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While contact hours have changed little this year and
remain close to the highest levels recorded in the 19-year
survey, “the overall workload has declined strongly”, the re-
port says, which “is perhaps understandable given the large
majority of students who work for pay”. Report co-author
Jonathan Neves, head of business intelligence and surveys
at Advance HE, told Times Higher Education, “something
had to give, and it looks like it’s independent study”.
Students who had previously attended private school are
most likely to be undertaking paid work, with 77 percent
of them carrying out paid work compared with 63 percent
of state school students. But the report notes that private
school students are much more likely to undertake only one
to five hours of paid work per week, and are commonly
doing so to “explore possible career paths”, compared with
government school students who “did so to supplement liv- Haigui at work: falling RoI
ing costs”.
Freeman says this trend could result in a “bifurcation” year 2023-24 hosted nearly 150,000 Chinese students. Of
of the student experience and is reflective of the “graduate late, more have been going to Hong Kong, Singapore and
premium starting to decrease” as more young people attend elsewhere in Asia. Classes are often taught in English, and
university. “A degree is no longer the passport to a fantastic they are seen as friendlier places to study. The number of
job that it might once have been, so students are looking Chinese students in Japan increased to 115,000 in 2023
for other ways to distinguish themselves, and I think high from under 100,000 in 2019.
levels of part-time work, even among people from private Like many young Chinese these days, Lei, an econom-
schools, is probably evidence of that,” he says. ics undergraduate, dreams of finding a stable position at
home after graduation, in the Chinese government or in a
CHINA state-owned company. Such employers now are often sus-
picious of graduates with a foreign education, he says. In
Haigui losing sheen April, Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of Gree Electric, a large
IT HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT SUMMER FOR Chi- appliance manufacturer, said her company did not hire hai-
nese students in America. On May 28, the State gui in case they had been recruited as spies by foreigners.
Department announced a campaign to “aggres- Meanwhile China’s own top universities are increasingly
sively” start revoking their visas. One of the targets will be competitive and attractive, especially in fields such as sci-
Chinese students in “critical fields”, science and engineer- ence and engineering. “China can catch up with and even
ing programmes that are deemed to be of strategic interest surpass America,” reckons one biology Ph D student at the
to China. Another will be students who have unspecified elite Tsinghua University in Beijing (ranked #20 worldwide
“connections” to the Communist Party. For young people by the QS World University Rankings; Peking University,
in China thinking about where to study, America now looks next door, is ranked #14). “It just needs a bit more time.”
a dicey proposition. Just look at his own professors, he says. The older ones all
Since China opened up in the late 1970s, some 3 million have degrees from American universities. The younger ones
young Chinese have gone to study in America. Many have were typically educated in China.
settled there. Others have come back, typically to pick up a Many students at home don’t seem too dismayed by
fancy job. They are known as haigui (sea turtles), a homo- America’s new visa policies. Li, a Masters student research-
phone for “returning from across the sea”. America’s Ivy ing satellite propulsion at Beihang University in Beijing,
League became something of a finishing school for the chil- says he can understand why America does not want to let
dren of the well-heeled in Beijing and Shanghai. President Chinese citizens into its high-tech programmes (Beihang
Xi Jinping’s daughter was an undergraduate at Harvard. graduates have been banned from studying in America
Mid-career party officials have also gone to America to learn since 2020 because of the university’s close links to China’s
about modern governance. armed forces). But he sees a silver lining. “People who can
But for many Chinese, the perceived return on invest- go study overseas tend to be pretty impressive. So if they
ment of an American education has been falling. It has al- stay, it will help domestic research and development,” he
ways been expensive, and these days middle-class families says.
are less willing to shell out amid an economic downturn and
a slump in the property market. They can choose cheaper (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times
universities in Britain, for instance, which in the academic Higher Education)

JULY 2025 EDUCATIONWORLD 73