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When the lunch bell rings at Cape Cod Academy, students line up for a weekly treat — food from Great House, a local Chinese restaurant.

At first glance, the piles of fried rice and barbecue pork might seem ideal for the private high school’s international students. Nearly 20 percent of the student body is Chinese, and in the hallways, throngs of students can often be found chatting in Mandarin.

But the Chinese students don’t find the lunch offerings especially appetizing.

“They put too much oil in it,” says Yunshu Zhang, 18, a third-year student who, here, in a village of 3,500 people on the southern Cape coast, goes by Tony. “To be honest, that shop will probably shut off if it was in China.”

The international flavor of Cape Cod Academy, or CCA, contrasts sharply with local demographics. The school is in one of the state’s least-diverse counties — a summer oceanfront getaway in the town of Barnstable, about 70 miles southeast of Boston — with a population that is 93 percent white and less than 2 percent Asian, according to census data.

But in the wider context of U.S. education, CCA’s international program is part of a growing trend. Tens of thousands of Chinese students attend U.S. schools, a number that is rapidly rising as Chinese families look to tap into the nation’s top-tier colleges and universities — which now host hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals seeking a U.S. degree.

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