The number of new international students coming to the United States for college and university fell in the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 academic years, according to the Institute of International Education. These marked the first drops in the number of new foreign students since the security crackdown in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
One-third of current international students are from China, where rising affluence has enabled more and more young people to attend college and graduate school both at home or abroad. Similar forces, plus a young, growing population, have propelled India to No. 2.
Also driving up international enrollment in the early 2010s was the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, which President George W. Bush and the late Saudi monarch cooked up in 2005. But the Saudis, beset by huge budget shortfalls caused by falling oil prices, cut the program back sharply in 2016.
China now has fewer young people than it used to, and even India’s population pyramid is beginning to narrow a little at the base. These countries won’t be sending growing numbers of students abroad forever.
The Institute of International Education, source of the U.S international-student statistics, is a New York nonprofit that was founded in the wake of World War I. It persuaded the U.S. government to start issuing student visas in the 1920s and continues to work with the State Department to encourage international student exchange. When it surveyed officials at 540 U.S. colleges and universities last fall, 83% reported that visa denials, delays and other hassles were discouraging international students from coming – up from 34% in fall 2016. Sixty percent said the social and political environment in the U.S. was driving students away, up from 15% in 2016, and 59% said they were losing students to other countries, up from 19% in 2016. Those are of course the opinions of people who work at universities, where President Trump tends to be extremely unpopular. But given that they seem to be backed up by shifts in student flows since 2016, they’re probably reflective of reality.
Given how fast international-student enrollment numbers grew in the 2010s, a pause might not be the worst thing in the world. Integrating huge numbers of Chinese students, some of them not really prepared for English-language instruction, was proving to be a struggle for institutions. The sharp declines in state higher education funding that made many schools so desperate to recruit international students have been replaced in recent years by modest increases, which is encouraging.
Still, an accelerating downward trend in the number of foreign students coming to the U.S. would be really bad. For one thing, these students represent a major source of income for U.S. universities and the economy as a whole – the estimated $45 billion they spent here last year is counted as a services export, and reduced the country’s current-account deficit by about 8%. For another, past international students have been a major source of talent for the U.S. when they stick around after graduation, and of good will and economic connection when they go back home.
The U.S. and its universities are still very attractive to foreign students, but it may not be forever.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
