Before the revolution, the largest bloc of foreign students in the United States was from Iran with numbers topping 50,000 a year.
That evaporated immediately after the revolution and only inconsequential numbers enrolled in the United States in subsequent years. But last year, Iran was back in the top 25 nations represented on US campuses.
The Institute of International Education (IEE), which conducts a census of foreign students in the United States said Iran had 4,731 students on US campuses in the 2009-10 school year and 5,626 students in the 2010-2011 schools year, a rise of 18.9 percent. That made Iranians the 22nd largest national student group in the US.
The figures only count foreign students and do not include Iranian-Americans who attend college as US residents.
The Iranian numbers, however, represent less than 1 percent of all the foreign students in US colleges and universities.
China ranks first with 158,000 students or 22 percent of the total, followed by India with 104,000 or 14 percent and South Korea with 73,000 or 10 percent. No other country has as much as 4 percent of the total.
The top three countries represent more than 56 percent of all foreign students in the US.
