【华尔街日报111115】Are Indian Students Shunning America?

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Are Indian Students Shunning America?
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/11/15/are-indian-students-shunning-america/?mod=google_news_blog
By Margherita Stancati
More and more Chinese students are heading to the U.S. for higher education, but the number of Indian students studying there is dropping. In the 2010-2011 academic year, around 103,900 Indian students enrolled at American universities, a 1% decline from the previous year, a new report shows.

A new report shows that the number of Indian students studying in the U.S. has declined.

This contrasts sharply with the soaring number of Chinese students, which increased by over 23% from the previous year to a little over 157,500, according to Open Doors, an annual report jointly released by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit, and the U.S. State Department.


This doesn’t mean Indian students have lost interest in U.S. schools. They still make up around 14% of the international student pie in the U.S., just second behind their Chinese counterparts. Many in India hope that studying abroad will give them better educational qualifications. By international standards, Indian universities still lag: none made it in a recent ranking of the world’s top 200, not even the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Besides the U.S., the U.K. and Australia are also popular destinations among Indian students.
For much of the past decade, most international students studying in the U.S. came from India. But China has been topping the list for the last two years, and the gap looks set to widen.
The failure of U.S. institutes to significantly boost their number of Indian students points at a rather basic problem: few in India can afford to study abroad. The data suggests this isn’t changing – while in China, a fellow BRIC country with a faster-growing economy, it is.
This is partly why U.S. universities are eyeing Indian students on their home turf. They have been lobbying the Indian government to allow foreign universities to set up branches in India, a country with a large English-speaking population. This, they hope, will also encourage more Indian students to enroll at the undergraduate level. At the moment, only 13.5% of Indian students in the U.S. are undergraduates, the report shows.
There were no surprises when it came to the fields of study taken up by Indian students in the U.S. A whopping 36.9% of them were enrolled in engineering – a lot more than for students from any other place of origin –, and another 15% in business/management, a subject popular across nationalities. Humanities, which has a less professional bent, was by far the least popular, with only 0.6% of Indian students enrolled in this field.
One of the study’s most interesting findings was that the number of American students who are now coming to India is actually increasing. In the 2009-2010 academic year, the last year for which data is available, their number rose 44.4% from the previous year. But in absolute terms the figure is less impressive, amounting to a total of 3,884 U.S. students. This made India the 14th most-popular destination abroad (China ranked 5th) for American students.
The number of Indian students in the U.S. also dropped in 2005-2006, and a lot more significantly, just to rise again the following year. This suggests the recent slip in enrollments could be a one-off rather than the beginning of a downward trend.