India leapfrogs China in new graduate enrollments
India has surged ahead of China to become the leading source of new international graduate students in the United States, according to just-released data from the Council of Graduate Schools.
First-time Indian graduate students in the fall of 2021 increased an eye-popping 430-percent over the previous year. Enrollments of new graduate students from China were up by 35 percent from the fall of 2020, according to a survey of American graduate programs by the council.
While India outpaced China in new enrollments, the largest share of international graduate students is still from China. But for the first time, more master’s and certificate students came from India in 2021 than from any other country, the council reports.
The big question: Are the 2021 enrollment figures an aberration, a reflection of pent-up demand caused by the Covid-19 pandemic? Or do they signal the coming of a more permanent realignment, at least at the graduate level, with India, long the No. 2, displacing China as the top sender of students to the United States?
Over all, the number of new international graduate students enrolled at American colleges climbed by 92 percent in 2021. Thanks to that robust growth, American graduate schools regained the ground lost during the pandemic. First-time enrollments had declined by 39 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020.
Part of the 2021 enrollment increase can be attributed to deferrals of offers of admission a year earlier, at the height of the pandemic, when consulates were largely closed and many international flights were grounded.
Among Indian students, 21 percent of master’s and certificate students and 12 percent of doctoral students deferred admission in fall 2020. Deferral rates from China were not nearly as high during the pandemic, with 6 percent of those admitted to both master’s and doctoral programs electing to defer.
Indian student deferrals likely inflated enrollment totals from that country, although the council did not specifically ask colleges about the share of students who had deferred among first-time enrollments, said Enyu Zhou, a senior analyst at the council. In essence, “Indian students from two consecutive application years were matriculating at the same time,” she said.
New graduate applications from India also increased significantly, by 36 percent. By contrast, since the fall of 2016, the largest one-year increase in applications from India had been 5 percent — and over a couple of years during that period, Indian graduate-student applications actually fell.
In addition to India, the council found strong growth from sub-Saharan Africa. Applications from the region rose by 64 percent and first-time enrollments by 103 percent. The council’s findings are based on responses from 361 institutions, or about half those surveyed.
Meanwhile, applications for the fall of 2021 from China dropped by 16 percent.
One reason for the drop in Chinese applicants may be that for much of the 2021 admissions cycle, international students from China were barred from traveling to the United States, at least directly. (They could travel to a third country and quarantine before coming to the United States.)
It wasn’t until late April 2021 that the Biden administration exempted Chinese student-visa holders from the pandemic travel ban — long after 2021 graduate applications were due. Uncertainty about whether they would be permitted to come to America may have depressed applications from China in particular. Only students from a handful of other countries — Brazil, Iran, and South Africa — faced such strict bans.
American consulates in China were also slow to restart visa services, while those in India prioritized student-visa applicants in the summer of 2021 — although there have been ongoing complaints about visa backlogs in both countries.
Despite the decline in applications, first-time Chinese graduate enrollments substantially increased in 2021. Still, there are concerns, many of which predate the pandemic, that American colleges are becoming less attractive to Chinese students: American politics and policies can make it tougher for students from China to study and work in the United States, educational options at home and in other countries may be more appealing, and some families may be questioning the return on a costly American degree. Geopolitical tensions between the two countries are also at a generational high.
If interest from Chinese students, who account for one of three international students in the United States, wanes, where will colleges turn? At the graduate level, perhaps, the answer might be India.
What are the enrollment trends at your institution, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels? Country-based college counselors, what are you seeing? Tell me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
