Indians become biggest international student group in U.S., surpassing Chinese for first time since 2009
Indians have become the biggest group of international students in the U.S., surpassing Chinese students this year for the first time in 15 years.
Indians have become the biggest group of international students in the U.S., surpassing Chinese students this year for the first time in 15 years.
New data released by the State Department in conjunction with the Institute of International Education shows that there are now 331,602 Indian international students in the U.S. (a 23% growth from last academic year), compared with 277,398 Chinese international students (a 4.2% decline).
South Korea, Canada and Taiwan follow distantly as the next most common countries of origin for international students, with numbers all well under 50,000.
Long the most populous at U.S. colleges and universities, Chinese international students have been falling in number every year since the pandemic. In the same time frame post-Covid, students coming from India have seen rapidly growing numbers.
The change is owed to the lingering impacts of pandemic-era travel restrictions and the U.S. government’s changing climate toward China, experts say, as well as the pull of engineering and computer science programs at U.S. universities.
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