A loss of foreign talent
For years, high-achieving foreign students have been a significant and growing presence at U.S. universities, filling half the spots in many graduate science and engineering programs. But this fall, 401 fewer international grad students are studying at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, a drop of 11 percent from last year. At the University of Maryland, graduate applications from overseas are down by more than a third in two years. And total foreign enrollment for fall '04 at Indiana University's eight campuses fell for the first time on record. "We're hoping it's a blip, but we're certainly concerned," says Christopher Viers, associate dean for international programs.
The sinking numbers, highlighted in several just published studies, have plenty of people worried that the nation may be in danger of losing its post-World War II pre-eminence as a magnet for worldwide talent. The Council of Graduate Schools reports that the number of new grad students from overseas is down 6 percent this fall at 122 member institutions; the Institute of International Education's new "Open Doors" survey of 2,700 schools shows that the overall number of international students fell by 2.4 percent to 572,509 last academic year, the first decline in three decades. "It's not hyperbole to say that our country has been built by the international scientists and engineers who have come here in the past 50 years," says Dan Mote, Maryland's president, pointing to his engineering faculty as a hint of the brainpower at stake: Of 193 scholars teaching and doing research at Maryland, 101 are foreign-born.
The nation's post-9/11 efforts to tighten once lax visa procedures, and the resulting perception of America as a suddenly unwelcoming place, are thought to be largely responsible for the declines. Stories abound of students cooling their heels at home for weeks into the semester while their documents come to Washington for review. "People asked me, 'Why don't you change countries?' But I'd already spent three years on my research," says one Ph.D. engineering student at the University of Southern California who went home to Kuwait last April for a short visit and got stuck there until mid-October. (He suspects his visits to relatives in Saudi Arabia initially raised red flags for U.S. officials.)
Marketplace. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been aggressively recruiting top students--Australian universities attracted 52 percent more Indian students this year, for example--and several nations are vastly expanding their own higher-ed systems, too. China, which produced just 125 Ph.D.'s in science and engineering in 1985, raised that to 7,600 in 2001. "We're facing competition like we've never seen before," says Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools.
Washington has taken notice, alarmed by the potential for economic and diplomatic harm. "U.S. relations around the world in the next 50 years are being nurtured at college campuses," Purdue University President Martin Jischke told a Senate committee last month, pointing out that the king of Jordan and half of the Jordanian cabinet were educated in the United States. Secretary of State Colin Powell recently asked consulates to expedite student visas; according to the State Department, the average processing time has dropped from 70 days to 22.
But worried campus administrators aren't waiting for government fixes. They're prodding faculty to pick their graduate research assistants in March instead of May or June, using E-mail and the Web to speed up the admissions paperwork and at times even pleading students' cases with U.S. consulates. When Indiana astrophysics Ph.D. student Kai Cai went home to Beijing over winter break and discovered that he faced a clearance check that might delay his return, his faculty adviser and dean wrote the consulate about his research--on gas clouds that turn into planets--to show that it posed no security threat. Cai received his visa a few days later. For the longer term, dozens of universities are forming partnerships with schools in other countries in the hope that student exchanges will inspire the best and brightest to come here--and stay.
TURNING TIDE?
A dip in foreign enrollment worries campus officials.
[Chart data are not available.]
[Chart labels]
International students at U.S. universities (in thousands)
1993
'96
'98
'00
'03
440
480
520
560
600
Source: Institute of International Education
USN&WR
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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