It’s a textbook marriage of supply and demand. Newly prosperous countries have newfound money to train their young people. America has a glut of campuses but fewer students than ever who are able to pay full tab. “Malaysia is a very important country for us,” says Daniel Shelley, director of admissions at Rochester Institute of Technology, where 6 percent of the students are foreign. “About 80 percent of its students come to the U.S. to study. Their government can’t support what they need–engineering and environmental science. These are the subjects the U.S. does very well.”
In record numbers, college recruiters are taking their show on the global road. Singapore, with its strong dollar and well-disciplined citizenry, was one of five stops last month on a pan-Ash tour led by a private Maryland agency, Linden Educational Services. Fifty U,S. schools took the trip. “This is good for everyone,” says Linda Heaney, president of Linden, whose tours are expanding into the Middle East and Latin America. “University representatives get a real sense of who these students are.”
For most schools, these trips are long-term investments. Heaney estimates that colleges return home with an average of one new student apiece. A single tuition at a private school will cover the price of the sales tour–$10,000–and there’s always the chance of tapping into a gusher. “If we don’t get any applicants this year, it’s sure to pay off in the years to come,” says Raul Fonts of Pennsylvania’s La Salle University. He wants to increase his small school’s foreign enrollment from 2 percent to 10 percent of the student body.
The numbers of non-American students have tripled in the last two decades, according to the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit cultural-exchange agency based in New York. A record 440,000 foreign students studied on U.S. campuses last year, up 4.5 percent from the year before.
Nearly two thirds of those students are from Asia, Most students come to study business and management; next in popularity are engineering, science, math and social sciences. “We want East Asians because, quite honestly, they are hardworking,” says La Salle’s Fonts. “We hope to also show them there is more than just class–there is theater, music and athletics.”
Perhaps even more appealing than the infiltration of smart minds and worldly perspectives is the influx of big bucks. Foreign students spent $6.1 billion in 1993 for tuition, room and board. They’re expected to spend an additional $3.6 billion on supplies and a good time. The U.S. Department of Commerce, which counts foreign students studying here as an exported service, ranks college education as the nation’s fifth largest–behind freight transport, but ahead of banks.
As with other trade issues, the sale of college study can be hurt by politics. For instance, in the 1992-93 school year, about 45,000 Chinese students came to the United States to study. The next year, however, according to Todd Davis, research director of the Institute of International Education, China sharply cut back it s sponsorships. The reason: the quarrel between Beijing and Washington over human-rights violations.
In its own way, recruiting foreign students to the United States is helping to shrink the world as surely as a CNN satellite or a fresh order of blue jeans. American pop culture is a commodity that helps sell American campuses. And many students want a firsthand dose of the real thing. “I want to become a more rounded person,” one student at the Singapore fair said. “No more Down Under for me,” said another who had studied in Australia. “Now I go up.” Go up, young man, and go East.
