Latitudes

International enrollments had a very good year

The number of international students on American campuses shot up 12 percent in the 2022-23 academic year, the largest single-year growth in more than four decades.

International enrollments once again surpassed one million, after dipping below that level during the pandemic. American campuses hosted some 1.057-million students from abroad last year, according to newly released data from the Institute of International Education and the U.S. Department of State.

This is a good news for colleges that are otherwise facing enrollment headwinds. International students typically pay high tuition prices and are a key source of revenue for many colleges. They also bring educational benefits by exposing their classmates to different cultures and perspectives on campuses.

Their impact is not simply confined to campus. International students contributed more than $40 billion to the American economy, supporting some 368,000 jobs, according to new estimates from NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

I broke down the findings of the annual “Open Doors” report in The Chronicle, but here are a few key takeaways:

International enrollments have recovered most of the ground lost during the pandemic — and it doesn’t look like a blip. The number of new international students coming to American colleges fell more steeply during the public-health crisis than for any other demographic group. The “Open Doors” report shows that total international enrollments in the fall of 2022 are less than 2 percent off pre-pandemic levels.

The upward trend continues into the current academic year. In a snapshot survey, administered this fall by the Institute of International Education and several partner organizations, colleges reported an 8-percent increase in international students. A separate Chronicle analysis of real-time visa data tracked a 9-percent bump in student visas issued for the fall of 2023.

It’s a grad, grad world. Growth was especially robust at the graduate level, where enrollments increased by 21 percent over the previous year. The number of international graduate students in the United States, more than 467,000, hit an all-time high.

That is a change from the past decade, when undergraduate enrollments outpaced graduate enrollments. Graduate numbers have bounced back faster from the pandemic. Parents may have been slower to send younger undergraduates abroad because of health and safety concerns, Mirka Martel, head of research, evaluation, and learning for the institute, said.

But Martel speculated on whether we could be seeing a longer-term shift in global-mobility trends toward going overseas for advanced study. It’s something I’m watching, too, and I’m interested in exploring what the surge in graduate enrollments means for campuses and for international-recruitment strategy. Email me your thoughts at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

Graduate programs weren’t the only area to see gains. The number of students taking part in Optional Practical Training, the popular work program for international graduates of American colleges, climbed by 8 percent. (Because participants in the training program, also known as OPT, remain on student visas, they are counted in the annual international-student census.)

Martel told me the rise in OPT participation is tied to the spike in graduate enrollments. Graduate numbers increased the previous year by 17 percent.

Enrollment in nondegree programs also swelled, by 28 percent. That’s welcome news for beleaguered English-language programs.

It’s all about India. India was the big mover, with enrollments soaring 35 percent. It fueled graduate growth — two of three Indian students pursue advanced degrees.

In the “Open Doors” report, India, the second-largest sender of students to the United States, was fast catching up to China. (Spoiler: It now has.)

Colleges welcome the interest. “The U.S. maintains a strong relationship with India on education, which I think is getting even stronger,” Marianne Craven, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for academic exchanges, said during a recent news briefing.

But institutions are also wary of being overly reliant on just a handful of countries. Together, India and China account for more than half of all international students on American campuses. As they seek to diversify enrollments, one region colleges may look to is sub-Saharan Africa, where enrollments jumped 18 percent.

You’ll note that I’ve said very little about study-abroad participation. That’s not a slight. The “Open Doors” data on education abroad is from the 2021-22 academic year — in other words, still the depths of the pandemic.

One interesting fact: Some 250 colleges reported that more than 16,600 students participated in online global-learning opportunities, including remote internships, collaborative project-based learning, and connected classrooms.

Want to hear more about the latest trends in international enrollments and new strategies for recruitment? Join The Chronicle today, November 15, at 2 p.m. ET for a virtual forum on international-student recruitment trends. I’ll be joined by a panel of experts to explore the latest “Open Doors” data and discuss what we’re seeing on the recruitment front lines. The session is free, but registration is required. Sign up here.

Foreign-language programs take a big hit

Even as international-student numbers rebounded, a separate report, from the Modern Language Association, found that foreign-language programs in the United States experienced record enrollment declines.

Enrollments in language programs tumbled nearly 17 percent between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021, a census of 2,455 colleges found.

Nearly all of the most commonly taught languages lost ground, with seven of the 15 most popular foreign languages hemorrhaging more than 20 percent of enrollments. The MLA called it a “staggering loss.”

A rare bright spot was Korean, which had enrollment increases of 38 percent over the five-year period.

The total number of foreign-language programs reporting enrollments also fell, by 961, an 8 percent dip. (The MLA defines a language program loosely, as language instruction offered by an institution, not necessarily as a degree-granting department or formal unit. Lower numbers do not necessarily represent closed departments, the organization noted, because a college may offer a language program one year but not the next.)

And community colleges were especially hard hit: Foreign-language enrollments slumped by 24 percent at two-year institutions compared with 15 percent at four-year colleges. Because community colleges disproportionately enroll underserved students, the decreases have implications for access and equity in language study. It’s “a terrible red flag,” Paula Krebs, the MLA’s executive director, said.

In its report, the MLA suggested that the overall drop in Americans attending college over the same period may have contributed, in part, to declining foreign-language enrollments. Still, since peaking in 2009, foreign-language enrollments have deteriorated by almost 30 percent, the MLA found.

Earlier this year, a proposal to eliminate the department of world languages, literatures, and linguistics at West Virginia University to help ease budgetary shortfall raised alarms about the dangerous precedent it could set for foreign-language programs across the country. (Although WVU administrators had suggested replacing in-person language instruction with an online app, the eventual cuts were deep but not as drastic — the university did away with all foreign-language majors but retained seven faculty members.)

Reducing foreign-language instruction is shortsighted, Krebs said. “Students get an understanding of the world and of other cultures.”

You can read more about the MLA’s findings — and about what colleges are doing to strengthen foreign languages.

House committee passes new oversight on foreign funds to colleges

The U.S. House education committee, voting along party lines, passed a bill to increase reporting and oversight of foreign gifts and contracts to American colleges, sending the legislation to the House floor.

“We deserve to know what countries are paying for influence on American campuses,” the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, said during the bill’s mark-up last Wednesday.

Foxx and her Republican colleagues argued that the so-called Deterrent Act, an acronym for “Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions,” is needed because colleges have not been transparent about the funds they receive from overseas and because the Biden administration has been lax about enforcing existing reporting requirements.

Democrats countered that the number and amount of transactions reported by colleges have increased under President Biden. They said the Republican legislation could make it more difficult for colleges to comply with reporting requirements and could limit international research collaboration. They also noted that increased scrutiny of global academic ties, which has focused on China, has disproportionately affected Chinese and Asian American scientists.

House Republicans also recently pushed to restart the China Initiative, a federal investigation of academic and economic espionage.

The bill approved by the education committee would lower the threshold for colleges to report foreign gifts and contracts to $50,000 from $250,000. Faculty and staff members at research-intensive institutions would have to disclose individual funding from overseas.

The legislation would bar colleges from entering into contracts with foreign “countries of concern.” Colleges that fail to comply with the measure’s provisions could lose access to federal financial aid.

While the bill, part of efforts to reform the Higher Education Act, received strong committee support, action in the full House is uncertain because of turmoil in the chamber.

Israel’s president calls on U.S. colleges to combat antisemitism

Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, has sent a letter to American college leaders, calling on them to exercise “moral leadership” and to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel “publicly and unequivocally.”

In the letter, Herzog writes that he is alarmed by incidents of antisemitism on American campuses and urges college presidents to set up task forces to combat such hate. Colleges and their leaders, he suggests, have a special role to play at such moments.

“All citizens of free countries must decide where they stand, but few have the responsibility you carry as custodians of knowledge and culture,” he writes. “Your choices will shape history and will be remembered.”

While the position of president of Israel is largely ceremonial, higher-education experts said it was uncommon for the head of state of a foreign country to attempt to influence how college leaders handle debates on their own campuses.

“It’s certainly extraordinarily unusual, if not unprecedented,” said Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay and a former chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. “And it’s also inappropriate.”

I’ve got more coverage of Herzog’s letter, and the reaction to it, here.

In other news related to the war in Israel and Gaza, the attorneys general of 20 states have written to the U.S. secretaries of state and homeland security to urge them to “vigorously renew” vetting of student-visa holders and to “promptly remove” anyone who supports Hamas or other terrorist groups.

The letter echoes calls by Republican presidential candidates and other elected officials to revoke the visas of international students who express support for Palestinians or criticize the Israeli government’s military response in Gaza.

It’s not clear that international students have been prominent organizers or activists in campus protests. But Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement that administrators had decided not to academically suspend students involved in an unauthorized anti-Israel demonstration last week because of “serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues.”

International students not taking classes full time could be in violation of their visa status.

Around the globe

The U.S. Department of Education has released an updated international-education strategy that emphasizes increasing the global and cultural competencies of American students while learning from other countries to strengthen education at home.

The U.S. Department of Justice will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that a program to protect young people brought to the United States as children is illegal. The case is expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Immigration scholars are calling for a new, indefinite “conditional residence status” to protect such young immigrants from deportation and give them work authorization and the right to travel abroad.

The Stevens Initiative has announced that it will expand its virtual-exchange programming and grantmaking to Latin America.

An Iraqi television station has posted a video that seems to show a kidnapped Princeton University doctoral student for the first time since she was abducted in Baghdad seven months ago.

Georgetown University could be the first American college to open a branch campus in Indonesia, offering foreign-service degree programs, The Hoya reported.

International-research collaboration is critical, but global science is “more vulnerable than it has ever been” to the actions governments take to respond to national-security concerns, the head of Australian Academy of Science said.

The number of foreign residents in South Korea has hit a record high, thanks to a 21-percent increase in international students.

Russian scientists are struggling with isolation from the broader scientific community since the war in Ukraine.

Affordability concerns are leading students to consider a wider range of destinations when studying overseas, according to a survey of international-recruitment agents.

A new report predicts that countries that traditionally attract international students could face growing competition from non-Anglophone destinations.

The State Department is now accepting applications for a grant competition to help colleges create, diversify, or expand their study-abroad programming.

There will be no Latitudes next week because of the American Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll be back in your inboxes on November 29.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on X or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.