WASHINGTON: India has become the largest source of foreign students in US universities and colleges, according to a new report which found that the aftermath of last year’s Sept 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon has hurt student exchanges between the United States and the Middle East.

The report, released on Monday by the Institute of International Education (IIE), found that some 67,000 Indians enrolled in US tertiary-level schools in the last academic year, up by 22 per cent over the previous year, surpassing China which had been the leading source country through much of the late 1990s.

The total number of foreign students enrolled in either two-year US community colleges, four-year colleges, or universities grew to a record 583,000 last year, an increase of 6.4 per cent over the 2000-2001 academic year which was also a record, according to the report, the latest in an annual series called ‘Open Doors’.

At the same time, however, IIE reported declines in the enrolment of students from predominantly Muslim countries, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Less dramatic falls were reported for Kuwait, Malaysia, and Egypt.

The declines were attributed mainly to slower processing of visa applications from most of these countries by US authorities after the Sept 11 attacks, which were carried out by 19 Arab men associated with Al Qaeda, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia.

In addition, students from these countries may entertain greater concerns about their own security in the United States, according to the report, which suggested that Canadian, British, and Australian institutions of higher education are likely to be the chief beneficiaries of this trend.

Many students from these countries who were already in the United States were interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and new regulations issued in September require that all men from Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia be finger-printed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on entry into the United States.

Declines in enrolment by South-east Asian students, on the other hand, were attributed in part to after-effects of the 1997 financial crisis there, as well as concern about post-Sept 11 anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.

But the “war on terrorism” appears to have worked the other way, too, according to the report, which found that the number of US students studying in the Middle East, almost 4,000 in 2000-2001, fell 60 per cent last year.

Israel, which normally receives about 75 per cent of all US students in the region, was particularly hard hit.

Overall, the number of US college students enrolled in foreign universities increased by 7.4 per cent last year, reaching a record total of 154,000, according to the report. It noted, however, that the terms of study by US students abroad are generally much shorter than foreign students here.

Nearly 50 per cent of the US students in the tally spent less than four months — some as little as one month — in study abroad, according to the report.

The general trend of continuing increases of foreign students in US schools and of US students abroad in spite of the trauma of Sept 11 was taken as a positive sign by education and US officials here.

As a regional group, Asian students dominated the foreign student body in the United States, accounting for 56 per cent of all enrolment. The next greatest percentage were students from Europe at 14 per cent, then Latin America with 12 per cent, the Middle East with 7 per cent, Africa with 6 per cent, and Canada and Oceania with 5 per cent.

Overall, the most popular fields of study for foreign students last year were business and management, engineering, mathematics and computer science. About half of all foreign students specialized in those subjects.

As for source nations, India and China led the pack with 67,000 and 63,000, respectively, followed by Korea (49,000), Japan (47,000), Taiwan (30,000), Canada (27,000), Mexico (13,000), Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand with about 12,000 each.

The number of Indian students enrolled in US schools doubled in just seven years, but has grown in leaps and bounds since 1999, according to the report. Almost 75 per cent of Indians registered in post-secondary schools last year were in graduate schools.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.