Guarding the Front Door While China Uses the Side Entrance to American Education?

Commentary

Washington has begun to recognize that American academia itself has become a strategic arena for competition with China. Last year, House lawmakers advanced the Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Research Act, a proposal that conditions federal research funding on transparency regarding foreign ties, through their version of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Although the bill did not survive into final law, it reflected a growing recognition that universities, laboratories, and federally funded research are targets of foreign exploitation. That recognition was overdue.

Yet by focusing almost exclusively on research universities and academic collaborations, policymakers missed where educational competition increasingly begins—well before students ever reach college. Certain international secondary schools have quietly become feeder pipelines into American higher education while operating under the radar, free from scrutiny, export controls, or disclosure requirements. Why do these earlier education pipelines remain almost entirely exempt from attention?

Make no mistake, these concerns are not hypothetical. Indeed, a growing number of international secondary schools operating in China have established formal and informal linkages with U.S. universities.

For example, the Western International School of Shanghai (WISS) is the first school in mainland China to offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) Career-related Program, a vocationally oriented study pathway for students aged 16 to 19, as well as the three main programs of the IB curriculum, which culminate in the IB Diploma.

Since at least 2021, WISS has promoted a dual-enrollment aeronautics pathway linked to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a long-established U.S. institution known for training pilots and aerospace engineers. The program introduces students to aviation, engineering, and aviation business while they are still in high school. Many of these technical fields are dual-use, central to both civilian transport and defense logistics, and occupy a uniquely strategic position in China’s national development and military planning.

Meanwhile, investigative publications indicate that Beijing faces a pilot-training shortfall and has systematically relied on overseas—particularly U.S.—training pipelines to meet both civilian and military aviation demand, underscoring why early exposure to U.S.-aligned technical education could be strategically consequential.

Another prominent example is the Dulwich International High School network, which illustrates how this model extends beyond a single institution and operates at scale across elite international education in China. Dulwich International High Schools have deep ties to UK education and embed American college-level instruction directly into secondary education. At its Suzhou, China, campus, Dulwich now delivers U.S. college credit courses through partnerships with both Marquette University and the University of Pittsburgh, including via Pittsburgh’s National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships-approved “College in High School” program.

Notably, this is the University of Pittsburgh’s first international high school partnership and runs alongside Dulwich’s existing Marquette dual-enrollment offerings, allowing students to earn official transcripts from two U.S. universities years before applying to college. Dulwich actively promotes these credits as transferable to a wide range of American universities and advertises them as part of guaranteed or preferential admission routes, in some cases accompanied by standardized English-language testing waivers. As presented by the school, these credits are accepted by dozens of U.S. universities, including Georgetown University, the University of California–Los Angeles, the University of California–Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Suzhou North America High School goes even further by aligning governance and curriculum directly with U.S. public universities. It was established in 2013 with formal involvement from North Carolina State University as the first provincially approved international high school developed in partnership with a U.S. institution. Recognized by provincial authorities, the school was designed explicitly to prepare students for U.S. higher education, meaning that the model aligns secondary education governance, curriculum, and outcomes closely with U.S. public university expectations, effectively externalizing part of the American education pipeline overseas.

Although there is no public evidence that schools such as WISS, Dulwich, or Suzhou North America High School are directed by the Chinese Communist Party or intentionally design their curricula around pro-Party ideology, this does not mean that they operate independently of state oversight. Under China’s Regulations on Sino-Foreign Cooperative Education, adopted by the State Council in 2003 and implemented by the Ministry of Education, foreign-run schools must operate through Chinese partners and remain subject to regulatory supervision and curriculum approval.

Recent reporting on UK independent schools provides a relevant point of comparison. In the UK, reliance on Chinese enrollment and capital has reshaped the character and priorities of elite schools such as Harrow, Roedean, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and Shrewsbury through demographic shifts and market reorientation. UK schools seeking to operate campuses in China have faced even tighter constraints, including limits on curriculum and textbook use, with some abandoning planned expansions rather than comply.

Understanding how the Chinese educational system works and neglecting to apply scrutiny over university–high school partnerships is a mistake.

Even though they might not involve federal grants, classified laboratories, or formal research agreements, they operate in fields such as aviation, engineering, design, and creative industries that are foundational to national competitiveness. By treating these collaborations as strategically neutral, U.S. higher-education and national-security policies overlook how technical capacity and professional trajectories are shaped well before university education or research oversight begins, creating a vulnerability that falls outside nearly all existing safeguards.

The SAFE Research Act reflects congressional recognition that foreign actors seek to exploit U.S. research institutions through opaque affiliations and partnerships. However, by concentrating almost exclusively on federally funded research, laboratories, and universities, current policy planning guards only the front door of American academia.

At a minimum, secondary-level collaborations that embed U.S. institutions abroad, especially in aviation and related technical fields critical to China’s national capacity, should no longer remain outside scrutiny, before the side entrance becomes the front door.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.