Meet the New International Student

For the past several years, the story of international education has been one of uneasiness and uncertainty.

The travel ban, shifts in visa policy, a trade war with China, doubts about job prospects, increased competition from other countries, even fear of American gun culture — all have contributed to three years of declines in the number of new international students on American college campuses.

The decreases are all the more jarring for having followed a decade-long international-student boom. That boom relied overwhelmingly on a single country: More than half the growth in students from abroad came from China.

But Chinese enrollments are now essentially flat, and a combination of factors — demographic, economic, political — suggest it’s highly unlikely that American colleges will once again see the same breakneck pace of growth from China. So where will tomorrow’s international students come from?

Losing out on international enrollments would be a blow to the many colleges that have prioritized global engagement in their institutional missions. What’s more, colleges have come to rely on the tuition paid by foreign students to fill budgetary holes left by state-funding cuts and a shrinking pool of domestic students.

Colleges have continued to recruit overseas, chasing promising leads and seeking new markets. The Chronicle studied economic, enrollment, and demographic data. We spoke with admissions officers, international-student advisers, high-school counselors, overseas-recruitment agents, and global-education experts. What are they finding? What might the future hold?

This is a portrait — or a partial and emerging one, anyway — of the New International Student.

More students will come from a wider range of countries.

To forecast where new, fertile recruiting grounds will be, it’s important to understand what fueled the most recent increases. Rajika Bhandari was until recently senior adviser for research and strategy at the Institute of International Education, where she was in charge of its annual international-enrollment survey. She says Chinese students and families looked outward for higher education because the country lacked a sufficient number of high-quality universities to meet the demand of its college-aged population. “It’s both demographics and capacity.”

A number of other countries fit that profile, says Bhandari, who is now president of the IC3 Institute, which seeks to bring college counseling to high-school students around the globe. One is India, already the number-two source country for international students. Others include some of India’s neighbors, such as Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.

Some of the countries in the region previously sent talented students to the United States for graduate programs, says Ishrat Jahan, regional educational advising coordinator for South Asia for EducationUSA, the State Department-funded network of college-advising centers. But now more students are interested in earning American undergraduate degrees, she says. High schools are even springing up specifically to prepare students to go abroad — a phenomenon that happened a decade ago in China.

Jahan has also noticed more young women interested in international study, a shift for this culturally conservative part of the world. Meanwhile, more American colleges have begun to travel to South Asia, building critical connections. “Personal relationships really drive applications here,” Jahan says.

Recruiters are also traveling to Africa, where the potential for higher-education growth is immense: 60 percent of the continent’s 1.2 billion people are under age 25. Yet just 10 percent of the college-age population in sub-Saharan Africa is enrolled in higher education, according to the World Bank. The region’s universities are simply unable to keep up with demand.

Already, Nigeria ranks seventh among all countries for globally mobile students. But the top choice for Nigerian students is Britain, not the United States. And China has quickly become a destination for students from across Africa, with more than 60,000now studying there. “Other countries are ahead of the U.S. in tapping into Africa,” Bhandari says.

Even if American colleges were to step up recruiting in a region, could it become the next China? Many educators are skeptical — and what’s more, they think it’s a bad idea to rely on a single country or region. One in three international students in the United States is from China, making many American colleges overdependent on it. “It’s a big risk,” says John Wilkerson, executive director for international admissions at Indiana University.

Beginning five years ago, Wilkerson sought to geographically diversify the university’s recruitment. At the outset, he and his team visited 11 countries. In the current admissions cycle, they will have gone to 66. To identify possible markets, Wilkerson doesn’t look at which countries are sending students to Indiana. Instead, he sifts through educational and economic data, such as trends for high-school graduation and homeownership, to pinpoint places with potential.

Such investments don’t pay off immediately, however. Wilkerson says it takes three to five years to build relationships that yield results. “When you’re asking students to cross continents,” he says, “you have to do more than give them a glossy brochure.”

Because Indiana’s enrollments from China and other traditional sources remained strong, he was able to underwrite recruiting efforts in new markets. Other institutions are taking different approaches. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville has opted to piggyback on faculty members’ travel to expand its global footprint. When faculty members fill out mandatory international-travel forms, they are asked to check a box indicating that they would be willing to help with overseas recruitment. About a quarter do. In return, they receive money, typically a couple of hundred dollars, from a faculty-recruitment fund that pays for an additional night in a hotel or a few days’ per diem, says Kim LaScola Needy, dean of the graduate school and international education.

The strategy has enabled the university to get to countries like Indonesia, and for far less money than it would take to send a dedicated admissions officer. Plus, it can build on professors’ existing networks and contacts. “They already have a foot in the door,” Needy says. “They are known; they are credible.” Arkansas hopes to use its new contacts in Indonesia to bring in a small number of graduate students.

But if countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Nigeria mirror China in important ways, they differ in a crucial one: income. The Chinese-student boom was financed by an ascendant middle class that could afford to pay for an American degree. By contrast, many of the countries growing fast now have much lower average family incomes. Jahan, the EducationUSA advising coordinator in South Asia, says high visa-denial rates in the region often aren’t the result of students’ being academically unqualified, but of their inability to prove that they can pay their way. “For every scholarship opportunity,” she says, “hundreds of students will apply.”

Students will shop for value.

Those shifting demographics could give rise to a new type of student: the bargain hunter.

The previous generation of student was heavily driven by perceptions of quality. Consulting university rankings like a Bible, they sought out, and were willing to pay for, brand-name institutions. That’s evidenced by the clustering of students in a relatively small number of American institutions, primarily well-regarded public and private research universities. During the height of the international-student surge, just 10 percent of colleges absorbed nearly 70 percent of the growth, a previous Chronicle analysis showed.

Rahul Choudaha, a U.S.-based international-education expert and blogger, characterizes those students as “prestige seeking,” willing to pay top dollar for top quality. By contrast, he argues, incoming students now are looking for value. They see a real benefit in a foreign degree but are limited in their ability to pay for it. This matters because the majority of international students, nearly 60 percent, rely on personal or family income as the primary source of funding for their degrees. “This student is looking to gain global experience,” Choudaha says, “but to minimize the cost.”

While most American colleges do not offer financial aid to international students, a growing minority are beginning to do so. Both Indiana and Western New England University, for example, award merit scholarships to international students based on the same criteria they use for domestic students.

Students may also borrow more to cover the costs of their education. Many students are very likely borrowing informally, from a relative or family friend. More recently, there has been a rise in Western-style lenders catering to international-student borrowers, who are ineligible for federal student loans and can’t qualify for a U.S. bank loan without an American co-signer. One such lender, Prodigy Finance, says it has seen an uptick in both the amount students are seeking to borrow and in the number of borrowers, particularly from emerging economies like Cameroon, Ghana, and Honduras. “Eighty percent of our students wouldn’t have been able to go to school without borrowing,” says Joel Frisch, head of Americas for Prodigy, which lends to graduate students.

Or students may seek out colleges where their dollars go further, particularly regional public universities, where tuition can cost just a third of what it does on the flagship campus, Choudaha says.

A model for the new type of institution is Minnesota State University at Mankato. The college, about 80 miles from the Twin Cities, enrolls 1,300 international students, about 10 percent of its student body. Its top-sending countries — Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast — reflect the changing geography of international recruitment. Mankato has more students from one high school in Ethiopia than from all of China.

International students pay only 10 percent more than the average Minnesota resident, says Anne Dahlman, interim dean of global education, with the total cost of attendance about $24,000 a year. “We attract students who never thought they had an option to study in America,” she says.

With three college-age siblings, including a brother also at Mankato, a costlier college would have been out of reach for Merwan Mohammed, a 22-year-old junior from Ethiopia. But he was also attracted by the university’s strong civil-engineering program, a field that’s in high demand in Ethiopia, where the infrastructure needs are steep.

Because of Mankato’s small size — there are only about 35 other juniors in his engineering program — Mohammed has gotten to know his professors better than he thinks he would in a larger university. He is a research assistant to one of his instructors, working on ways to make air-compressed bricks, a more environmentally friendly alternative to heat-fired bricks. “I always talk to my professors during office hours,” he says, “and I ask for research opportunities.” International students at Mankato outperform their American classmates in retention, completion, and grade-point average, Dahlman says.

In exchange for lower tuition rates, international students are required to complete 25 hours per semester of service on campus or in the local community, through what the university calls a “cultural contribution scholarship.” Mohammed has built houses with Habitat for Humanity, given campus tours, and worked as a global-student ambassador. Rather than seeing such work as an obligation, Mohammed says it’s been an opportunity to get to know Mankato residents better. “I feel much more like part of the community,” he says.

Mankato officials hope that the scholarship conveys to international students that “you are welcome here — and we don’t just say it, we invest in it,” Dahlman says. But she acknowledges that the financial assistance is important to overseas recruitment for a little-known college in small-town Minnesota, where the average January high is 25 degrees. (“I had never experienced snow,” Mohammed says. “I had always wanted to, but I didn’t like it once I did.”)

While international enrollments may be flatlining across America, Dahlman says Mankato hopes to more than double its number of overseas students over the next eight years, to 3,000.

Students will seek specialized programs that offer a strong promise of employability.

For international students, gaining work experience has become an essential part of earning an American degree. “It’s no different than domestic students paying attention to postgraduate outcomes,” says Indiana’s Wilkerson. As international students become increasingly concerned about employability, they could become choosier about the majors and programs they pursue.

Already they’re showing signs of shifting preferences. The number of international applicants to American M.B.A. programs is falling, and interest in studying business, long one of the most popular majors for foreign students, is down. Instead, students are gravitating to more-specialized majors that can give them a competitive edge in the job market. Prodigy Finance, which tracks the fields of its borrowers, sees more students pursuing degrees such as business analytics and financial engineering, which uses computer science and mathematics to address financial problems. “In an uncertain world,” Frisch says, “students really latch onto job placement.”

That explains the lone bright spot in the most recent international-enrollment figures. Participation in Optional Practical Training, a program that allows international students to work in the United States for at least one year after earning a degree, has increased nearly 10 percent. The emphasis on work could only grow as American colleges attract more students for whom a foreign degree is key to economic mobility, for themselves and their families.

Students like Lauren Zha are guided by long-term prospects when they make choices about what to study. Zha, a 27-year-old from China, originally came to Northeastern University to study finance, but she later switched to a master’s-degree program in computer science. Zha enrolled in Align, a program at Northeastern for non-computer-science majors. The five-year-old program, which gives students a two-semester “bridge” before they go into the regular master’s degree, was designed to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science. It does that — about half of Align’s current students are female — but it’s also proven to be a popular path for international students, says Carla E. Brodley, dean of computer science. Forty percent of Align students are international, and, like Zha, a third of the foreign applicants were already in the United States.

So far, Align has a perfect job-placement rate, with graduates snapped up by top tech firms like Amazon and Facebook, where Zha landed a job as a software engineer. Employers appreciate the diversity of students’ backgrounds, Brodley says — Align draws students equally from business, STEM, and the liberal arts.

Northeastern teaches the program on four campuses in the United States, and it plans to expand to Toronto and Vancouver. The original intent was to help Canada diversify its high-tech work force, Brodley says, but the expansion may have a secondary benefit as well. If international students are unable, or unwilling, to study in America, they can still enroll in Align in Canada.

The program, and the subsequent master’s degree, made a big difference to Zha. She says nine out of 10 of her former finance classmates have returned to their home countries after struggling to find work on OPT with an American employer.

“The job market in the finance industry is me begging for a job,” Zha says. “It’s not that way in tech.”

For other students, the appeal of certain majors is their relevancy back home. At the University of Idaho, international students are enrolling in environmentally focused majors, like fisheries and water conservation, that have real-world application in their home countries, says Dana Brolley, the university’s director of international services.

Jahan, of EducationUSA, says there is growing interest in environmental science among students from Bangladesh, which is on the front line of dealing with the impact of climate change. Increasing interest in health professions may also reflect demand back home, says Hironao Okahana, of the Council of Graduate Schools.

International students will be recruited from colleges’ backyards.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice has some 300 international students, but Eli Cohen, deputy director of international-student recruitment and marketing at the college, which is part of the City University of New York system, takes few overseas recruiting trips.

That’s because about 70 percent of John Jay’s foreign students were already in the United States before they applied to the college. They were studying in American high schools or community colleges, enrolled in English-language programs, or even working as au pairs here.

With a small office — Cohen has just one colleague — and limited resources, John Jay has long recruited international students domestically. Now, the strategy is increasingly appealing to other budget-conscious colleges looking for a reliable supply of international students.

While international enrollments in community colleges and intensive English programs have declined in the past couple of years, there are still 245,000 students from abroad in two-year colleges, language institutes, and high schools in America, many with a desire to go on to earn a bachelor’s degree. Put another way, if the United States was counted among sending countries, it would be the second-leading source of international students, behind only China.

Recruiting locally is cheaper than the weekslong overseas trips taken by many admissions officers. And at a time when American colleges face growing competition from other destinations, like Australia, Britain, and Canada, there’s another advantage to looking in one’s own backyard — these students have already expressed an interest in studying in the United States. “No one comes to a high school or to a community college here to turn around and go home,” Cohen says. “These students are low-hanging fruit.”

As part of the CUNY system, which includes both four-year institutions and community colleges, John Jay has a built-in pipeline of international transfer students. It also benefits from its New York City location and the “CSI factor” — criminal justice and forensic science are popular majors with foreign students, too.

But companies are also springing up to help colleges make connections with this pool of students. The company Rekruut — it’s Dutch for “recruit” — this fall held international transfer fairs in 10 American cities. About 70 colleges signed up for the fairs, which were hosted by local community colleges, says Peter Phippen, one of Rekruut’s founders.

Phippen has a background in international admissions and saw a need to improve the pathway for international students at community colleges. While some two-year institutions do have offices to serve those students, many lack the infrastructure to provide specialized advising. Students from overseas often have different concerns when transferring than do their domestic counterparts.

For instance, many American students at community colleges choose a nearby institution for a bachelor’s degree because of family or work obligations. But international students may not be similarly place-bound, and so the best-fit college may be one that offers a particular major or degree program — on the other side of the country. “Right now international transfer is riding the coattails of domestic transfer, and that can only take you so far,” Phippen says.

While Rekruut currently runs transfer fairs, Phippen hopes to eventually help two- and four-year colleges negotiate articulation agreements with international transfers in mind. Such arrangements could also assist community colleges with their own overseas recruitment. The community-college model is unfamiliar in many parts of the world, and being able to show how enrolling at one can lead to a bachelor’s degree could help attract students.

At Western New England University, in Springfield, Mass., Michelle R. Kowalsky, executive director of undergraduate admissions, has become more intentional about recruiting international students from high schools. She has cross-trained her American recruiters so they are more familiar with the specific needs of foreign students. “I don’t want a student to say something about an I-20” — a student-visa document — “and have the counselor be totally thrown off,” she says.

While Kowalsky still travels abroad, recruiting locally has particular benefits. For one, students already in the country have visas, so they don’t face the same uncertainty that hangs over the visa-application process. They also can visit campus and build connections, important for an institution like Western New England, which may not have the same reputation abroad as better-known colleges. And although the transition from high school to college can be tough for all students, says Kowalsky, “the cultural adjustment is not as drastic as for someone who steps off the plane and onto campus for the first time.”

Students will earn American degrees without coming to America.

Under President Trump, the United States has sent mixed messages to international students. While administration officials have said that they welcome foreign students, government actions have made it more difficult to study in the United States, as students face new visa restrictions and lengthy administrative delays that can force them to push back their start dates and forfeit scholarships.

But American colleges can still export their education with programs abroad. That could mean offering degrees online, or franchising educational programming to a foreign partner. Many institutions, of course, already have joint-degree programs, in which students spend time at an overseas university before coming to the United States for a year or more to complete their studies. In such arrangements, students typically earn two degrees: one American, one foreign. On the other end of the spectrum, a handful of American institutions, notably Duke University and New York University, run full-scale campuses abroad.

Some colleges are pioneering an intermediate model, offering full American degrees abroad, albeit without the infrastructure of a comprehensive campus. The University of Arizona, for example, awards degrees at a half-dozen microcampuses, located at partner universities around the world; five more are expected to open in the next year. “Microcampus programs are an evolution of the dual-degree model,” says Brent White, vice provost for global affairs and dean of global campuses, “with the University of Arizona going to the students instead of requiring students to come to us.”

The programs are developed by Arizona faculty members and tailored to local needs — the university offers a public-health program in the United Arab Emirates, for example, while students in Peru can study economics and industrial and systems engineering. In all, Arizona enrolls about 900 students overseas, White says.

Politics and visa policy did not spur Arizona’s approach; rather, the university developed microcampuses to expand access, White says.

Janet Ilieva, a British-based higher-education consultant, says transnational education — that is, providing education from one country to students based in another — rarely cannibalizes international-student numbers. “I don’t think this is distracting students from studying in the U.S. or the U.K.,” she says. “It widens access to an overseas degree to those who would never be able to afford to study abroad.”

Students like the prestige and employability edge of an international degree. And more foreign governments are seeking to attract international universities. The Philippines recently loosened restrictions on foreign higher-ed providers, and the Indian government could follow suit. After years of sending tens of thousands of students abroad, China wants to build more joint academic programs with overseas colleges at Chinese universities. “I think we’ll see more investment in capacity building at home, to keep knowledge closer to home,” Ilieva says.

British universities already serve more international students in programs overseas than they do on their campuses at home. But given American higher education’s global reputation, more countries could look to colleges here as natural partners.

Some institutions will have a head start. Webster University opened its first overseas campus, in Geneva, four decades ago, and its newest, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in August. Over the years, it has awarded nearly 19,000 degrees internationally. “For Webster, it’s how can we serve global needs in a local community,” says Elizabeth J. Stroble, the chancellor. “We want to meet those unmet needs.”

Colleges aren’t likely to see a return to the boom in international enrollments of recent years. But with some smart strategies, creativity, and luck, they could still realize their global aspirations.