Recruiting Farther Upstream

Shilin Wang knew from an early age that she wanted to go to art school. So when, during the summer before her freshman year, her mom brought up the idea of leaving her hometown of Shanghai to go to high school in California, she jumped at the chance. “I had been thinking of it for a while since I knew I was going to be an art student in the future and that I would have more opportunities to do that in America,” says Wang.

Bolun Li, who grew up in Beijing and is now a freshman business and finance major at Duke University, had entrepreneurial ambitions even before coming to the United States four years ago to attend a prep school in Massachusetts. He credits his teachers for his freedom to explore his own interests and for their help as he started a business to teach other teenagers how to invest and manage their own finances. “I’m a big believer in flexibility of curriculum,” says Li, “and that’s where Chinese education sort of lacked at that time.”

The decision these two students made to leave their home countries for a high school education in the United States is one that hundreds of thousands of families are making. As the growth in the number of international students enrolling at U.S. universities has slowed, the number of international students in secondary schools more than tripled between 2004 and 2016, according to the 2017 Institute of International Education report Globally Mobile Youth