Number of US-bound Indian students peaks

Around 1.96 lakh students went to the US in 2017-18, registering a rise of more than five times in the last 20 years.

ternational students in the US with support from the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Effectively, the number of US-bound Indian students has increased by more than five times in 20 years as the figure was just 33,818 in 1997-98. As per the report, Texas received 21,171 Indian students while California and New York had more than 20,000 of them each. Illinois and Massachusetts were other states with more than 10,000 students each.

The flow of Indian students to US has gone up so high despite the fact that the growth rate was only 5.4% during the period, which was lowest in last five years.

The report says that the number of international students at US colleges and universities remained at more than 10 lakh in 201718. But the annual growth rate was only 1.5%. The total number of international students was 10.94 lakh in 2017-18 compared to 10.78 lakh last year.

According to the report, 69.2% students are from Asia – more than 50% from China and India alone, 8.5% from Europe, 7.3% from the Latin America, 8.3% from Middle East and North Africa while only 3.6% are from the Sub-Saharan Africa.

The report says that the percentage of Asians has been increasing continuously in the last three years, while the percentage from Muslim majority MiddleEastern and North African countries has been decreasing during this period.

Interestingly, Indian students currently make up 17.9% of all international students in the US, up from 15.8% in 2015-16. The number has been increasing every year except in 2005-06 and in the period between 2010-11 and 2012-13 when there was a negative growth. The highest growth rate of 29.4% was witnessed in 2014-15.

More than 70% of the Indian students chose engineering/computer science/ math as their field of study, while about 10% chose Business and Management. They have contributed $7.52 billion to the US economy in 2017, according to the report, while the total international community contributed $42.4 billion during the period.