Magnet Schools?

“When the United States sneezes,” it used to be said, “the world catches a cold,” a reference to the nation’s outsized influence. Now India, the second-largest sender of international students to U.S. universities and the planet’s second most populous nation, may be on a path to eventually becoming the international education equivalent.

In a two-pronged education strategy, India aims to simultaneously attract international students and to keep more Indian students from selecting higher education institutions abroad, its Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced in March. To be  sure, the nation is just beginning this initiative in earnest. But for U.S. institutions, the consequences of India’s growth strategy having even modest success in siphoning off Asian or other international students who might otherwise attend in the United States could be profound: The effort could begin chipping away at the more than $5 billion annually that Indian students spend when they study in the United States, according to U.S. Department of Commerce estimates.

For U.S. institutions that rely on international students to make their budget and internationalization goals, the timing poses a challenge: India is the fastest-growing source of their international students at a time when the flow of Chinese international students has slowed and universities are working urgently to diversify their sourcing.

In 2015–16, nearly half of international students at U.S. colleges came from China (about 32 percent) and India (about 16 percent). China’s 328,547 students outpaced India’s 165,918, but the number of Indian international students in U.S. universities grew nearly 25