Foreign Students in US Higher Education

Total enrollment in degree-granting US institutions of higher education took a big jump in the first decade of the 21st century, but has levelled out or even declined a bit since then.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total enrollment went from 15.3 million in 2000 to 21.0 million in 2010–an increase of more than one-third in just 10 years. But by 2020, total enrollment was down to 19.0 million. Enrollment fell a little more in the pandemic, and then has bounced back a little bit. But the NCES projections are that total enrollment will reach 20.1 million by 2030–that is, enrollments in US higher education are projected to be lower in 2030 than in 2010.

(In passing, I’ll add that about 60% of these higher education enrollments are full-time students, with the other 40% being part-time. I’ll also add that the sharp increase in enrollments from 2000-2010 is part of what drove the rise in student loan defaults–although that’s a different story.)

Here, I want to focus in particular on enrollments of foreign students in US institutions of higher education. There are sometimes comments (hopes?) that a larger number of international students could help to offset the decline in total enrollments. But while the number of international students is shifting, there doesn’t seem reason to believe that a new and additional surge of international students will be filling the seats and dormitories of US colleges and universities.

Again, based on data from the NCES, the total number of foreign students roughly doubled from the 2000-2001 to the 2015-16 academic year, rising from 547,000 to 1,043,000. Since then, the total dipped during the pandemic, but by 2022-23 is now basically back to the 2015-16 level at 1,057,000.

The source countries that send college and university students to the US are shifting. For example, in 2015-16, 3.4% of the international students came from countries in Africa. That’s now up to 4.7%, with most of the increase accounted for by students from Nigeria, in particular.

But in the big picture, the action is mostly about countries in Asia, which accounted for about 71% of all foreign students in the US in 2022-23: for comparison, total foreign students from Europe and from Latin American are both less than 10% of total foreign students in the US, and the Middle East/North Africa region is less than 5% of the US total (with students from Saudi Arabia accounting for about one-third of the students from this region.

Within the broader category of foreign students from countries in Asia, China and India dominate. In 2022-23, students from China were 27.4% of all foreign students at US colleges and universities, while students from India were 25.4%. But back in 2015-2016, a full 31.5% of all foreign students were from China, while only 15.9% were from India. Thus, the share of foreign students from China has been falling, while the share from India has been rising.

In addition, looking back a little further to 2000-01, the share of foreign students from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were 8.5%, 8.3% and 5.2%, respectively. But in 2022-23, the share of foreign students from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had fallen to 1.5%, 4.1%, and 2.1%, respectively.

In the international market for higher education, universities and colleges and technology institutes have been springing up around the world in the last few decades. If the US higher education sector is to maintain its current numbers of foreign students, much less to increase those numbers substantially, it is going to need to draw from where the people are–which means China and India, and increasingly, countries of Africa.