India-Forums.TV

[aryan]

MUMBAI: A popular wisecrack goes that Indian students -- particularly engineers -- would, immediately after their graduation ceremony, board the flight out to the United States for higher education. There's always been some truth in that humorous exaggeration; from 2000, particularly, there have been more Indian students on US campuses than from any other country. But in 2010, China upstaged India on campus.

Indeed, Chinese students in the last couple of decades have been seesawing with their Indian counterparts on this score -- in the late '90s it was Chinese students who dominated the foreign student population in the US. Data released by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) reveals that after a year of zero growth, when American universities saw no rise in the number of foreign students, international enrollments have gone up marginally. But the largest contributor has been China, not India.

The CGS data shows that in 2009 and 2010, fresh enrollments from India fell sharply. This year, the United Kingdom seems to have replaced the US as the favourite education destination for Indians; the UK issued 57,500 visas to Indian students, which is almost double the 32,000 visas issued by the US.

Findings on fresh admissions reveal that both offers of admission to prospective students from India as well as admissions have fallen in 2010, the former by 5% and the latter by 3%. The council's findings on fresh annual enrollments are different from those released by the International Institute of Education -- the latter maps all the total international students on campuses in the US, irrespective of their year of arrival. But it is CGS's figures that give the real indication of annual student movement to the US. According to CGS, China, India, South Korea and the Middle East, and Turkey, in that order, now make up the key student-sending countries to the US.

"While first-time graduate enrollments declined 3% for both South Korean and Indian students in 2010, the free fall that occurred last year has slowed," the report notes. But even after three consecutive years of decline in first-time enrollment numbers from India, there are more Indian students in US graduate schools today than there were in 2005.

In fact, the dropping enrollments forced the IIE to conduct a survey on Indians' perceptions of the US as an educational destination. The weaknesses listed included the soaring cost of tuition, cost of school application process and the fact that the US was further from home as compared to the UK.

WRITING ON THE WALL

No. of foreign students on US campuses
Year ----------- India ---------China
2009 ---------1,03,260 --------- 98,235
2008 --------- 94,563 ---------81,127
2007 --------- 83,833--------- 67,723
2006 --------- 76,503 ---------62,582
2005 --------- 80,466 ---------62,523
2004 --------- 79,736 ---------61,765
2003 --------- 74,603 ---------64,757
2002 --------- 66,836 ---------63,211
2001 --------- 54,664 ---------59,939
1995 ---------31,743 --------39,403

(Source: IIE)