100,000 fewer Chinese international students are in the United States compared to 2019, and this trend is showing no signs of slowing. These students are a major economic driver in small college towns and large cities across the United States. In 2024, Chinese international students had an estimated $14.6 billion-dollar economic impact in the United States through tuition and living costs alone. They also greatly add to the science and engineering fields in the United States, particularly in AI and quantum computing. The cost of Chinese international students’ contribution to the U.S. economy and academic institutions is difficult to calculate, but what impact does fewer Chinese international students have for the United States?
Yingyi Ma joined us in November 2025 to uncover why fewer Chinese students are coming to the United States and what that means for the U.S. economy and higher education.
Yingyi Ma
Yingyi Ma is a professor of sociology at Syracuse University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Foreign Policy Program. She is the outgoing chair of the Asian/Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Ma’s research addresses education and migration in the United States and China; she has published one monograph, two co-edited volumes, and more than 30 journal articles and book chapters. Her book, Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education, published in 2020, won the best book award, Higher Education Special Interest Group, Comparative and International Education Association in 2021, and the Bourdieu Book Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association the same year. She is a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program fellow, and a frequent commentator for national and international media outlets. She received her doctoral degree in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.