More Mobility, More Competition

Driven by population growth and an emerging middle class in countries around the world, the global population of international students has more than doubled to 4.5 million students since 2000, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. One estimate projects that their ranks could grow to as many as 8 million by 2025. While the world may not yet be flat, as columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman famously predicted, it certainly has grown more mobile, and U.S. institutions have reaped the benefits, particularly as students from China and India began studying here in large numbers.

But even as overall numbers have grown, the U.S. share of internationally mobile students has fallen from 28 percent in 2000 to 22 percent in 2014, as countries like China, Australia, and Canada emerged as new international hubs (see tables at right). Moreover, many institutions focused their efforts on the largest sending countries, to the detriment of developing farther-reaching global pipelines of prospective students.

Coupled with international students’ concerns over the White House’s efforts to block travel to the United States by certain nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, the net result for U.S. institutions is a newly challenging recruiting environment—one in which they will need to leverage all of their competitive advantages to meet their enrollment goals and sustain their global preeminence.

The Trump administration’s travel ban, rhetoric from the president and administration officials, and subsequent headlines in global media have created particularly stiff headwinds for U.S. institutions recruiting