SAN DIEGO _ It seemed like a great solution to a bad problem.
Plagued by years of cuts in state funding, the University of California, San Diego threw open its doors to Chinese students who were willing to pay three times as much tuition as California residents to attend the prestigious La Jolla school.
The money helped it hire faculty, add courses, stock the library and cover financial aid for Californians. The students also have bolstered research into everything from self-driving cars to cancer treatments.
By fall 2018, UC San Diego had 5,573 Chinese students, the most of any UC campus.
But the strategy may be unraveling. Chinese enrollment grew by only 41 this fall after soaring by an average of 526 students a year over the past decade. Enrollment could drop in 2020.
The social and political climate in the U.S. has left many foreign students feeling unwelcome and unsafe, leading to a national drop in the number of newcomers seeking a spot at American universities, according the Institute of International Education, a New York-based interest group.
Students have described the climate as anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, especially against the Chinese, who account for a third of the roughly 1 million international students in the U.S.
Educators say much of the tension stems from the U.S.-China trade war, which led the Trump administration to consider banning Chinese students from U.S. schools.
The idea was shelved. But the administration tightened visa restrictions on Chinese graduate students in certain areas of science and technology.
The move caused a shudder at UC San Diego, which heavily uses the students in research that benefits companies like San Diego-based Qualcomm, the nation's largest chipmaker, and Northrop Grumman, the world's fifth-largest defense contractor.
Students also are upset that the Trump administration has regularly and publicly said that Chinese scholars and students might steal intellectual property or act as spies on American campuses.
"Chinese students are just purely students," said Pengcheng Cao, a graduate student in engineering. "They are not different from young people in the U.S."
The collective uproar is having an impact. The university said this month that it is beginning to focus less on China and more on recruiting high-paying undergraduates from other parts of the world and the U.S. No quotas have been set for these students, who are charged $30,000 more than Californians in annual undergraduate tuition.
Chancellor Pradeep Khosla signaled the change in October, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune that perhaps the time had come to recruit more aggressively from other parts of the world. But he didn't find the situation worrisome.
"We are not losing sleep over Chinese students not coming here. ... The rest of the world is open to us and people care about what we do and know what a great institution we are," he said.
Even so, UC San Diego's Rady School of Management started has been diversifying its student mix.
"We are certainly aware that we are one tweet away from having a significant decrease in the volume of applications from China, and we are working on ways to manage that risk," said Sean Carver, assistant dean of graduate programs at Rady.
He was referring to Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who angered the Chinese on Oct. 4 when he posted a Twitter message that said, "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong."
UC San Diego's revised strategy involves challenge and risk, especially when it comes to diversifying its foreign enrollment. The campus doesn't have a history of making such change.
The university draws students from more than 90 countries. Only five of them sent more than 100 students last fall; only one _ China _ sent more than 1,000.
UC San Diego's overall enrollment has soared by 12,113 since 2008. Nearly 44% of those students were from China.
There's just as much concern about how a decline in Chinese students could affect UC San Diego's research program, which averages almost $4 million a day in new funding.
"The work they're doing is critical for the scientific progress being made in our labs," said Susan Shirk, chair of UC San Diego's 21st Century China Center.
"You might say there are no substitutes because American primary and secondary education are not producing sufficient science and technology manpower for America," she said.
