Migration of Foreign Students to the United States

Abstract

Foreign student enrollments in colleges and universities have been increasing rapidly in the United States as well as in other English-speaking and West European countries [6, p. 17; 16, p. 278-85]. As enrollments of native-born students decline over the next decade, U.S. colleges and universities can be expected to compete for and enroll still larger numbers of foreign students. These phenomena emphasize the importance of understanding why foreign students come to the United States for higher education and how and why the distribution of foreign students by country of origin has changed. Such an understanding requires knowledge of the immigration procedures that control foreign students' migration to the United States and awareness of the problems of measuring the number of foreign students in U.S. higher education. This article describes the migration of foreign students to the United States and briefly discusses how that process has changed. Next, the determinants of foreign student flows are analyzed. Third, the quality of the existing data on foreign students is assessed, and changes in the countries of origin of foreign students during the last twenty-five years are described and discussed. Finally, we discuss some of the consequences for colleges and universities of changes in the number of foreign students. In particular, we discuss some of the likely impact