Beijing (AFP) – Chinese students lamented Washington's latest tirade against them on Thursday, accusing the Trump administration of acting "recklessly" and tarnishing their once-sparkling image of an American higher education.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that authorities would "aggressively" revoke the visas of Chinese students, long a major revenue stream for American colleges.

Washington will also tighten visa checks on future applications from China and Hong Kong, Rubio said, days after the US government moved to ban Harvard University from enrolling non-Americans.

"This US policy may seem to be a hasty decision, but it has had an immeasurably devastating impact," Bi Jingxin, a student at a college in the Chinese capital Beijing, told AFP on Thursday.

"If we Chinese want to study in the US, the most important thing is its faculties and cutting-edge academic achievements," Bi, 21, said.

Rubio's proposals, he added, show that Washington was "not behaving in a way that's conducive to the spread of the United States'... international academic image".

"It seems that Trump and his team are acting recklessly, without any thought for the consequences," Bi said.

Elsewhere on the sun-dappled campus of Beijing International Studies University (BISU) -- one of the country's most prestigious -- the mood was unseasonably gloomy.

"If (the US) is targeting us so strongly, it chips away at my best options (for studying abroad), as well as my impression of the United States," 23-year-old Zhang Yue said.

While she may have considered a course at an American college before, "now, my expectations of (the country) have been lowered", she told AFP, adding that she might opt for a European adventure instead.

In his Wednesday statement, Rubio indicated that officials would particularly go after students "with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields".

Outside BISU's library, a student who asked to be identified by his surname, Wang, said that attitude "seemed a bit unreasonable".

"Students go to (the US) purely for academic progress, so they shouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of inconveniences," the 19-year-old told AFP.

Young Chinese people have long been crucial to US universities, with 277,398 attending them in the 2023-24 academic year alone, according to a State Department-backed report of the Institute of International Education.

Beijing's foreign ministry on Thursday blasted Washington for acting "unreasonably" and said it had lodged diplomatic representations.

Also affected are large numbers of Chinese high school students preparing to study in the United States later this year, as well as a thriving private industry that helps prepare them for their lives overseas.

One teacher at a Beijing-based international school said it was "heartbreaking" to see "highly aspirational" pupils wracked with uncertainty over their international futures.

"The timing and short-termism of this announcement means that many of our students... have had to make major changes to their potential pathways," the teacher said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Daniel Strom, co-founder and lead consultant at Elite Scholar Advising, an educational consultancy, said many clients "remain hopeful that Trump's proposals will be reversed in the courts".

But, he added, some of them had begun to look at alternatives in Britain and Canada if their plans to go to America fell through.