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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.
I don't know what's going on here, but here are some things I suspect:
GRE takers - the report is that there is a big drop in the number of students taking the GRE last June. But what about in October? Some of the decline could be because students in China and India have figured out that they'll do better if they take the later test. We need to know if the numbers are also down for that test date.
There are other possibilities too. A decline would be seen if the bottom tier of students have figured out that they're wasting their time and money taking the GRE. Then there's the change from the multiple-choice analytical test to the essay-based writing test; this could deter some potential applicants. The number of students taking the GRE more than once could have declined once students figured out that schools have access to both sets of scores. And the number of GRE takers could have dropped due to crackdowns on GRE fraud in the PRC; this was widely rumored a few years ago.
Applications Applications≠applicants, and the desirability of a US education is most accurately reflected in applicants, where a student applying to 6 schools counts the same as a student who applies to 4 schools. For example, if international students have figured out that they are wasting their time applying to schools that don't can't support foreign students, then that might reduce the number of applications per student. Applications could also go down if there is better counseling for the lower tier of applicants.
I'm also not sure whether the number of applications can be measured accurately. The report is likely to be based on ETS reporting how many schools a student asks for their scores to be sent to. We will look at a student's application based on a self-reported GRE score and only ask for the official score if we're seriously interested. I suspect other schools do the same..."preapplication" systems will reduce the number of applications.
Enrollments a 6% decrease in enrollments may be statistically significant, but may not reflect decreased desirability of a US graduate education. This can't be evaluated without also looking at the number of offers made. There are reasons why the numbers of offers may have decreased. Many US institutions have had budget crunches in recent years, which means that a larger fraction of new grad students are going to be supported as TAs. With tuition and fees rising at the same time, we need to be even more careful about taking international students who can teach US undergrads.
My instincts and anecdotal evidence suggest that post 9/11 security issues create problems for recruiting outstanding international students to the graduate programs in the US. Visa denials to new students, horror stories of students being trapped in China in the middle of their graduate studies (we had several cases of this last year) after visiting families or going to conferences, and general delays and unpredictability of whether or not admission means being able to come here can't be helpful. The competition is real, as are the negative effects on our competitiveness of going overboard on security screening for student visas. But this NYT story doesn't provide the right kind of data to support that storyline.
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