China Props Up Foreign Students' Numbers in U.S. - the Chronicle of Higher Ed

By Karin Fischer

When Li Zhou visited Washington last month, he didn't take in the sights. He stuffed envelopes, hundreds of them, addressed to college-admissions directors across the country.

The associate director of college counseling at a Beijing high school, Mr. Li needed to make sure his students were on the radar of American colleges. Among his current crop of 10th-grade advisees, 150 out of 500 already are planning to earn their college degree in America.

The students from Beijing No. 4 High School are part of a flood of Chinese students attending American colleges. Enrollments from China shot up 30 percent in the 2009-10 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education's annual "Open Doors" report, which was released this week.

The rapid increase in the number of Chinese students, however, obscures the slowing overall growth in the number of foreign students at American colleges. International enrollments rose only 3 percent, to 690,923, in 2009-10, while first-time-student figures expanded even more anemically, by just 1 percent.
The previous year, by contrast, total enrollments jumped 8 percent, while new-student numbers swelled 16 percent.
International-education experts finger the faltering economy as the prime culprit in the slowdown, limiting U.S. institutions' overseas-recruitment budgets and cutting into students' nest eggs in South Korea and Vietnam, among other countries. They also worry about systemic factors that could affect long-term international-study trends, such as growing competition worldwide and increased capacity for higher education in students' home countries.
Even the expansion in Chinese numbers is seen by many in international admissions as a mixed blessing. On one hand, full-fee-paying foreign students are of mounting importance to U.S. colleges' shaky bottom lines, and many institutions welcome them as a vital way to globalize their campuses.
At the same time, veteran educators worry about overreliance on a single sending country. Iran, for example, was once the largest source of international students—until the overthrow of the shah, in 1979, halted student travel. Likewise, Japanese enrollments contracted with the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s.
What's more, having a homogeneous international-student body does not truly increase campus diversity, says Douglas L. Christiansen, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions at Vanderbilt University.
"Do you want to build pipelines throughout the world," he asks, "or do you want to build pipelines to just one country?"

Many Factors at Play

Even with measured growth, the number of international students in the United States hit an all-time high in 2009-10.
And a deeper analysis of the Open Doors data suggests great variability by country, academic level, and program of study.
Bachelor's- and graduate-degree programs, for instance, posted modest gains, of 5 percent and 4 percent, respectively. But the number of students in associate-degree programs plummeted 7 percent in 2009-10, after growing 13 percent just a year earlier.
One reason for the drop-off, says Judith Irwin, of the Center for Global Advancement of Community Colleges, could be that, even in the best of times, many community colleges have meager recruitment budgets. Belt-tightening may have kept many of their recruiters from traveling overseas, says Ms. Irwin, who is executive vice president for global and college alliances at the membership organization.
What's more, the families of associate-degree students are often the least able to afford an overseas education and are more affected by the economic crisis. "These are parents on the margins," says Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the Institute of International Education.
Enrollment in intensive-English study also declined, by 3 percent. Such enrollments typically dip in times of financial turmoil because such study can be seen as discretionary. Some students may opt for programs at home or in less expensive neighboring countries, while others hold off until the economy rebounds, says Mark W. Harris, president of ELS Language Centers, a major provider of language instruction.
Even within the population of English-language students there are differences, Mr. Harris says. Total enrollment in ELS's U.S.-based programs fell in 2009-10, he says, but the number of students signing up to polish their English after receiving provisional admission from an American college grew.
Such students might be more likely "to sweat it out," he says, despite the financial hardship of moving forward with their education.
Another factor: The economic downturn did not hit all countries evenly.
Five out of the top 10 sending countries had a decline in the number of students attending American colleges. Vietnam saw a sharp slowdown in growth: just 2 percent in 2009-10, after increases of 45 percent in each of the two previous years.
The economy is not the only dynamic at play. South Korea and Taiwan, which reported declines in American-college enrollments, have built up their own graduate programs, very likely encouraging more students to stay home. Singapore, too, has established itself as an education hub, pulling in top students from neighboring countries.
India, meanwhile, is experiencing robust economic growth, but enrollments of Indian students at American colleges have stagnated, increasing by less than 2 percent in 2009-10. As a result, China overtook India in this latest Open Doors report to become the largest source of international students in the United States.
The majority of Indian students studying in the United States do so at the graduate level, and many seek to stay and work after graduation. With U.S. job prospects dim, many young Indians are remaining home or choosing countries, like Britain and Singapore, that make it easier to work, say international-student advisers there.
Some countries, however, have posted sizable enrollment gains. The number of students from Saudi Arabia increased 25 percent in 2009-10; almost all are fully supported by government scholarships.
Over all, the number of foreign students in the United States whose primary financial source is a home government or university shot up 27 percent. The Saudi government, which runs the largest such program, recently announced that 16,000 more students have been approved for sponsored international study, says William M. Fish, president of the Washington International Education Council, which organizes an annual conference to connect American colleges and representatives of foreign embassies.

The Prime Mover

But the real mover is China—without the increase in Chinese students, international enrollments at U.S. colleges would have declined by more than 10,000 in 2009-10.
The rapid influx from China has mainly been among undergraduates. Their numbers climbed by 52 percent in one year.
Last month, some 35,000 prospective students and their parents thronged the China World Exhibition Center, in Beijing, paying 10 yuan (about $1.50) for the chance to speak with representatives of foreign universities.
Many students were seeking to study in traditional high-demand fields like business and engineering, but many others told Mark Poindexter, who was manning Central Michigan University's booth, "how deeply interested they are in theater or the arts or sociology."
Mr. Li, the high-school counselor in Beijing, says studying in the United States attracts students with broad and varied academic and extracurricular interests. He personally knows the downside of China's regimented system: Years ago he found himself unable to switch out of the nuclear-physics program at prestigious Tsinghua University after realizing that he had "a greater interest in human beings."
Going overseas, he says, also may be the right choice for students who don't do well enough on the gaokao, China's rigorous national college-entrance exam, to earn a spot at a top institution like Tsinghua or Peking University. Despite significant government spending on higher education, demand for places at Chinese universities far outstrips supply—and the country's growing middle class has the money to pay for an international education.
Ninety percent of Mr. Li's students who study overseas go to America. Most of them, like Nie Jianyi, skip the gaokao to prepare for the SAT and the English-language exam. For Mr. Nie, who grew up watching English-language television, it wasn't a question of whether he would study in the United States, but when. "It was just a matter of time, whether I could come in college or graduate school," he says.
Mr. Nie started classes this fall at George Washington University, where he is majoring in international relations, after a spending the summer in a special program to make international students ready for U.S. college classrooms. The students also got a taste of American culture, visiting attractions like Ben's Chili Bowl, a highly caloric Washington institution.
Colleges across the country have scrambled to accommodate the influx of Chinese students. Michigan State University went from having four Chinese freshmen in 2005, out of 202 incoming foreign students, to 445 out of 678 this fall, says James W. Cotter, director of admissions. Having so many Chinese students has led to unexpected challenges, such as outsized demand for popular majors like engineering and complaints about the quality of dining-hall rice.
Academic and administrative departments across campus have responded, says Peter F. Briggs, director of international students and scholars at Michigan State. The faculty-development office held seminars on teaching international students, while the counseling center hired a Chinese-born therapist. Mr. Briggs has named a half-dozen Chinese undergraduates to act as special advisers to his staff.
There is room to grow, Mr. Cotter says. "Have we reached the saturation point?" he asks. "We're not there yet."
Indeed, as Michigan's college-age population is expected to shrink in coming years, out-of-state students, from China and elsewhere, will be needed to fill classrooms.
Other U.S. colleges, too, have stepped up overseas-recruiting efforts. For institutions that are new to recruiting, or that have limited budgets, a focus on China makes sense, says Vanderbilt's Mr. Christiansen. "In China," he says, "it's almost like a gold rush."

Boom or Bust

As with any boom, there's the risk that prospects could run dry, says Mike Elms, co-founder of Hotcourses Ltd., a British company that publishes Web sites and guides for students who want to study overseas.
The Chinese government could restrict the number of students who go abroad. Other countries could cut into American market share. More and better Chinese universities could open.
And there's a demographic inevitability: China's one-child policy means that eventually the country's college-age population will decline.
Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, says colleges should not worry about the possibility of Chinese enrollment declines. After all, he says, every time a major source of international students has faded, another has filled its place.
India, for one, with its burgeoning middle class and insufficient domestic-university capacity, could be resurgent—a report on fall enrollments by the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that Indian students' numbers at that level may be stabilizing.
Other expanding markets are largely untapped. At a college fair that Mr. Elms recently attended in Turkey, he says, the majority of prospective students said they wanted to study in the United States, but just six of the 200 participating colleges were American.
Meanwhile, a few colleges are turning to consultants like Christopher Price, whose company, PFL Group International, recruits students in Nigeria and Pakistan, among other countries.
The Obama administration has emphasized building educational exchanges and academic partnerships in emerging markets such as India and Indonesia, making education a foundation for expanded economic, political, cultural, and social ties, says Alina L. Romanowski, deputy assistant secretary for academic programs at the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
But Victor C. Johnson, senior adviser for public policy at Nafsa: Association of International Educators, says that without a comprehensive national strategy for international-student recruitment, American colleges always will be subject to market oscillations. Right now, he says, "our policy is to take whoever wants to come and whoever wants to pay."
A survey this fall of 700 institutions suggests that U.S. colleges are becoming more aggressive, and more creative, in their efforts to attract international students. Almost two-thirds of those responding said they had tried to ensure that foreign-student numbers did not decline. Among other steps, they had established international partnerships or collaborations and expanded international-admissions staffs and recruitment budgets.
Colleges in the United States also could benefit from tough new visa policies in Australia and Britain, a controversy over recruitment practices for foreign students in Australia, and a weaker U.S. dollar.
In the end, says Ms. Blumenthal, of the Institute of International Education, "it's a race between people wanting the best education anywhere in the world and the country providing the best."