Despite a sizable bump in visas issued to Chinese students for the new academic year, for the first time in 15 years China is no longer the top source of international students in the United States.
A surge in students from India displaced China from a position it has held since the 2009 academic year. As of September, there were more than 320,000 active Indian student-visa holders, compared with some 254,000 from China, according to a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
India leapfrogged China, despite a 47 percent increase in new F-1, or student, visas issued in China in the critical months of May through August. That’s a reversal from 2022, when Chinese visa issuances plummeted during the same period.
Nearly 70,000 visas were awarded to Chinese students during the summer months that account for the bulk of F-1 issuances, according to a Chronicle analysis of visa data collected by the U.S. Department of State. Last year, only about 47,000 visas went to Chinese students.
While China had a strong rebound, it was outpaced by India in new student-visa issuances. The 89,000 visas granted to Indian students were a 5 percent increase over the same four months in 2022 and 160 percent more than during the same span in 2019, before the pandemic.
The total number of new student visas awarded for the fall of 2023 increased by 9 percent from 2022 and by 20 percent from 2019. More than 307,000 F-1 visas were issued by U.S. consulates worldwide, cementing a post-pandemic turnaround.
Most international students are issued a single visa for the duration of their studies. And while elementary- and secondary-school children from abroad also come to the United States on F-1 visas, nine in 10 student-visa holders are college students, so visa data are largely a reflection of college enrollments.
The reinvigorated overseas interest in American higher education is likely to be welcome news to college leaders, who have come to rely on international students for their talent and for their tuition dollars. New enrollments fell more steeply during the pandemic for international students than for any other demographic group.
Hope and Headwinds in China
The healthy growth in new students from China may be particularly reassuring. When visa issuances there tumbled by 45 percent last year, many international-admissions experts wondered if Chinese students had soured on the United States.
The uptick in new visas isn’t the only positive sign, said Xiaofeng Wan, an associate dean of admission and coordinator of international recruitment at Amherst College. Wan, who is studying Chinese-student trends as part of his doctoral research at Boston College, recently surveyed college counselors at more than 80 Chinese high schools and found that enrollment in international tracks that prepare students to go overseas is 25 percent higher among 10th-grade students than among those in their final year of high school.
In China, students who study in international schools or programs don’t have the option to attend a Chinese university, and during the pandemic, many families pulled their children from such programs, instead enrolling them in high schools that taught the national curriculum, Wan said. Chinese parents were often alarmed by the handling of the Covid outbreak in the United States and by the anti-Asian racism the pandemic spawned. “They’re warming up to the idea that studying abroad is a possibility now,” he said.
Shi Wang, vice principal and director of college counseling at Tsinghua University High School, in Beijing, said that during the pandemic foreign teachers who taught many of the classes in international high schools left China. It was also tough to take exams, like Advanced Placement and the SAT, that matter in American admissions.
Wang, likewise, sees renewed interest in studying abroad. “Now we have the reset button,” he said. “The demand is there.”
Still, the rebound in new visas is not necessarily a return to the boom period of the past decade and a half, when enrollments of Chinese students skyrocketed year after year, and they accounted for one in three international students on American campuses. The number of visas issued to Chinese students for the new academic year remains well below pre-pandemic levels.
China may continue to be an important, but not the dominant, source of international enrollments.
In Wan’s survey, most counselors said the United States was their students’ first choice but that the students were also applying to colleges in multiple countries, including Britain, Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong. “They make sure to have a Plan B — and a Plan C,” he said. In the past, students less commonly applied to different countries.
When the Beijing Overseas Study Service Association, a group of Chinese recruitment agents, analyzed the preferences of prospective students and families who used its online college-search platform, it found that the United States was the second-most-popular destination.
Some prospective students don’t even bother to apply to the United States because they think it can be difficult to get a visa, especially if they are interested in studying science or technology, said Jon Santangelo, a senior consultant to the recruitment-agents group. (A Trump-era policy, retained by the Biden administration, denies student visas to graduates of Chinese universities that are said to have ties with the Chinese military or national-security agencies. Over all, however, U.S. visa-approval rates for Chinese students are high, with nine out of 10 applications granted last year.)
Geopolitics and competition from other countries are not the only factors that could temper Chinese enrollment growth. Safety is a major worry for Chinese parents, especially incidents of gun violence in the United States, which are heavily covered in the Chinese media and on social media. China is also going through its own baby bust, with fewer high-school graduates.
A new headwind could be the Chinese economy, which has been sputtering. The recruitment-agents group recently put out an alert warning that worsening currency-exchange rates for the Chinese renminbi could make studying abroad much more costly. Declines in property values in major Chinese cities could also be a problem, because families often use apartments as nest eggs to pay for overseas tuition costs. “Affordability has become a major consideration for Chinese families when deciding on studying abroad,” said Chenxing Sang, the group’s secretary general.
What’s more, young Chinese have been most affected by the economic slowdown, with one in five struggling to find work. Will students and families invest in a costly American degree if the employment payoff is uncertain?
But Shi Wang, of Tsinghua University High School, said that, much as in the United States, a downturn could make staying in college more attractive to students facing a poor job market. And while Xiaofeng Wan, of Amherst, acknowledges that pocketbook issues matter, he notes that Chinese families typically save an “astonishing” amount for their children’s education, insulating that decision from economic dips.
Both men agree that it is important for American colleges to re-engage with Chinese students and schools. Even though China lifted Covid restrictions in January, travel from the United States remains difficult and costly, with limited flights. “A marathon,” said Wan, who spoke with The Chronicle while on a recruitment trip to China and Japan. He said he has seen fewer fellow admissions officers on the ground.
Wang said he fears many colleges have shifted their focus from China, but he hopes they would still see it as a promising source of international students. “Because of Covid, we had three years of lost connections between American colleges and Chinese schools,” he said.
Is Strong Interest From India Sustainable?
India, meanwhile, experienced another strong year, with visa issuances approaching 90,000. Rising interest could especially benefit graduate programs, which typically enroll more than three quarters of students from India.
Still, Jonathan D. Weller, director of international admissions at the University of Cincinnati, said he is seeing more interest in undergraduate study among Indian students and families than when he first began recruiting there, more than 15 years ago. (Visa data are not broken out by academic level, but in 2021, the number of Indian students enrolled in undergraduate programs increased by 16 percent, according to the Institute for International Education.)
Natasha Chopra, director of TC Global, an international-student recruitment agency, said many factors drive Indian students to study abroad. The country has a burgeoning youth population — more than half of its 1.4 billion people are under age 30 — but not nearly enough capacity or quality in its universities. A growing middle class, along with greater availability and acceptance of student loans, means more Indian families can afford foreign degrees. “It all has to do with demand and supply,” Chopra said. “If you are middle class, you have to make the investment in your children’s education.”
There are reasons the United States is a draw, too, Chopra said. America has both highly ranked colleges and many options to choose from, appealing to a wide group of students. Indian students often find American colleges’ emphasis on internships and job placements attractive. “People are looking for outcomes and employability,” she said.
While the United States does not offer a clear pathway from study to work that many of its competitor countries, like Australia and Canada, do, graduates can get on-the-job training through a program known as Optional Practical Training, or OPT. Indian students are far more likely to take part in the postgraduate work program than their counterparts from China — more than a third of Indian student-visa holders were participating in OPT in 2021, compared with 18 percent of Chinese students.
The program, in which students remain on their student visas, allows graduates to stay in the United States and work for at least one year and as many as three years. Indian students, two thirds of whom study engineering or math and computer science, are more likely to qualify for the longer work program.
In fact, India’s edging ahead of China in overall numbers reflects not just sizable increases in new students but the popularity of OPT, extending the time that Indian students spend in the United States.
The combination of factors spurring growth from India suggests that interest among Indian students could be sustainable. Still, among colleges, there is a cautiousness about taking such enrollment trends for granted.
For one, politics could play a role. “It’s absolutely sustainable to kingdom come, contingent on U.S. policies,” said Naveen Chopra, Natasha Chopra’s husband and founder of TC Global. “Are you going to re-elect Trump? That’s the million-dollar question.”
Former President Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric on international students and efforts to impose more restrictive student-visa policies were seen as unwelcoming by many Indian students and families, and Indian enrollments declined during part of his previous term.
But lessons from recent years, when colleges realized they couldn’t count on sustaining student increases from China, also weigh heavily on many in international admissions. “We don’t take growth for granted,” Weller said.
This year, about 950 of Cincinnati’s 1,500 new international students are from India, but Weller is working to cast a wider net in attracting students. This spring, the university opened an international-recruitment office in Colombia, its first outside Asia.
“It’s not that we’re trying to pivot from India,” Weller said. “We hope to expand our global footprint.”
But the new visa data underscore the challenges to diversifying international enrollments. Beyond India and China, few other major sending countries saw significant year-over-year increases in visa issuances. The exceptions include Taiwan and Saudi Arabia, where the number of new visas granted rose by 12 and 11 percent, respectively, and Ghana, where visa issuances soared, by 68 percent.
