November 29 2013
The number of Iranian students at American universities continued rising this year as it has for eight straight years, reaching 8,744, the highest Iranian enrollment since 1989.
The number of Iranians enrolled rose 25 percent this term after rising 24 percent last year, among the highest increases for any nationality. In fact, the surge boosted Iranian nationals from the 20th largest student group last year to the 15th largest this year.
The figures are for Iranian students from Iran—foreign students, not Iranian-Americans.
The figures are collected each fall by the Institute of International Education.
The number of Iranians enrolled today is far from the pre-revolution years. The highest number in any year was 51,310 in the 1979-80 college year, when Iran sent more students to American colleges and universities than any other country. In fact, Iran was the largest source of foreign students in the US for nine straight years—from 1974-75 through 1982-83.
The number began to fall—to plummet, actually—immediately after the revolution and bottomed out at 1,660 in the 1998-99 school year.
But the numbers have been on the rise since then and soared under President Ahmadi-nejad, who some think unintentionally fed the brain drain from Iran. The term when Ahmadi-nejad took office, only 2,420 Iranians registered at US schools. Since then the number has soared 260 percent.
Unlike many other nationalities, the vast majority of Iranian students in the United States studies at the graduate level—82 percent versus just 6 percent at the undergraduate level and the rest in other programs.
Fifty-five percent of those Iranians are studying engineering, a much higher proportion than for any other major nationality. (India is second at 36 percent.)
Another 11 percent are studying in the physical and life sciences and 10 percent are in math and computer science, both higher proportions than for most other nationality groups.
A key point is that all of them are paying for their own education, as the Islamic Republic will no longer fund students studying in the United States.
Today, Iranians comprise barely 1 percent of all the foreign students in the United States, while back in 1978-79 they were 18 percent of the foreign student body.
The number of foreign students in the US is now almost triple what it was back then.
Despite all the talk about the tighter visa rules after the 9-11 terror attacks in 2001 driving students away, that did not happen. The total number of foreign students fell just 3 percent from before 9-11 to the 2005-06 school year. Since then, the numbers are up by 41 percent in seven years. There are now 820,000 foreign students versus 583,000 the year of 9-11.
Foreign students comprise less than 4 percent of all students enrolled at US colleges and universities.
The largest source of foreign students in the US this year, as for several years, is China, followed by India and South Korea. Those three nationalities now comprise just under half of all the foreign students in the US.
The University of Southern California (USC) topped the list with the largest number of foreign students, 9,840, continuing a lead it has held for a dozen years.
