President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education have hurt colleges across the country, but they may also weaken the U.S.’ ability to compete with its geopolitical rival China, some lawmakers say.
The Trump Administration’s protectionist actions, from issuing sweeping global tariffs to the shuttering of USAID, are “ceding global leadership to China,” Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a report released on Monday. Commissioned by ranking member of the committee Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the report comes after House Republicans proposed an appropriations bill that includes further cuts to foreign aid.
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The report was also published amid the backdrop of China stepping up its diplomatic efforts, opening itself up to more tourists, and advancing the global reputation of its universities.
China has long sought to court the world’s top talent by increasing government investment into higher education, boosting funding for science and technological research, and recruiting faculty from overseas. Chinese universities have risen steadily in global rankings, with 15 schools in mainland China and Hong Kong listed among the top 100 universities on the 2025-2026 Best Global Universities Rankings, compiled by U.S. News and World Report. Tsinghua University in Beijing ranked the highest of the Chinese universities on the USNWR list, moving up two spots from last year to place at 11th (tied with Imperial College London). Peking University and Zhejiang University also rose in the rankings to 25th, up from 31st, and 45th, up from 51st, respectively. That’s a sharp jump from seven years ago, when just two Chinese universities were in the top 100: Tsinghua University at 50th and Peking University at 68th.
While U.S. universities still dominate the top ten, the ranking suggests that Chinese universities are becoming more attractive to global talent at a time when the Trump Administration’s targeting of U.S. colleges threatens to hurt American competitiveness.
“As America retreats from global leadership under the Trump Administration, China is well-positioned and eager to exploit this moment of American disengagement,” said Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The report also warned that Trump’s crackdowns on higher education “have laid the groundwork for a brain drain.”
“At a time when China is articulating its vision for a future that leaves America behind, the Administration’s abdication of global leadership is dangerous and will impose real costs on the American people,” Sen. Shaheen said.
Trump’s pressure campaign on U.S. universities has ranged from slashing billions of dollars in research funding to restricting international students. Trump has especially targeted elite schools in the U.S., such as Harvard University, which still occupies USNWR’s number one spot. Asian universities are already trying to make the most of the possible “brain drain” from the U.S., with several courting Harvard transfers.
Read More: How Trump’s Crackdown on International Students Could Escalate Trade Tensions With China
This year’s rankings don’t yet reflect the direct effects of Trump’s policies, but experts have said that Trump’s campaign is likely to accelerate the growing global popularity of Asian, especially Chinese, universities, while discouraging international students from going to the U.S.
“There is a slow, long-term strengthening of the position of the global power of universities in China,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at Oxford University. “And the turmoil in U.S. higher education will hasten that trend. The present Administration has created a space for international rivals to fill.”
Chinese enrollment at U.S. universities has declined over the years
Chinese students and researchers had already started to turn away from the U.S. before Trump returned to the White House for a second term.
Chinese students were the largest proportion of international students in the U.S. in the 2019-20 academic year, with more than 370,000 of them. That number had shrunk more than 25% by the 2023-2024 academic year, with India overtaking China for the number of nationals studying in the U.S. Nearly 20,000 ethnic Chinese scientists left the U.S. for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021, according to a study by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That trend accelerated in 2018 during Trump’s first term, when his Administration introduced the “China Initiative,” which investigated scientists affiliated with China on the basis of national security concerns and resulted in charges against more than two dozen academics. Critics accused the program of racial profiling and fearmongering, and said it created a “chilling effect” within the scientific community that curtailed research and innovation. A 2021 MIT analysis found that a majority of the cases the Department of Justice opened against Chinese and Asian American researchers were not related to economic espionage or intellectual property theft. (The Biden Administration ended the China Initiative in February 2022.)
The Trump Administration also targeted Chinese students through a restrictive visa policy beginning in 2020. Proclamation 10043 prohibited the entry or issuance of visas to Chinese students enrolled in U.S. graduate programs with ties to Chinese “military-civil” universities, resulting in the cancellations of more than 1,000 student visas. A 2021 letter signed by over 40 associations, including the Association of American Universities and the American Council of Education, expressed concern about “reports of this proclamation being applied very broadly.” Biden resumed regular visa services in China in May 2021, but left the proclamation in place, with reports of Chinese students being denied visas on that basis occurring up to at least 2023.
Several U.S. universities have also ended their academic partnerships with Chinese universities in the past year. The University of California, Berkeley, cut ties with the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute in February after the Trump Administration opened an investigation into undisclosed funding from the Chinese government. The University of Michigan abruptly ended a two-decade partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University in January on the basis of national security concerns. In September, the Georgia Institute of Technology ended its partnership with the Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute for the same reason.
In the meantime, thousands of Chinese researchers have returned to China, according to the aforementioned study, and higher education experts predict that Chinese applicants to the U.S. may begin looking elsewhere, including within China itself.
Chinese universities’ ability to attract homegrown talent has been a key strength, Senthil Nathan, managing director and co-founder of higher education consultancy Edu Alliance, told United Arab Emirates state-owned outlet the National last year.
“These Chinese universities are selecting the best Chinese students. That’s a huge difference. They are not following the western blueprint,” Nathan said. “They are not attracting the best and the brightest from the world, but from within their country because they have enough resources.”
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A hostile environment for some international students in the U.S.
The Trump Administration in recent months has clamped down on international students in the U.S. In May, Trump introduced heightened screenings for student visa applicants, including requiring applicants to have “public” social media profiles, while the Administration that month said it would begin “aggressively” revoking Chinese student visas.
Earlier this year, Trump also began targeting foreign-born students for deportation and threatened to bar international students from enrolling at Harvard—moves widely seen as attempts to compel U.S. universities to comply with his demands on academic curricula and campus activism. Trump has also threatened Harvard with budget cuts and federal contract cancellations as part of that pressure campaign.
“For a long time, the U.S. has been considered a top destination by international students, and at the same time, U.S. higher education has benefited much from international students especially regarding financial stability and research,” Lili Yang, an associate professor specializing in higher education at the University of Hong Kong, told TIME in May. The U.S. has cultivated a “reputation as a place for free expression.”
But Trump’s policies have “damaged” that reputation, she said. “Without brilliant international students, U.S. research and technology may gradually face a shortage of human resources and lose its globally leading position.”
While China has been trying to boost its soft power, in no small part through academic exchange, Trump’s higher education policies demonstrate that “the Administration no longer relates to the world in terms of soft power in education and science,” Marginson told TIME in May.
Madi Biedermann, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, told USA Today that the Administration’s actions will help “faculty and graduate students to focus their attention on advancing science” by targeting antisemitism on campus. Quelling pro-Palestinian speech has been positioned as a driving force behind Trump’s pressure campaign. However, many of the students whose visas were initially revoked (before Trump reversed course) did not participate in any pro-Palestinian activism and some of Trump’s demands are broadly related to diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) related programs.
“American universities that are committed to their academic mission, protect students on campus, and follow all federal laws will have no problem accessing generous taxpayer support for their programs,” Biedermann added.
China is investing in research as Trump slashes funding
The growth of Chinese universities’ global reputation has been in large part due to significant government investment into higher education, especially scientific research and development. China has steadily increased its spending in that sector over the last five years, and it has seen dividends in its output. Between 2018 and 2020, China published nearly a quarter of the world’s scientific papers, surpassing the U.S., and it has since worked to maintain this pace.
Duncan Ross, the chief data officer at Times Higher Education which also compiles an annual global rankings list, told the National last year that the Chinese government has targeted investment at the national, regional, and city levels.
“It’s not that U.S. universities have got worse in any way. They are improving,” he said, but universities in Asia “are just improving more quickly.”
At the same time, Trump has ordered billions of dollars in federal research grants to be cut, which would gut research on cancer, HIV, sickle cell disease, and more. An analysis published on July 9 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that Trump’s cuts put a third of basic scientific research programs at risk, while the National Institutes of Health could have its budget cut by 40%.
Even if international students were willing to take the risks of studying in the U.S. under a tremulous immigration policy, experts say a decline in research could knock U.S. universities off their global perch. It could even push American talent to look overseas. A March poll by British scientific journal Nature found that 75% of U.S. scientists are considering leaving the country.
“China is already trying to seize the moment and recruit some of the brightest talent,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) said at a congressional hearing in April. “Bright young people, who want to do medical research here, are suddenly worried. Why start that PhD if their funding is going to get yanked away? Why study new vaccines if RFK Jr. [Secretary of Health and Human Services] is going to meddle in their work? Why come to the U.S. for promising research if Trump might just try to deport them for jaywalking?”
Phil Baty, the chief global affairs officer at Times Higher Education, told the National last year that the steady rise of Chinese universities in global rankings suggest “tectonic shifts in higher education from the West to the East, with real excellence demonstrated in East Asia and South-East Asia in particular, and well beyond.”
“The U.S. needs to remind others, and itself, that it’s constantly competing for its position in the global talent marketplace. We can’t be complacent if we want to maintain our dominance in innovation and tech even as other nations fight to take the lead,” Lex Zhao, a managing partner at immigrant-founded venture capital firm One Way Ventures, told TIME in May.
Trump’s policies, he adds, are “driving foreign talent away from our institutions and into the arms of more welcoming nations—even those hostile to us—when we should be doing the exact opposite.”