Washington DC

A top US diplomat said that the country needs to get more international students from India for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) domains. US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell said that not enough Americans were taking up courses in these domains.  

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Campbell also noted that the US universities are limiting Chinese students' access to sensitive technology given security concerns. But the Chinese nationals could still apply for humanities courses, Campbell indicated.

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According to official statistics, the total number of foreign students in the United States in the 2022/23 academic year was nearly 290,000.

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But many in the academia as well as the larger civil society argue that deteriorating Washington-Beijing ties amid concerns related to the theft of US expertise have derailed scientific cooperation while subjecting the Chinese students to unwarranted suspicion. 

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"I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics," Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank when asked about the China Initiative introduced by the Trump administration with an aim to combat Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft. 

Critics say that the continued implementation of the rule is spurring the racial profiling of Asian-Americans. 

Campbell said US universities had made "careful attempts" to support continuing higher education for Chinese students but they have also made attempts to be "careful about the labs, some of the activities of Chinese students."

"I do think it is possible to curtail and to limit certain kinds of access, and we have seen that generally, particularly in technological programs across the United States," he said.

Campbell said that it was suggested that China was the only source to make up for the shortage of science students, but that is not the case.

"I believe that the largest increase that we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students that come to study in American universities on a range of technology and other fields."

"It really has been China that has made it difficult for the kinds of activities that we would like to see sustaining," Campbell said, adding that foreign executives and philanthropists were wary about long-term stays in China due to concerns about personal security.

(With inputs from agencies)