When the Institute of International Education issued its annual foreign-student census last fall, it was one for the record books: International enrollments clocked their largest one-year increase in more than four decades.
Of course, the growth followed the single-biggest decline since the institute began its count just after World War II. During the pandemic, with international travel restricted and consulates closed, new enrollments of foreign students had fallen more precipitously than for any other demographic group in American higher education.
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
When the Institute of International Education issued its annual foreign-student census last fall, it was one for the record books: International enrollments clocked their largest one-year increase in more than four decades.
Of course, the growth followed the single-biggest decline since the institute began its count just after World War II. During the pandemic, with international travel restricted and consulates closed, new enrollments of foreign students had fallen more precipitously than for any other demographic group in American higher education.
The rebound is a relief for colleges, many of which have come to depend on a reservoir of overseas tuition dollars to remain financially afloat. But it isn’t exactly a return to normal.
Pre-pandemic, the typical student-visa holder was an undergraduate from China — the country that accounted for one of every three foreign students — as enrollments at that academic level shot up nearly 90 percent over a decade.
Now the typical international student is in a graduate program and from India or, to a lesser extent, from sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in South Asia. In fact, there now are more foreign graduate students in the United States than there were international undergraduates during their pre-pandemic heyday. And those gains have been especially strong in master’s-degree programs.
ADVERTISEMENT
Applications from abroad are “robust, strong, and unrelenting,” said Andrew Karolyi, dean of Cornell University’s business school.
Without double-digit increases from overseas, American graduate schools would be seeing their enrollments shrink. In 2018, one in five students in graduate-school classrooms was from abroad, said Scott Jeffe, vice president for research for graduate and online programs at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, an education-consulting firm. Today, a third are.
International enrollment is an area of potential growth, but it’s not a silver bullet.
This latest surge would seem to be proof that American education has retained its global standing. Yet colleges should be wary of placing big bets on this development.
Historically, master’s enrollments have been more volatile than those in lengthier bachelor’s or doctoral programs — during the pandemic, only English-language study saw steeper declines. The lessons of China’s boom, then fizzle, remain fresh for many admissions directors, making them wary of promises of the next big thing. How much of the recent growth can be sustained, and how much is pent-up demand?
It’s also tougher for colleges to have an institutional strategy for graduate enrollment, international or domestic, given that responsibility for recruitment and admissions is frequently spread out among schools, departments, and even programs.
ADVERTISEMENT
And for professionally minded foreign graduate students, the right to stay in the United States and work is nearly as great a draw as an American diploma. Obstacles to obtaining on-the-job experience — be they economic shifts or changes to visa rules, as former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has threatened — could dim that appeal.
“I’m hopeful but not confident” of continued foreign-student increases, said Jennifer Latino, a senior director at EAB, a consulting firm focused on higher education. “International enrollment is an area of potential growth, but it’s not a silver bullet.”
Applications to American graduate programs had been rising in the months before the pandemic, only for actual enrollments to tumble in the fall of 2020.
The following spring, the Biden administration gave special exemptions to Covid-related travel restrictions to international students, opening the floodgates to both new applicants and students who had deferred admission the prior year. American consulates made students’ visas a priority to try to get them to campus in time for the start of fall classes.
But three years on, continued vigorous growth suggests that the numbers represent more than pent-up demand. As of May, there were 351,000 Indian student-visa holders in the United States, an increase of nearly 192,000 over that period. Wait times for student-visa appointments at the United States’ four consulates in India range from 163 to 292 days. In Ghana, whose numbers have more than doubled, delays for visa applicants stretch for more than a year.
ADVERTISEMENT
Even in China, which had a reopening flood of students, only to see visa issuances fall off the following year, enrollments have again begun to rise, a sign that the pandemic no longer exerts a gravitational force on global mobility.
Conditions for studying abroad are ripe in parts of the world where the expansion of the higher-education system has not kept pace with either demographic growth or economic demands. In India, both capacity and quality have increased faster for undergraduate study than for the graduate level, and the country lacks graduate programs in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence, climate science, and robotics. That pushes ambitious students to look abroad, said Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, an assistant professor of educational studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
If you put all your eggs in the online basket or in the classroom basket, you’re going to lose some students.
And while India’s middle class has not grown nearly as fast as China’s, it has expanded by some 65 million people over the past two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. This increase in standard of living — along with the rise of lenders specializing in international study, allowing students to borrow against future earnings — has made a foreign degree more affordable for more Indians, said Choudhury.
“In the new middle class, this is their aspiration for their children,” he said. “It is the American dream, through the Indian eye.”
Colleges have a blueprint for using foreign enrollments as a fail-safe. Fifteen years ago, another big surge of students from abroad helped bail out colleges, especially public flagships and other research-intensive universities, from the recession. Researchers found that at some institutions, international students accounted for 40 percent or more of new tuition revenue.
ADVERTISEMENT
Likewise, graduate programs have been an engine of enrollment and revenue growth since the recession. Even before the pandemic, increasing numbers of master’s students were helping to offset dips at the undergraduate level.
In some fields, like business, it can be relatively cost-effective to expand or start new master’s programs, relying on existing faculty members or adjuncts, said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who has studied graduate-education trends. As at the undergraduate level, most international master’s students cover the full cost of their degree, and many pay higher out-of-state tuition rates.
What’s more, rising numbers of international graduate students don’t seem to have engendered the same sort of backlash as earlier undergraduate increases, which led to concerns that foreign students were elbowing out American applicants. “At the graduate level, there’s not the same level of pressure on public universities to enroll in-state students,” Kelchen said. In states, like California, where lawmakers have capped out-of-state and international undergraduate enrollments, less-scrutinized graduate programs may be an “attractive” alternative to capitalize on foreign interest.
When it comes to attracting international students, however, not all master’s programs are created equal. Three areas of study — business, engineering, and math and computer science — account for three-quarters of new international students, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.
International students pursuing Ph.D.s also disproportionately gravitate toward STEM fields. But the North Star for master’s students is a job.
ADVERTISEMENT
MPower Financing is a public-benefit corporation that makes loans to international students studying in the United States and Canada. Almost all its borrowers are master’s students, and many are pursuing specialized or professional degrees tied to fast-growing fields, said Sasha Ramani, MPower’s senior director of corporate strategy. In the past year, interest in programs in artificial intelligence has quadrupled among Indian borrowers, Ramani said. “We call it the ChatGPT effect.”
It’s not just the long-term prospects of emerging fields that drive international-student choices. Some of the calculus is more immediate: While all foreign graduates of American colleges are allowed to stay in the United States and work for a year through a federal program known as Optional Practical Training, those who earn STEM degrees qualify for three years of OPT.
Sai Sourab Ganti was working as a software developer in his home country of India before he came to the United States, where he studies engineering management at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and works as a “global ambassador” for other foreign students. For the students he mentors, gaining as much American work experience as possible is the “highest priority.” Indian students take part in OPT at exceptionally high rates — a quarter of all Indian student-visa holders in the United States are taking part in the work program.
For them, return on investment is paramount, and a degree and hands-on experience are a package deal, Ganti said.
“If I just have a U.S. degree, I don’t think there would be as great a value” when seeking a job back in India, he said. “But a U.S. degree plus three years of OPT, that will be of value.”
ADVERTISEMENT
In addition, working for three years at higher American wages can help borrowers like Ganti pay off their loans.
Under the Biden administration, the number of majors qualifying for longer STEM OPT has been expanded twice, to include fields like developmental and adolescent psychology, landscape architecture, and demography studies. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama also added to OPT.
Business schools may be the clearest example of the impact of the more-generous definition of STEM. Just a decade ago, M.B.A.s were their bread and butter, but facing declining interest, many top schools broadened their portfolio of programs, adding discipline-specific, often one-year, degrees in areas like finance, management, and business analytics.
“Initially, there was a lot of pushback from people who thought it would weaken our reputation,” said Gareth James, business-school dean at Emory University who was then a professor at the University of Southern California, an early adopter.
Not all such degree programs are in STEM, and not all attract foreign students — some have very few, while others are almost entirely international, James said — but they have proliferated.
ADVERTISEMENT
At the University of Washington, which has six specialty master’s programs in its business school, students can opt to take technical courses that allow their degrees to qualify for STEM. Nearly all international students do, said Frank Hodge, the dean.
Applications from abroad have doubled since the pandemic, Hodge said. “I don’t think we can compete in international markets without STEM.”
Among top business schools, a half dozen have international enrollments that comprised half or more of their M.B.A. class in the fall of 2023, according to Poets & Quants, a website that focuses on graduate business education.
The growth isn’t exclusive to business programs. International students have jumped from 42 percent of all graduate-school enrollments at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County to 58 percent today, said Janet C. Rutledge, vice provost and dean of the graduate school.
As UMBC added more certificate and applied master’s programs, the intent was to meet regional work-force needs, not to attract international students. Still, they have flocked to programs such as biotechnology, data science, and entrepreneurship, Rutledge said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Ganti has added a post-baccalaureate certificate in cybersecurity to his engineering-management degree. In every sector, employers like Dunkin’ Donuts and Google have cybersecurity concerns, he said. “You have to be able to translate your degree into something commercially viable.”
The increase in international students has classroom benefits, said James, a native New Zealander. Emory’s graduates will go on to work both around the world and in companies that are global, which makes studying alongside students from different countries and cultures an important preparation.
Still, with the enrollment changes come challenges. For one, the trend among American graduate students, many of whom are working, is toward online and hybrid education, said Jeffe, the graduate-school consultant. Since 2019, the number of graduate students taking some or all of their classes online has increased by almost 425,000, while the number choosing classroom-only instruction has declined.
Will it continue to make sense for colleges to go around the world looking for tuition dollars?
Visa rules, however, require that international students take most of their courses in person. That leaves graduate programs serving two divergent populations, Jeffe said. “If you put all your eggs in the online basket or in the classroom basket, you’re going to lose some students.”
Visas create other complications. About nine out of 10 Chinese applicants are granted American student visas, while in India, denial rates ranged from 25 percent to a high of 50 percent in the years immediately before the pandemic. Refusal rates in sub-Saharan Africa are even higher. The rise of graduate students from India means that colleges have far less certainty that the international students they accept will actually make it to campus.
ADVERTISEMENT
Shifting international-student demographics present new challenges for recruitment. Many admissions officers had grown familiar with the well-tread circuit of Chinese high schools and college fairs, but in India, prospective students typically join the work force before returning to graduate school, making it more difficult for American colleges to increase their visibility. And since graduate recruitment is decentralized, said Rajika Bhandari, an international-education strategist, on some campuses different academic programs have little awareness of one another’s foreign-recruitment strategy. “It’s siloed.”
In India, colleges are turning to in-country recruitment agents, and Choudhury said he has seen growth in private universities that have formed partnerships with American institutions, all but guaranteeing a path from an Indian bachelor’s degree to an American graduate program. Cornell’s business school has joint master’s programs with two prominent Chinese universities, Peking and Tsinghua.
Just as colleges must alter their recruitment strategies, they must also change the academic and cultural supports they offer. The needs of this new crop of students don’t necessarily match the infrastructure that has been built up for Chinese undergraduates. They may care less about whether dormitory dining halls serve dishes from home. Because Indian students typically have previously studied in English, enrollments in preparatory language courses have plummeted, and many intensive-English programs have shuttered.
At the same time, career-services offices could find themselves working overtime. Then there are the unexpected wrinkles: When UMBC’s international graduate numbers shot up, the university had to add bus routes to serve foreign students living off campus without cars.
The university also had to find emergency funds for Nigerian students when that country’s currency suddenly lost much of its value, Rutledge said. New international students could be much more vulnerable to such economic shifts — MPower said 70 percent of its borrowers come from households with incomes under $12,000.
ADVERTISEMENT
The more budget-conscious international students could make less expensive public colleges — like UMBC or the University of Texas at Arlington, where the engineering school has seen a huge bump in Indian enrollments — more attractive.
But American higher education as a whole will have to adjust to a new financial model. Simply put, a graduate student in a one- or two-year master’s program simply does not generate the same fee revenue as an undergraduate studying for four years or more. Will it continue to make sense for colleges to go around the world looking for tuition dollars?
Already, some graduate programs are pulling back a little on the number of foreign students they admit. At UMBC, where international graduate enrollments jumped from 150 to 770 in four years, the latest class has a more modest 500, Rutledge said.
This year the incoming class at the University of Washington’s business school will be roughly split between domestic and international students, a choice UW made to achieve more of an equilibrium of backgrounds and perspectives, Hodge, the dean, said.
There’s a practical reason, too. Washington prides itself on its high job-placement rates of graduates, which count in business-school rankings. “Almost without exception, those we can’t place are international students,” Hodge said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Many employers, such as the big accounting firms, refuse to hire applicants on visas, despite OPT. With recent layoffs in the high-tech sector, which attracts many Washington graduates, the business school could end up with more hard-to-place students competing for fewer jobs.
And then there are the storm clouds on the horizon, with November’s presidential election. During his first term in office, Trump and members of his administration repeatedly said they wanted to curtail OPT and make it more difficult for international students and other immigrants to work in the United States. If he returns to the White House, many international educators worry that he could restrict, or even gut, the popular work program. Many foreign students, said Lin Larson, director of student recruitment at the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Engineering, “are watching the news and saying, ‘Maybe we’ll wait.’”
A slowdown in Indian interest in studying abroad is likely to be the result of American actions, rather than a diminishing of Indian ambitions, said Choudhury, the Indian higher-education expert. When he came to the United States last year for a fellowship at Harvard University, he took his 12-year-old son on a mini-college tour, visiting the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most of his fellow Indian professors plan to send their children to college here, he said.
The Indian desire for American degrees runs deep. “This is not temporary,” Choudhury said. If the situation changes, he added,“that will be a shock from your side, not from our side.”
Karin Fischer writes about international education and the economic, cultural, and political divides around American colleges. She’s on the social-media platform X @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.