Across the Pacific: Observations on the 21st-Century U.S.-China Student Movement

Abstract

The rapid expansion of trans-Pacific educational and cultural activities in the past two decades is extraordinary. In the 2012/13 academic year, more than 60 percent of the 819,644 foreign students enrolled in American colleges and universities are from Asia. Among the Asian students, nearly 50 percent are from mainland China. The Chinese student group alone has grown over 420 percent in the past 20 years and now accounts for 28.7 percent of all international students in American institutions of higher learning. Colleges and universities are not the only places hosting the large number of Chinese students. A parallel but unprecedented trend is the even more rapidly expanding enrollment of under-age Chinese youths in American private preparatory schools, which has shot up from a limited few to nearly 30,000 during the first decade of the 21st century.