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China's top universities are opening to foreign students. That's a big problem for US schools.
(kdwalmsley.substack.com)
Bullets:
Chinese universities dominate the global rankings in hard sciences, Engineering, and Computer Science.Many of them now accept international students, and are marketing their schools in foreign countries.US schools already face serious financial challenges, from the steep decline in international student enrollment. Foreign families typically pay full tuition and room and board, and American colleges rely on those higher fees.Chinese universities pose an existential problem, going forward. They are qualitatively superior, even in Western surveys. And the over cost of attendance is a mere tenth of going to a top American program.
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Report:
Good morning.
Chinese universities opening to international students from across the world. And that is a serious problem right now for universities in the United States, who rely on international students paying full tuition to stay open. It will become an existential problem for them, going forward.
And to understand the shift that’s taking place, imagine your family lives in South America, or Africa, or elsewhere, here in Asia. You have a kid at home, some money saved up for a good university, and soon you’ll need to make some hard decisions, as to which university you should send your son, or your daughter, and your money.
I admit that I am cherry-picking the data here. If your kid wants to be a lawyer or study political science or French Literature, this isn’t for you. Here is the US News and World Report, and their rankings of top global universities for Engineering:
Chinese universities are ranked #1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. MIT shows up at #13, then China again at 14 and 15. So MIT is the top-ranked American program for Engineering. The cost to go to MIT, before Financial Aid, for this academic year:
Tuition of $64 thousand, housing and food is another twenty thousand, total of over $89,000. Financial aid is available, they are happy to point out. MIT is the top US university for engineering, and American students may be getting what they pay for. Tuition there is not too far out of line with other top engineering schools in the United States, who are ranked lower:
Harbin Institute of Technology is in Heilongjiang province, and is world ranked at #3. To convert Renminbi, Chinese yuan to US dollars, divide by seven and that’s close enough. So tuition for these international bachelor programs at Harbin is under $4,000 per year.
For master’s degrees, it’s under $5,000 USD per year. Those figures are typical, by the way, of international programs from other top Chinese universities.
Looking next at Computer Science: China and Singapore again hold the top spots in the rankings, and Stanford shows up at #8. Tuition at Stanford is over $67,000 a year, total cost of attendance—let’s just call it $100,000 after your family buys the plane tickets.
So we see the problem, to international families, if the universities in Asia—and in China in particular—are qualitatively better, even in our own surveys? And when the cost to attend is a tenth, compared to US programs?
Then we have this map. Remember, you’re not an American in this thought exercise. And it’s today, not twenty-five years ago. And you have some important decisions to make that may determine the long-term future of your family. China is the top source of trade for almost all of Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.
A big reason to go to MIT, or Stanford, is so your kid can meet today the other kids who will be managers of key companies in ten years, and upon graduation be part of the powerful business and professional networks of university alumni across the world. Please remember, too, that for Chinese students, the competition to get into a Tsinghua or a JiaoTong or a Zhejiang is very high—it is only the very top students from across the country who gain admittance into the best Chinese schools, which also are the best schools, period.
Point we’re making here is that going forward, where is your student more likely to form those relationships that lead to the best career opportunities later? Is it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in Palo Alto? Or is it more likely to be in Shanghai or Beijing or Hong Kong? Or in Harbin? And is it worth it, to your family, to spend ten times as much, on a wager that this map is going to flip back to where it was, back in 2000?
Be good.
**Resources and links:**Mapped: How China Overtook the U.S. in Global Trade (2000–2024)https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-china-overtook-u-s-in-global-trade-dominance-2000-2024/Fewer international students are enrolling at U.S. colleges, which could cost the country $1 billion, reports findhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/30/international-student-enrollment-decline.htmlThe College Conundrum: Chasing International Students And Full-Pay familieshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwhite/2025/03/05/the-college-conundrum-chasing--international-students-and-full-pay-families/Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)https://stubard.com/blog/admission/best-engineering-universities-in-usa/Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT)https://apply.china-admissions.com/university/harbin-institute-technology/#moreinfoBest Global Universities for engineeringhttps://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/engineeringBest Global Universities for Computer sciencehttps://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/computer-scienceInternational college students bring billions to the US. Here's why that may change.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/05/15/international-college-students-billions-economy-immigration/83417546007/U.S. Economy Could Suffer a $7 Billion Loss from Precipitous Drop in International studentshttps://www.nafsa.org/about/about-nafsa/us-economy-could-suffer-7-billion-loss-precipitous-drop-international-student
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cats > landlords
(thelemmy.club)
cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/mop/p/645584/cats-landlords
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On the Road to Nuclear War
(www.counterpunch.org)
Photo by Thomas Bormans
On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.
This grim appraisal has impressive evidence to support it.
The New Start Treaty, the last of the major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia, expired on February 5, without any serious attempt to replace it. New Start’s demise enables both nations, which possess about 86 percent of the world’s 12,321 nuclear weapons, to move beyond the strict limits set by the treaty on the number of their strategic nuclear weapons (the most powerful, most devastating kind), thus enhancing the ability of their governments to reduce the world to a charred wasteland.
Actually, a nuclear arms race has been gathering steam for years, as nearly all the governments of the nine nuclear powers (which, in addition to Russia and the United States, include China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) scramble to upgrade existing weapons systems and add newer versions. China’s nuclear arsenal is the fastest growing among them. “The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world . . . is coming to an end,” observed Hans Kristensen, a highly regarded expert on nuclear armament and disarmament. “Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric, and the abandonment of arms control agreements.”
The U.S. government is currently immersed in a $1.7 trillion nuclear “modernization” program that President Donald Trump has championed and repeatedly lauded. As early as February 2018, he boasted that his administration was “creating a brand-new nuclear force. We’re gonna be so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.” In late October 2025, to facilitate the U.S. nuclear buildup, Trump ordered the Pentagon to prepare to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, which had ceased 33 years before. In line with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, signed by 187 nations (including the United States), no nuclear power (other than the rogue nation of North Korea) has conducted explosive nuclear testing in over 25 years.
Another sign of the escalating nuclear danger is the revival of implicit and explicit threats to initiate nuclear war. Such threats, which declined with the end of the Cold War, have resurfaced in recent years. When angered by the policies of other nations, Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin have repeatedly and publicly threatened them with nuclear destruction. According to the U.S. government’s Voice of America, the Russian government, in the context of its invasion of Ukraine, issued 135 nuclear threats between February 2022 and December 17, 2024. Although some national security experts have discounted most Russian threats as manipulative rather than serious, in November 2022 Chinese leader Xi Jinping thought the matter serious enough to publicly chide his professed ally, Putin, for threatening to resort to nuclear arms in Ukraine.
Underlying this drift toward nuclear war are the growing conflicts among nations―conflicts that have significantly weakened international cooperation and the United Nations. As the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put it, rather than heed past warnings of catastrophe, “Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.” Consequently, “hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war.”
But this is not necessarily the end of the story―or of the world.
After all, much the same situation existed in the second half of the twentieth century, when conflicts among the great powers fueled a dangerous nuclear arms race that, at numerous junctures, threatened to spiral into full-scale nuclear war. And, in response, a massive grassroots campaign emerged to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Although that campaign did not succeed in banning the bomb, it did manage to curb the nuclear arms race, reduce the number of nuclear weapons by more than 80 percent, and prevent a much-feared nuclear catastrophe.
Furthermore, in the early twenty-first century, there have been new and important developments. The worldwide remnants of the nuclear disarmament movement regrouped as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and, joined by farsighted officials in smaller, non-nuclear nations, drew upon the United Nations to sponsor a series of antinuclear conferences. In 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1 (with 1 abstention), delegates at one of these UN conferences adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Although all nine nuclear powers strongly opposed the TPNW―which banned the use, threatened use, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, stationing, and installation of nuclear weapons―the treaty secured sufficient national backing to enter into force in January 2021. Thus far, it has been signed by 99 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.
In addition to the efficacy of public pressure for nuclear disarmament and the existence of a treaty banning nuclear weapons, at least one other factor points the way toward a non-nuclear future: the self-defeating nature—indeed, the insanity―of nuclear war. With even a single nuclear bomb capable of killing millions of people and leaving the desperate survivors crawling painfully through a burnt-out, radioactive hell, even a nuclear “victory” is a defeat. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is believed to have said, “the survivors would envy the dead.” It’s a lesson that most people around the world have learned, although not perhaps the lunatics.
Lunatics, of course, exist, and some of them, unfortunately, govern modern nations and ignore international law.
Even so, although we are on the road to nuclear war, there is still time to take a deep breath, think about where we are going, and turn around.
The post On the Road to Nuclear War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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The Lemmy Club
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