It’s one thing if you are a Harvard, a private university with the nation’s largest endowment, as the Trump administration vows to “agressively revoke” Chinese student visas.
It’s quite another thing altogether if you are the University of California, a public system that in recent decades has relied less and less on public monies and more and more on tuition — which is significantly higher for foreign and out-of-state seniors than for California residents.
Whether you think that is a good idea or not, the financial model of the UC system has come to rely on foreign students and the extra money they pay. Some Californians believe that the admission of so many foreigners has made it tougher for their children to gain admission to their schools of choice when the entire world seems to want to send their kids here to matriculate at our vaunted universities. And that may in some cases be true — but the fact is that the campuses have also increased their overall enrollment, by the many thousands, in the current fiscal model.
As the nonprofit news site CalMatters reports, “At UC Davis, more than 3,600 students, or just over 9% of the student body, came from China — the highest of any UC campus — according to the UC system’s Fall 2024 enrollment data.”
Altogether, there are about 20,000 Chinese students in the UCs. San Diego has about 3,900, Irvine about 2,900, Berkeley about 2,200, as does UCLA.
And San Jose State has the largest population of international students in the Cal State system. “This spring alone, we are proud to have approximately 4,000 international students from 88 countries enriching our campus, hundreds of them graduating last week,” campus spokesperson Michelle Smith McDonald told CalMatter reporter Adam Echelman. “Ongoing national events,” such as the State Department’s recent statement, “are raising questions and concerns” for those students.
A Chinese student who agreed to be known by her nickname HuHu said: “We’re also scared about discrimination,” she said. “If we’re in a state where our visa could be canceled at any time, it’s an action that encourages people to discriminate against the international student community.”
It’s not a matter of our state, which has been welcoming to international students and to diligent, hardworking immigrants from dozens of countries for many years now here. It’s the national policy that we are dealing with here.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told United States embassies in other lands to stop scheduling all new visa interviews for international students, Politico reported.
Given California’s budget deficit, the UC and Cal State systems are already facing budget cuts from Sacramento of about 3% this year. If the Chinese and other foreign students are essentially kicked out, the universities’ budget woes are only going to get worse.
But beyond the budget issues, the federal government’s policies are an attack on long-term innovation and recruitment of global talent. Many who come here as students stay and become business and scientific leaders in California. Why would we do anything to undermine or deter that?
We don’t want to see them excluded from our schools, our economy and our culture.
