SACO, Maine — Thornton Academy, founded in 1811, looks a lot more like a college campus than it did six years ago. It serves about 1,600 students in Grades 6-12.
Gan “Billy” Xiong is an incoming senior at Thornton Academy. Chen “Vanessa” Li and Tianyu “Sam” Zhou are 2015 graduates. A few years ago, none of them had either heard of Maine or knew much about it.
Vanessa spent her sophomore year at a school in Texas as a cultural exchange student, meaning she didn’t have a say in where she attended school that year.
“After that first year in the U.S., I just wanted to go somewhere totally different because I heard people saying Texas doesn’t really represent the whole U.S., I guess,” she said during a recent interview at the school. The next year, she wanted to go for something in the “opposite direction” — Maine seemed like a good fit.
For Sam, one of Maine’s big draws was its “very good environment.”
“In Beijing, the pollution is terrible,” he said. “We feel very relaxed here.”
Sam doesn’t have a driver’s license, but flies a Cessna 172 out of a southern Maine airport on the weekends. Getting his pilot certification was one of the first things he did when he reached the U.S.
Although academies like Thornton are known to have led international student recruitment in Maine in terms of program size, there’s little reliable data tracking how many international students — like Billy, Vanessa and Sam — are studying in Maine at any one time.
StudyMaine, an organization under the Maine International Trade Center, works to support and promote international programs at both high schools and college campuses. It believes, based on data provided by schools with which it works, there are between 1,200 and 1,500 international students in 20-25 Maine high schools. The majority are from China.
In 2014, the Institute of International Education released a report in which it placed the total number of F-1 students enrolled in Maine high schools in 2013 at 952, but just 29 were in public schools. StudyMaine views that as an underrepresentation of Maine’s true numbers, as it doesn’t include J-1 students and misses some newer and growing programs, especially at public schools.
Still, IIE ranked Maine ahead of about 30 other states — including New Hampshire, Indiana, Utah, Vermont and North Carolina — in terms of international students enrolled in secondary schools.
The Maine Department of Education does tally foreign tuitioned students, but that number still excludes students who come to Maine as part of J-1 cultural exchange programs, and also misses several sizeable international student populations at Maine academies and public schools.
Nationally, according to a 2014 report from IIE, there were more than 73,000 international students in U.S. high schools as of October 2013, with an estimated 67 percent enrolled in four-year programs.
Chinese students, parents and employers place a high value on a U.S. education, especially universities, in large part because of the variety of education available. A Chinese student who has attended high school in the U.S. stands a better chance of being accepted into an American university.
Vanessa and Sam were among 46 international students to graduate from Thornton Academy earlier this month, along with more than 300 of their “local” classmates. Both plan on attending an American university. Vanessa will attend Parsons School of Design in New York City. Sam is heading to Syracuse University to study computer engineering.
As for Billy, after a summer at home in China, he will return to Thornton Academy for his senior year — his fourth at the school. One of his goals?
He hopes to earn a spot as a lineman on Thornton Academy’s football team.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.