International grad student applications on the rise

Looks like a lot of the visa problems created after 9/11 may have been fixed. From MSNBC:

Enrollment of international students in U.S. universities could be showing the first signs of recovery after years of weakness following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as the government refined the visa application process and schools try to get ahead in the global competition for foreign talent.

In the 2005-2006 school year, 564,766 international students attended accredited U.S. higher education institutions, according to the most recent report by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit partly funded by the federal government to track student mobility in and out of U.S. borders.

The number was flat compared to the year before, but it marked the end of a two-year decline first seen in 2003, which raised alarms within academic circles and among education officials.

Because most international students spend years in their programs, the total enrollment number moves slower than the new enrollment number, which was up 8 percent in the fall of 2005.

As the article notes, total enrollments are a lagging indicator, and this is data from 2005, so it's already old to start with.

The article cites two other sources:

A more recent IIE [Institute of International Education] online survey shows the recovery holding up. In the 2006-2007 school year, 52 percent of U.S. campuses reported increases in new international enrollments, and only 20 percent reported declines.

and

Although international graduate school applications began to rise again in 2005, the total number for 2007 was still 27 percent lower than 2003, according to CGS [Council of Graduate Schools].

I'm not familiar with the IIE survey. The CGS numbers are interesting, but from what I have heard from more knowledgeable people, they don't disaggregate their numbers in some critical ways, which renders their data much less informative than it could be, and they won't share their raw data.

I have been working with the NSF's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering this week, and I realized that this data set could easily provide some more timely information than IPEDS. There are questions about numbers of first-year students broken out by citizenship, so it's straightforward to track first-year foreign student enrollments from year to year. After 10 minutes wrestling with WebCASPAR, I get the following numbers for first year graduate enrollments in S&E programs (excluding health fields):

There has been quite an increase in enrollments by US citizens, but foreign student enrollments are still well below 2001 levels. It's interesting that the numbers of first-years continued to decline for several years after 2002.

So maybe the visa problem is not quite as fixed as one might hope? Or maybe the headaches were so great that people are continuing to shy away from applying for visas even after things have improved?

On the plus side, it looks like things are on the rise again, but at the rate the 2004-2005 increase suggests, it may be another year or so before we return to 2001 levels.

For context, here are the total numbers of S&E graduate students broken out by citizenship:

The first year enrollment numbers aren't available before 2000, but the rapid rise in total numbers from 1996-2003 indicate that there must have been pretty rapid growth in first year numbers from 1994-2001 or so. To have killed off that much growth must have taken quite a fiasco in processing visas and in the US's reputation abroad.