The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has taken the sudden drop in enrollment of Chinese students at its campus very seriously. The change has prompted the school’s leadership to shell out $425,000 per annum on insurance, making it the first in the country to do so.
According to a Market Watch report, the university is buying insurance to protect itself against the risk of decline in Chinese student enrollment.
The school will be entitled to a $60 million cover, if the enrollment of students at colleges of business and engineering drops below 18.5 percent in comparison to previous years as a result of policy changes announced by the federal government.
“One of the risks that I pointed out was that we had a large concentration of our revenue was coming from tuition payments from students from China,” Jeffrey Brown, the dean of the Gies College of Business, told Yahoo Finance. “We loved having Chinese students as part of our college, but there was a part of the risk there that was out of our control.”
Chinese students currently account for nearly 10 percent of the total of 50,000 students enrolled in the university.
According to the 2018 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, higher education institutions continue to see a decline in the enrollment of international students with a 1.5 percent drop recorded in 2018 for the third consecutive year due to such factors as the political climate in the United States.
Out of 540 institutions surveyed for the report, 49 percent reported the decline in the new international enrollment.
Political Climate Causing Decline in International Student Enrollment