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.
“There was a fall in Chinese student migration and then during Covid, it really plummeted,” said Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor of economics and immigration scholar at the University of California, San Diego. “U.S. universities realized that the Chinese numbers are not coming back, we need another source of really smart international students, they started kind of tapping into the pool that is India.”
Since the pandemic, the number of Indian international students in the U.S. has nearly doubled. Part of this is because of demographic trends on the subcontinent, said Mirka Martel, IIE’s head of research, evaluation and learning.
As India’s university-age population grows, studying in the U.S. becomes more highly in demand. More than 40% of India’s population is under 25, according to Pew Research Center analysis, and the population is aging slower than both China and the U.S.
“The vast majority of Indian students who come to the U.S. are graduate students, particularly graduate students who are studying math and computer science or engineering,” she said. “Their options for graduate study are really attractive outside India.”
They also tend to want to stay in the U.S. and work after graduation, Khanna said.
Chinese international students typically come with different priorities, Martel and Khanna said. The boom in Chinese students coming to the U.S. in the 2000s was largely driven by the fact that universities outside of China were more affordable than those in China, Khanna said.
Now, there are geopolitical factors making the U.S. less feasible and appealing.
“When we saw the large increases in the 2010s, they were mainly driven by students coming from China to study undergraduate degrees,” Martel said.
That trend took a massive hit during Covid, but the slowing of Chinese student immigration began even before that, in 2016, when relations with China began to worsen, Khanna said.
The U.S. government began to heavily review and reject students coming from any institution presumed to have Chinese military ties, he said. Anti-China rhetoric from government officials also dampened the desires of many to come to the U.S.
“The rhetoric around that didn’t go as well with Chinese students,” he said.
Indian international students haven’t seen higher numbers than their Chinese counterparts since 2009, when both groups were about a third of what they are now.
In the 75 years since data collection began, the total number of international students has consistently risen to rise across the board, despite temporary dips in the aftermath of 9/11 and Covid, Martel said.
“We’ve seen international education trends transcend politics,” she said. “International education benefits everyone.”
