Find out why US needs Indian students for sciences, Chinese for humanities: Top diplomat says ‘Increasingly important…’

The US Ambassador Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said more students for science, technology, engineering and mathematics programmes in the country should be from India, considered an important security partner of the country. 

Campbell also said  Chinese students should be considered more for humanities rather than science subjects,  underscoring the US' security concerns and escalating tensions with China on the trade front. “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,” news agency Reuters quoted the second-ranked US diplomat as saying.

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He pointed out that US universities intend to limit Chinese students’ access to sensitive technology, citing security concerns.

Campbell noted that not enough Americans were pursuing fields like science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for which recruitment from overseas is needed.  “The US needed to recruit more international students for those fields, but from India - an increasingly important US security partner - not China.”

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Chinese have been the largest group among international students in the US for many years. In the academic year 2022-23, their numbers reached nearly 2.9 lakh. Amid deteriorating US-China relations and fears of intellectual property theft, academicians and civil society leaders suggest that unwarranted suspicion has hindered scientific collaboration.

The US diplomat told the Council on Foreign Relations, "I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics," Reuters reported.

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Campbell suggested that US universities have been "careful" to support continuing higher education for Chinese students. However, he reiterated that it is possible to curtail and limit certain kinds of access, particularly in technological programmes across the country.

(With inputs from Reuters)