But the longer answer is that security concerns are likely to accelerate an existing trend: the rapid increase of students from Asia, who made up more than half the 582,996 foreigners enrolled in 2001-02. (India is the leader, with 12 percent of those students, followed by China with 11 percent.) Students from the Middle East amount to 7 percent, but visa problems may prompt Muslims to look elsewhere. “Australia and England are suddenly very big,” says Ozlem Altiok, a Turkish graduate student at Texas A&M.
The biggest attraction for foreign students is American graduate schools. Prakhar Prakash, an Indian who is working on a Ph.D. in environmental engineering at Lehigh, praises “the open-minded policies of U.S. universities” that allow foreigners to compete on equal terms with Americans for stipends. But this isn’t mere generosity. With foreigners constituting a quarter to a third of all graduate students, they play a huge role in cutting-edge research projects. “You’ve got the resources to attract the very best students from abroad,” says David Ward, president of the American Council on Education and a native of Britain who got his Ph.D. as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Wisconsin and is now a U.S. citizen. The result is “a concentration of global intellectual firepower.”
Most foreign students who come for undergraduate studies have to pay their own way, and they are often from countries with weaker higher education. Those include most of the Muslim nations, whose students are coming under increasing scrutiny by U.S. authorities–sometimes leading to high-ly publicized confrontations.
Iranian-born Yashar Zendehdel, a sophomore at the University of Colorado at Boulder, traveled to Denver in December 2002 to comply with the Justice Department’s Special Registration program for men from 25 mostly Muslim countries. But he spent 30 hours in detention and was threatened with deportation after federal immigration officials charged him with not carrying a minimum 12-credit courseload. In fact, he had received approval to drop one course while switching majors, and he was eventually cleared. He blames his ordeal on an official’s “stupid mistake.” But he complains that his treatment was “awful” and that the incident still makes him angry.
Others have fared better with the registration requirements. “At first I was worried because my friends told me it would be hard,” says Indonesian Ludi Suryadi, an American University junior majoring in business IT, “but it was pretty easy.” He’s happy to be here. “It’s a big opportunity to study in the U.S.” Even with mounting bureaucratic obstacles and the occasional horror story, foreign students are likely to keep on coming.
