Duke University

Duke and Wuhan's partnership was approved by the Ministry of Education in September 2013. The school's first group of students began classes in August 2014.

Simon said there are 37 graduate students from 14 countries in DKU's master's degree programs in global health, medical physics and management studies. Plans call for a full-scale undergraduate program in Fall 2018, Simon said.

DKU also offers a non-degree undergraduate semester program in Kunshan, the Undergraduate Global Learning Semester, which has 53 undergraduate students - 15 percent are international and 85 percent are Chinese - for the 2015-2016 academic year.

"The Ministry of Education has created a special bureau that is responsible for oversight and management of these joint-venture universities," Simon said. "There are new things on the Chinese and foreign sides, but the responsibility is twofold. They want to ensure compliance with certain rules and regulations and make sure that the ground remains fertile for these universities to do their thing. In other words, to bring to China the quality of education, the type of pedagogy and the research capability that was committed to from the very beginning."

Kent Steward, executive director of university relations and marketing at Fort Hays State University (FHSU), said that in recent years the Chinese government has improved its college education system, including partnerships foreign schools.

"The big program that we have there is what we call a cross-border agreement," Steward said. "And we have two dual-degree partnerships in China right now, so the students end up with a dual degree either from Shenyang Normal or from Sias International and Fort Hays State."

FHSU operates the dual-degree program along with Sias International University (Xinzheng, Henan province) and Shenyang Normal University (Shenyang, Liaoning province) where Chinese students study in English toward undergraduate degrees in business administration, global business, information networking, organizational leadership and political science.