With an offer from Columbia University’s strategic communication program, a $3,000 deposit paid, and a visa interview booked for early June, Jennifer Tang was on the verge of a future finally within reach.

But over two weeks starting May 27, U.S. immigration policy lurched between extremes — first, a full freeze on Chinese students, including plans to cancel existing visas. Then, on June 5, President Donald Trump abruptly declared they were still welcome as part of a pending trade deal with China.

The policy whiplash left thousands of students across China with no clear understanding of which guidelines were in effect or whether any of it could change again without warning.

Tang didn’t wait to find out. She gave up her place at Columbia and enrolled at Imperial College London instead, calling the U.S. visa suspension “the last straw.”

“I felt it was too big a risk to take,” the 22-year-old from Shanghai told Sixth Tone. “Considering the political climate, my choice isn’t really a downgrade.”

For most, though, the path forward is far less clear. In group chats and on social platforms, the mood remains grim. Some students have resumed domestic studies. Others, however, are starting to look beyond the U.S. to avoid more disruption.

Sensing an opportunity, top schools in Hong Kong, Japan, and across Europe have issued open invitations and expanded funding to attract students affected by U.S. policy shifts.

Student visa consultants say the shift has been building for years. But now, few students are betting on a single destination. Instead, they apply widely — to the U.K., Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong SAR — and wait to see what holds. What used to be the default first choice is now the riskiest bet.

Try again later

On the night the U.S. announced it would broadly revoke Chinese student visas, Cris Lin in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was startled awake. She was just drifting off when a headline flashed across her phone: that the U.S. would suspend student visas globally with immediate effect.

The next day, May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students, particularly for those studying in “critical fields.”

Lin, who was preparing to study law at the University of California, Berkeley, went straight to the U.S. visa site to try and book a visa appointment. For the next several hours, she cycled between browsers, devices, and VPN nodes, fighting her way through the overloaded visa portal. Each time she got close to booking an interview, the system crashed.

She even created five new email accounts to restart the booking process from scratch. Each time she got a step closer, something broke — a timeout error, a frozen screen, a crash at the final payment page. “It was beyond frustrating,” she said.

Though she managed to secure a spot on her own, Lin considered hiring an agent. “They use bots to constantly refresh the site and grab slots,” she said. One quoted her 500 yuan ($70) for an appointment within two weeks, slightly less if it took longer. “The longer it takes, the lower the fee,” she added.

A Beijing-based agency, Avocado Tourism, told Sixth Tone it had secured interview slots for four clients since the freeze began in late May. The service includes a 2,500 yuan “emergency fee” on top of the standard rate.

“There’s no option to choose where (the appointment will take place) — it could be Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou,” said a member of staff, requesting anonymity. “Getting any slot at all is already considered lucky.” The agency declined to explain its methods. “We run three different systems at the same time and see which one works.”

Far north in Beijing, Lex Luo, 19, couldn’t even bring herself to try. With slots vanishing too fast for her to follow, she stopped reloading the U.S. Embassy’s website.

Luo had spent two years trying to recover from falling short on the gaokao, China’s grueling college entrance exam. Studying abroad was her only way forward — and her only shot at becoming a video game designer.

When an offer from the University of Utah, complete with a scholarship, arrived on May 20, it felt like the pressure might finally lift. “It wasn’t just about time or money,” she said. “It came at a psychological cost — waiting, doubting, watching everything shift around me.”

And despite little clarity from her visa agency, or fellow students, Luo says she was determined to hold on. “I keep telling myself the worst is over,” she said. “That gives me just enough to keep going.”

Degrees of uncertainty

Just days after the chaos, Trump abruptly reversed course, saying Chinese students were still welcome as part of a pending trade deal. The message came in a short post on his social media platform Truth Social, on June 4, with no formal policy update and no change to the visa appointment freeze.

On June 12, he went further, pledging to help students remain in the country after graduation. “I’ve always been strongly in favor of it,” Trump said when asked about Chinese students studying in the U.S. “It’s also good for our schools. It’s good for our country.”

For families already leaning toward stability over ambition, it was another moment of mixed signals. For students, it changed little on the ground: interviews were still hard to book, embassy websites offered no clarity, and agencies had no new information.

The policy swings seemed to accelerate a shift already underway. Betty Shi, a senior consultant in eastern China’s Zhejiang province with 15 years of experience in U.S.-bound education, has witnessed what she calls a “cliff-like decline” in applications to the U.S. unfolding in real time.

“A decade ago, I could send about 30 high school students to the U.S. each year,” Shi told Sixth Tone, using a pseudonym. “Now, that total has been cut in half.”

Nearly all her students now apply to multiple countries from the outset. “No one can guarantee a visa anymore. If you’re told there’s no chance of getting one at all, then what can you do?” Shi said.

She added that unless parents explicitly rule out a country, agencies now advise a shotgun approach. “The most extreme cases include students applying simultaneously to Singapore, Australia, the U.K. and Hong Kong SAR,” she said. “Today, it’s all about casting a wider net.”

The official numbers tell a similar story. China had been the largest source of international students in the United States since 2009. But in the 2023–2024 academic year, India overtook it for the first time, sending 331,000 students compared to China’s 277,000.

Together, students from India and China still dominate the international student population in the U.S., accounting for 29.4% and 24.6%, respectively. But the number of Chinese students has now declined for four consecutive years. The current figure — a 4.2% drop from the previous year — brings enrollment back to levels last seen a decade ago.

At the same time, other countries are moving quickly to position themselves as alternatives.

According to a report by China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, France has announced a $113 million plan to recruit researchers from the U.S., while the European Union is investing more than $560 million to turn the region into a global hub for scientific talent. Canada and Australia have launched similar efforts — all aimed, in part, at drawing students and scholars unsettled by shifting U.S. policy.

And when the Trump administration barred Harvard University from enrolling international students, Hong Kong urged its universities to offer spots to displaced admits, with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology announcing streamlined transfers and unconditional offers. Officials framed the effort as part of the city’s role as an “international education hub.”

One of Shi’s clients, who paused studies at a Chinese university to transfer to a U.S. music program, has quietly resumed domestic classes as a fallback. Another family chose to withdraw all U.S. applications outright.

“Some of the news circulating in China really unsettles them,” Shi said. “Many parents say from the first meeting that they’re not considering the U.S.”

Wu Yue, a senior researcher at the Intellisia Institute, an independent think tank based in the southern city of Guangzhou that focuses on Sino-U.S. relations, sees the visa restrictions as part of a deeper shift in U.S.-China relations.

Though the moves followed what was officially framed as a positive round of trade talks, he said they reflect long-standing efforts to decouple educational exchange. “This won’t be resolved quickly,” Wu said. “It’s likely to be used as leverage in future negotiations.”

For Tang, who had an alternative study plan by chance, the timing made all the difference. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she said. By late May, many of her peers had run out of options — most universities had already filled their seats for the upcoming fall semester, and backup offers were expiring as deposit deadlines closed in.

“There’s nowhere else to turn, so they’re taking it step by step, just waiting to hear back from the schools and the authorities,” Tang said. “I think a lot of people are just leaving it to fate now.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Visuals from Westend61 and cienpies/VectorStock/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)