An independent civil record. No government funds it, and none speaks for it. Sources Editorial position For teachers 中文
uschina.us A public record of what Americans and Chinese have built, funded, taught and defended together.
Home / American support / Educational opportunity
America → China

A quarter century of growth, and five years of decline.

2009–2025 · Case 8 of 15

The Institute of International Education's Open Doors Report is the standing source for this case, and it tells a story with a turn in it rather than a straight line. In the 2009/10 academic year, 127,628 Chinese students were enrolled at American universities. By 2010/11 that had grown to 157,558, a 23.5 percent jump in a single year that made China the largest source of international students in the country, at 21.8 percent of the total.

Growth continued for most of a decade. The 2019/20 academic year was the peak: 372,532 Chinese students, 34.6 percent of all international enrollment in the United States.

It has fallen every year since. The 2024/25 Open Doors Report, released in November 2025, counted 265,919 Chinese students, a 4 percent decline that year alone and roughly 47 percent below the 2019/20 peak; undergraduate enrollment specifically fell 10.2 percent. India passed China as the largest source of international students for the second consecutive year, with 363,019 students, up 10 percent.

372,532 → 265,919 Chinese student enrollment at US universities, 2019/20 peak versus 2024/25, a decline of roughly 47 percent over five years.

The earliest years of the relationship, right after normalization in 1979, are harder to pin to a single Open Doors figure and are left out of this entry until that number can be confirmed directly from the Institute's own historical tables.

Sources: Institute of International Education, Open Doors Report, editions covering 2009/10 through 2024/25 (opendoorsdata.org). The 2024/25 figures are from the report released 17 November 2025.