International students posted 12/22/2004 06:36:26 pm by Jim Hu [academia]
Left2Right and Tom Barnett both point to a NYT article about declining numbers of international students coming to the US.
Here's the bottom line:
American universities, which for half a century have attracted the world's best and brightest students with little effort, are suddenly facing intense competition as higher education undergoes rapid globalization.
and here's the supporting data:
In July, Mr. Payne briefed the National Academy of Sciences on a sharp plunge in the number of students from India and China who had taken the most recent administration of the Graduate Record Exam, a requirement for applying to most graduate schools; it had dropped by half.
Foreign applications to American graduate schools declined 28 percent this year. Actual foreign graduate student enrollments dropped 6 percent.
Hmm...I certainly expect that the number of international students will decline as opportunities closer to home improve. This happened with Japanese students and postdocs, and will eventually happen with other countries. In the long run, expect a change in the language mix in the hallways in your department.
But is there a sharp decline in interest from India and China now? Not so fast - could there be alternative explanations? At the end of the day, a 6% decline in enrollments is not as dramatic as the declines in GRE takers and applicants. It's especially hard to know what this means without knowing how many offers were made, and how many individual students were involved. For a 50% drop in the potential applicant pool to only lead to a 6% drop in enrollments suggests that either US universities are being less selective, or that the reduction in GRE takers and applicants are not randomly distributed.