The International Student Blog

Each year, during International Education Week, the annual “Open Doors” report is published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) which shows the previous years international student and study abroad participant levels from the previous year.

As suspected, China has rocketed ahead with a 23% increase from the previous years figures. They now stand at 157,558 international students in the USA, followed by India with 103,895 (an actual decline of 1% on previous numbers) and South Korea with 73,351 (a 1% increase on previous years figures). Apart from China, the top 5 sending countries to the USA have actually all seen declines or only very slight increases. Other big gainers in this years report was Saudi Arabia, with a 43% increase to 22,704, and Iran with 5,626 international students, an 18.9% increase over previous years.

US students studying abroad, however, did not fair so well – with only a slight increase in previous years from 260,327 last year to 270,604. This number, considering the efforts to push students to study abroad shows the recession and the economy is clearly having an impact – as numbers have not risen dramatically over the last few years. The study abroad report also shows that students who do study abroad, are starting to look a little further a field, with India increasing by 44% over last years numbers and 15 of the top 25 destinations were outside of Western Europe and 19 were countries where English is not a primary language.

For more information about the data and to view all the details you can visit the Open Doors website for more information:

http://www.iie.org/en/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 9:54 am and is filed under International Student, Study Abroad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.