With the international population at American institutions growing ever more diverse, a record annual 819,644 students from abroad studied at U.S. colleges and universities in the 2012-13 academic year. The new high represents a 7-percent jump over the previous year, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2013 “Open Doors Report on International Exchange.”
In addition, a record annual high of 283,322 Americans, representing a 3-percent increase over the previous year, studied abroad during the 2012-13 academic year, according to the Open Doors Report, which was released Monday.
“In absolute numbers, this is the largest number of international students that the U.S. has ever hosted,” said Dr. Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the Institute of International Education (IIE), noting that much of the new international student growth has come from China and Saudi Arabia.
Students from China, particularly at the undergraduate level, increased their enrollments by 21.4 percent in total to 235,597 students, and the number of Chinese undergraduates jumped by 26 percent over the previous year. In contrast, the U.S. saw a decrease in the number of students from India, one of the leading sources of international students for the U.S. India accounted for 96,754 students in 2012-13, which is down 3.5 percent from 100,270 in 2011-12, according to the report data.
The Open Doors Report’s newly-released figures represent the seventh consecutive year that the New York-based organization is documenting expansion in the total number of international students in U.S. higher education. Over the past three years, the rate of growth of international students in the U.S. has grown steadily. In the past decade, international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities have increased 40 percent, according to the Open Doors Report.
International students have been “attracted to the excellence and the diversity of our country’s higher education,” Evan M. Ryan, the U.S. State Department assistant secretary for educational and cultural affairs, said last week during an IIE briefing for the news media.
