Report: “Findings from the 2014 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey Phase II: Final Applications and Initial Offers of Admission”
Author: Jeff Allum, director of research and policy analysis, Council of Graduate Schools
Organization: Council of Graduate Schools
Summary: After nearly a decade of double-digit increases, American graduate schools probably will not have a record number of students from China in this fall’s incoming class. Graduate programs reported no rise in offers of admission to Chinese students, the first time in eight years with no growth.
There will, however, be many more Indian students—admissions offers to prospective graduate students from India jumped 25 percent, the second year of large gains. The report’s author calls this two-year trend “particularly significant” because in the past enrollments from India—the second-largest source of foreign students, after China—have fluctuated wildly.
And graduate deans may want to brush up on their Portuguese. Offers of admission to students from Brazil have nearly doubled. Over all, admissions offers to international students are up 9 percent.
Bottom Line: Chinese appetite for American higher education may have finally hit a saturation point. That could spell trouble for American universities that have come to rely on students from China, who account for one in three foreign graduate students, to offset slackening interest in graduate education among domestic students.