This can be largely explained by the drop in birth rates in China associated with the one child policy. The number of college-aged Chinese in 2020 will be roughly half what it was a decade before[1]. People have seen this coming for years. The administrators blaming this on politics are most likely scapegoating for their poor planning.
> The administrators blaming this on politics are most likely scapegoating for their poor planning.
Couple of people I know in India right now are looking at going to Canada, Aus or NZ because they are uncertain what is going on under Trump. 5 to 10 years back almost everyone in my friend circle in India wanted to go to the US.
Well one might think that it would be beneficial for Americans if there is less immigration but you never know if US corporations might outsource more for to save costs.
If this was the case, it would be a gradual decline, instead of a dramatic decrease in one year. Also, anecdotally, none of my family members want to study in the US anymore.
How gradual would it have to be for you to find this plausible? The prior NYT article referenced in this work mentions that first-time international student fell 3% from 2016. Those were numbers collected prior to the election, mind you. And a 50% change in the largest cohort of international students over only 10 years is going to make for a pretty big impact. Especially considering that these middling American schools are seen as alternatives to better domestic choices like Tsinghua. If the schools being discussed here were low on the priority list of potential students, the change would be even more exaggerated.
Imagine the hypothetical where there were 2 schools, each of which could educate 50 students per year and where all students prefer school 1 to school 2. If the population drops from 100 to 80, school 2 would see a 40% decrease in enrollment, even though the general population only dropped 20%. Now if school 1 is in China and school 2 is in the US...
Yeah, isn't that the general attitude in China that a US degree is not as valuable as it used to be? That should be contributing to the observed decline as well.
[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/china/age_structure.html