Making ting tong cool

LAST March, Alexandra Wallace, a blonde Californian who was attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was so annoyed by “these hordes of Asian people” filling up her campus and talking on their cellphones in the library that she made a YouTube video mocking them: “Aah, ching chong ling long ting tong.” Her clumsy imitation of Chinese catapulted Ms Wallace to her moment of fame. Asians and others responded with YouTube counterattacks; “ching-chong-ling-long” became a ringtone; UCLA declared itself outraged; and Ms Wallace apologised, then left the university.

A year on, and the incident has spawned its own genre of local comedy, but nobody seems the least bit bothered by it anymore. In fact, the increase in applications by Chinese students only quickened in the past year, says Bob Ericksen, the director of UCLA's centre for international students. There are now 695 undergraduates from China at UCLA, five times more than two years ago. They represent 3% of the student body.

This is a nationwide trend. After years of staying flat, the number of foreign undergraduates has increased 25% in the past four years, while the number of Chinese students has almost sextupled, to about 57,000. China thus leads India and South Korea as the primary country of origin for foreign students. On the demand side, China produces vast numbers of highly qualified applicants whose families can afford to pay American fees. On the supply side, American universities are usually happy to accept such good students.

Public universities, moreover, have an additional incentive. Many are struggling financially because their states have been cutting budgets in a weak economy. So they take more pupils from other countries and states in part because they pay higher fees. For example, Californians pay an average of $13,000 a year at the ten campuses of the University of California; outsiders pay about $36,000.

Naturally, this leads to some resentment among in-state applicants who fear rejection. In reality, says Robert Stacey, a dean at the University of Washington (the state, not the district), those outsiders displace very few in-state applicants, and subsidise the education of the rest. While the number of Chinese students at UW tripled this year, to about 600, they still account for only about 10% of all students, and Washingtonians still account for about 75%, he says.

But the many new Chinese students do more than provide funds. They also change the culture. Traditional stereotypes about Asian students being geeky came about when the pupils tended to be “ABCs” (American-born Chinese). Those caricatures still exist, as displayed to humorous effect on websites such as asianssleepinginthelibrary.tumblr.com, which consists of photos of Asian students sleeping in the library, usually slumped over their study materials.

This picture is totally outdated, says Mahlon Meyer, who teaches a class in Chinese history at the University of Washington to about 200 students, one third of whom are Chinese. Increasingly, the Chinese have more money to spend than the Americans. And they have more on their minds than studies. “They are now the popular ones, getting the American girls,” says Mr Meyer. “The Chinese students, I think, have more confidence than American students in general.” Based on his experience, the problem is not that too many of them will come, but that on the contrary they will start to decide that it's not worth the money, and stay home.