In their quest for a U.S. education, more Chinese families are sending their children to America—and at younger ages.
The number of Chinese students at elementary schools surged from 500 in 2011 to 2,450 in 2015, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over the same period, the number of Chinese nationals attending secondary schools in the U.S. jumped from 17,914 to 46,028. Those numbers pale compared with the tens of thousands of Chinese students enrolled at U.S. universities, but are expected to soar in the next few years.“It’s an obvious trend,” said Emily Li, an educational consultant in Irvine, Calif. who specializes in the Chinese market. “When I came in 2004, there were mainly students like me attending graduate school. A few years later, there are college students. Then high-school students. And now there are junior high and elementary school students coming.”
Well, I’m not super-optimistic about China’s medium-term prospects. I hope they’ll manage a transition to a genuinely free country, and without an economic collapse or a civil war. But I don’t actually expect that they’ll manage it smoothly.