New York, August 27: US graduate school admissions offers to foreign students fell off a cliff this year, with student enrolment from India seeing a 16% decline, according to a report compiled this month by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), which represents 500 US colleges.
Historically, US grad schools have drawn waves of Indian students.
But this year the students did a double-think about being saddled with loans in a troubled job market. Typically, most US B-schools have a class composition which is white, male and Asian.
But the study shows there is a significant drop in Asians, especially Indians, taking loans to the tune of $120,000 to study in the B-schools as they are not sure about getting H-1B visas.
“Foreign students have to be able to work in the US after their graduation to pay back their student loans,” Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University adjunct professor who conducts research into the immigrant jobs market, told DNA.
Also, fewer Indian students are showing up on campus as the recession has been hard on foreign students securing loans — a problem which intensified this year when many grad schools lost the contracts for co-signer loan programmes on which many foreign students depend heavily.
Graduation applications from both India and South Korea fell in 2009 by 12% and 9%, respectively. The decline in interest from these countries was reflected in the admissions offers doled out to students, down 16% for both India and South Korea according to the August survey. But admissions offers were up 13% for China and 10% for the Middle East and Turkey — without which the 3% overall decline would be worse.
“When we start to see declines like this, it concerns us because this will affect the composition of the students in our programmes,” James Wimbush, dean of the graduate school at Indiana University and a professor of business administration, told BusinessWeek.
Debra W Stewart, CGS president, said the decline in admissions of international students was worrying: “For the past few years, growth in first-time graduate enrolment has been driven by international students.”
CGS says foreign students comprise 61% of the student body in business, engineering, and physical science programmes at US grad schools.
Every third graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology went abroad from 1964 to 2001, mostly to the US. But the American Dream seems to be losing some of its lustre as 84% of recent IIT graduates — including the Class of 2008 — have chosen to remain in India, according to a survey by business research company Evalueserve.
–Agencies–