When Zhao Jun accepted an admission offer from the Department of Statistics at Columbia University in April 2013, he never suspected most of his future classmates would be from China.

Like other Chinese students who apply for graduate schools in the United States, Zhao hoped to improve his English skills and broaden his cultural understanding by studying in America for two years.

“I was aware that there would be some Chinese students, but I really didn’t expect that almost all of my classmates would be Chinese,” says Zhao, 22, from north China’s Hebei Province. “Mandarin is the only language we use in class. There is no need to speak English.”

Every year, more and more Chinese students go to the United States for advanced degrees. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), among the 819,664 international students who attended US colleges and universities in the 2012-2013 academic year, 235,597 were from China. That number is a 21.4 percent increase from the previous year, when the overall increase of international students in the US was 7.2 percent.

The irony is Chinese students are coming in such numbers that they tend to dominate certain university departments. As a consequence, they are inadvertently robbed of the very cultural experience they hope to gain through foreign study.

With Columbia University’s foreign-student count reaching a record 8,797 in 2013, the Ivy League institution is ranked fifth among US universities in terms of the number of international students, according to the IIE.

It is exceeded only by the University of Southern California, Purdue University, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and New York University.

Of those, Columbia is clearly the dream school of millions of Chinese students because of its Ivy League status. Also, the fact Columbia admits more Chinese students than any other Ivy League school makes the New York college an even bigger magnet for Chinese students.

At Columbia, more than one-third of the international students are from China and more than 80 percent of those are graduate students, according to the IIE.

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as the “STEM” majors, are fields that attract the majority of international students to Columbia.

According to the university’s International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO), the Fu School of Engineering and Applied Science had the highest percentage of international students, with 45.6 percent during the 2012-2013 academic year, while the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) had 39.8 percent.

Although the exact number of Chinese students in the STEM fields at Columbia is not available, Jennifer Soler, assistant director of Columbia’s ISSO, confirms these programs indeed have very high percentages of students from the Chinese mainland.

Moreover, the situation is similar in the natural sciences, according to Yang Xue, 23, a Chinese student majoring in chemistry. “There are 60 students in our program,” she says. “Half of them are from China.”

In terms of cultural programs, Yang says Columbia organizes and sponsors various social activities for international students. They are designed to improve their cultural understanding and linguistic skills of those from other countries, but few Chinese students take part in them.

“Usually Chinese students don’t socialize much with local students. They only talk to other Chinese students.” Yang says.

There are many reasons why Chinese graduate students seldom socialize. In a YouTube video created by four Chinese students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and viewed more than 110,000 times, Du Ye and Dolores Lu say the language barrier is one of the most important factors preventing Chinese students from integrating into American culture.

“In China, before we came, the English-training agencies and the schools didn’t teach us how to communicate in English,” Lu says in the video. “They taught us how to get good grades. Speaking English was never the focus of English learning in China.”

According to Lu, many people try to speak English when they first come to America but give up eventually because they are constantly making mistakes and speaking “broken English.”

Zhao says this is particularly true for students in STEM majors. Because they have spent most of their academic careers working on research and quantitative skills, they have spent comparatively little time honing their communication skills.

The situation is much the same in graduate school, where the workload continues to demand a huge amount of time and effort, Zhao adds.

“Mathematics is not like history or politics. There are a lot of hard facts and formulas. If we read it, we know it. If we don’t read it, we simply don’t know it,” he says. “So most of the time we just stay in the library and study.”

The increasing number of Chinese students is not an isolated Columbia phenomenon.

According to Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director of the International Student Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the institution has 3,549 graduate students, of which 683 are from China’s mainland. “They are the biggest group by far,” she says.

However, the students from China tend to be spread evenly among all of MIT’s departments, Guichard-Ashbrook says. Unlike Columbia, no single program is particularly heavy with Chinese students, she adds.

The situation at Columbia University is also unique because of the school’s location in Manhattan, which is internationally known for its abundant cultural offerings.

A graduate degree at Columbia seemingly offers both the education and the cultural experience of a lifetime, all for the price of a couple of years away from home.

In comparison, other top science institutions are not necessarily positioned to offer the cultural advantages of New York City. For example, the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, is in the rather nondescript suburb of Pasadena, a city of 200,000 that does not even have a real shopping mall.

However, the students who typically go to Caltech don’t seem to worry too much about being well-rounded, officials say. Instead, the international students want to become top scientists.

“All of our students are very goal-oriented,” says Joseph Shepherd, dean of graduate studies and a professor of aeronautics and mechanical engineering at Caltech. “The graduate school is extremely focused on going into research. Students spend a lot of time in the lab and with their heads buried in a book.”

Zhao says Chinese students often favor Columbia because of its sterling reputation as an academic powerhouse and member of the Ivy League, and also because they want to become well-rounded individuals and benefit from the abundant cultural offerings that the Big Apple can provide.

But according to Zhao, such a goal may simply be unrealistic. In fact, he says he fears his New York experience will be little more than time spent in the library studying with other native Mandarin speakers.

“Sometimes,” Zhao says, “I feel like I am still in China.”

(Paris Liu is a freelancer currently studying in the United States.)