of 289,526 students in 2022/23, followed closely by about 270,000 students from India.

However, a slight drop of 0.2 percent year-on-year was recorded in Chinese students. In 2020/21, Chinese enrollment in the US decreased by nearly 15 percent amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the 2019/20 academic year, the number of Chinese students attending US higher education institutions reached a peak of 372,532. Now, Chinese student numbers in the US have returned to 2013/14 levels.

Commenting on international enrollment at US institutions in June, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that the US needs more international students pursuing degrees in technology, engineering, and mathematics.

However, he said the focus should be the recruitment of Indian students and not Chinese, adding that the latter are welcome to study humanities instead of STEM.

"I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics," Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank.

According to the data from the Open Doors report, there was a growing trend of Chinese students in the US until 2019/20:

• 328,547 students in 2015/16
• 350,755 students in 2016/17
• 363,341 students in 2017/18
• 369,548 students in 2018/19
• 372,532 students in 2019/20
• 317,299 students in 2020/21
• 290,086 students in 2021/22