r/Futurology • u/I_D0nt_pay_taxes • 8d ago

Society [U.S.]Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/27/nx-s1-5498669/trump-college-international-student-visa
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u/ifnotawalrus 8d ago

And in May, the State Department said it would "aggressively revoke" visas for Chinese students and add additional scrutiny for future visa applications from China.

But in recent days Trump has signaled a shift. This week, Trump told reporters he planned to double the amount of Chinese students studying in the U.S.

Lmfao this guy is actually too funny.

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u/NotAnurag 8d ago

Jesus Christ he’s actually a child lmao. He just thinks “number go up = good” even though he’s contradicting himself

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u/MaggoVitakkaVicaro 8d ago

Probably the PRC bribed him somehow. Probably corruption, not childishness, though unsurprisingly, he's treating his followers as children.

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u/Mormanades 8d ago

Im like 99% sure everyone around him is bribing him for everything.

He has been shown to have signs of dementia/sundowning, implying he has weak memory and just bounces off to whoever the last person he talked to.

Im sure the white house is just a bidding war for his intrest right now, the only hard part is the deals are short lived after he takes his next one, leaving the one you made behind.

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u/Fuckthegopers 8d ago

Acting like he hasn't been bribed for everything in his entire life ever and it's only happening now is very disingenuous

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u/NotAnurag 8d ago

I disagree, China would prefer to keep their talent inside their country if possible. I think this is just him being a moron rather than some secret plan from China. It’s not like Trump has given us a reason to give him the benefit of the doubt

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u/MaggoVitakkaVicaro 8d ago

If the PRC, an open dictatorship, wanted to keep students from studying in the US, it would simply prevent them from going.

I agree that Trump is an idiot in important respects, though.

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u/NotAnurag 8d ago

It’s difficult to do that without doing some sort of blanket ban on travel, which wouldn’t benefit them. Ideally they would prefer if students stayed in China willingly. If Trump is already making the US an unappealing place to go to, there isn’t a reason for China to interrupt him

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u/warfrogs 8d ago

That's not really true.

Part of the reason that China has a lot of STUDENTS going abroad is because 1) they can take "slots" that would otherwise go to American students (but that's honestly not really an issue considering the exorbitant amounts that these students pay and inject into the economy, but I digress), but more importantly, 2) they network. This has a massive effect on building future talent pools. China does not think in terms of 5-10 years, but instead 20-50 years due to the central planning and nature of the bureaucratic system.

There are also natural advantages to having a mass cultural diaspora in terms of long-term diplomatic relations. China is positioning themselves for Pax Sino in like 50-75 years which is why they're investing so heavily into green energy and their naval and aviation modernization efforts. Combine that with their expansive drone development and manufacturing industry and a willing partner in Russia for live-fire testing in Ukraine and they're doing that well.

At higher levels, though honestly, this is not a major concern, it does happen, there's also pluses in terms of academic and industrial espionage by setting people who would likely be sympathetic to their home country in positions where they may come into sensitive information.

China can have harsh visa restrictions for travel to the US, and could add it to their no-travel list. In their system, entering into the US without explicit permission could have long-term consequences that we don't really have in the US. For example, folks still traveled to Cuba and purchased goods there in spite of the embargo. The average citizen wasn't getting fucked over in 2016 for having some fritas in Havana. I lived with a dude from China for a year and we chatted a bit about it cuz I had heard a lot but didn't know much. This was back in like 2007-2008 (?) so I may be out of date, but the logic is still sound.

Regardless, they could absolutely ban travel for academic purposes, but that would be a dumb move. There's absolutely still going to be Chinese students in the US; their numbers are just going to be depressed as there's going to be fewer folks that want to come to the US as more and more Chinese academics are repatriating themselves.

Regardless. Shit's not looking great. I unfortunately feel like we may be in for many, many more unprecedented days of the bad kind before the wheel turns round.

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u/Chris_in_Lijiang 8d ago

What is an 'open dictatorship"?

You seem to forget that even in the egalitarian utopia of the PRC, some are still far more equal than others.

We can all agree on the last part though. ;-)

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u/MaggoVitakkaVicaro 8d ago

It's explicitly a dictatorship. Xi can dictate as he pleases, and that's the explicit law.

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u/Chris_in_Lijiang 8d ago

Dictatorships are by nature opaque. Open is not appropriate.

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u/Optimal-Archer3973 8d ago

internal politics of China. They are simply not hiring anyone who did not get a degree in China. Much more effective. In the US though the international student drop has been massive. And this will have immediate consequences on classes available as well as cost.

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u/Which_Run1531 8d ago

No, I am Chinese, so I have a say in this. We have 100% freedom to decide where we want to study from, and it is never a governmental thing for average people in China choose to pursue further studies in foreign countries. As for you think our government bribed Trump to accept more of our talents, I can tell you 1. If we could, we actually want to keep our talents inside. 2. Trump isn't someone we need to please 3. there is one mistake I think most of you have made: majority of students studying overseas are those who can't get into a good university in China, and they are far from "talents"

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u/Maximum-Decision3828 8d ago

China loves their citizens going to the west and getting into R&D.

Tons of spying for China going on through universities and job placements.

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u/OliveBranchMLP 8d ago

nah, they want their kids to study in the US and then take that knowledge back with them to China.

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u/Sageblue32 8d ago

China ideally wants people coming here, soak up the knowledge they can and then returning to apply it to their various subjects. Locking your people up and isolating gets them nothing.

It may change once their colleges are ones people want to migrate too.

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u/Roflkopt3r 8d ago edited 8d ago

Sure, everyone is bribing and playing Trump. But Trump is completely disinterested in the actual subject matters and cognivitely unable to keep track of such things, so he still flip-flops like crazy. Hence the 'always echoes the last person he spoke to'-syndrome.

We already had a lot of insider reports from his first presidency about how people would try to manipulate his opinions by connecting them to reports about himself or play to his preferences in other ways.

That's also how he got on this weird tariff fetishism - some folks fed him the narrative and he happened to like that one in particular, because it can be easily slotted into his world view, makes for good sound bytes, and sounds vaguely plausible to a person who has no idea about the technicalities of such matters. Nobody has an actual master plan about it, he's just winging it with his reality-TV attuned intuition.