The Geography of Foreign Students in U.S. Higher Education: Origins and Destinations

From Brookings

This report uses a new database on foreign student visa approvals from 2001 to 2012 to analyze their distribution in the United States, finding that:

The number of foreign students on F-1 visas in U.S. colleges and universities grew dramatically from 110,000 in 2001 to 524,000 in 2012. The sharpest increases occurred among students from emerging economies such as China and Saudi Arabia. Foreigners studying for bachelor’s and master’s degrees and English language training accounted for most of the overall growth.

Foreign students are concentrated in U.S. metropolitan areas. From 2008 to 2012, 85 percent of foreign students pursuing a bachelor’s degree or above attended colleges and universities in 118 metro areas that collectively accounted for 73 percent of U.S. higher education students. They contributed approximately $21.8 billion in tuition and $12.8 billion in other spending—representing a major services export—to those metropolitan economies over the five-year period.

Most foreign students come from large fast-growing cities in emerging markets. Ninety-four (94) foreign cities together accounted for more than half of all students on an F-1 visa between 2008 and 2012. Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hyderabad and Riyadh are the five foreign cities that sent the most higher education students to the United States during that time.

Foreign students disproportionately study STEM and business fields. Two-thirds of foreign students pursuing a bachelor’s or higher degree are in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) or business, management and marketing fields, versus 48 percent of students in the United States. Both large (San Jose, Calif.) and small (Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas) metro areas figure among those with the highest shares of their foreign students in STEM disciplines.

Forty-five (45) percent of foreign student graduates extend their visas to work in the same metropolitan area as their college or university. Metro areas that retain high shares of their foreign graduates under the temporary Optional Practical Training (OPT) program tend to be either large diversified economies (e.g., New York, Los Angeles), or specialized labor markets that align closely with foreign graduates’ training (e.g., Honolulu, Seattle, Las Vegas).

These findings suggest that foreign students can provide important economic benefits to their U.S. metropolitan destinations—serving as bridges back to their growing home cities and offering valuable skills to local employers. More metropolitan leaders should emulate leading practices that capitalize on the knowledge and relationships of foreign students to strengthen local economies while also maximizing students’ educational and professional experiences in the United States.

CHECK OUT the interactive data.

World University Rankings 2015-16

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016 list the best global universities and are the only international university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

The top universities rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

Ranking

A Silent Majority Of Undereducated And Underemployed Millennials

Millennials are often mocked as Starbucks baristas with Ivy League educations.

And while they are the best-educated generation to date, data from the Pew Research Center show about two-thirds of millennials between ages 25 and 32 lack a bachelor's degree.

That majority is often ignored in conversations about millennials.

This narrative is alive and well in Boston's Harvard Square, where church bells chime as millennials sip lattes and drift out of bookstores. But take a walk down the road, and the story changes.

More from NPR.

New college data give fuller picture of graduation rates — and show challenges

From the Washington Post:

Dozens of public universities across the country..., report that fewer than half of their full-time freshmen in 2007 earned bachelor’s degrees after six years at those schools or after switching to other schools.

That finding emerges from an unusual cache of data posted on a nongovernmental Web site to provide what sponsors call “a more comprehensive and accurate picture” of college outcomes than can be found in federal records. The new data put a rare spotlight on a crucial group: transfer students.

The government tracks graduation rates for first-time, full-time students who finish where they began. But that omits the huge number who hop from school to school. Colleges are now stepping forward to fill in gaps in public knowledge through a site called Student Achievement Measure.

So far, 250 public colleges and 16 private schools have disclosed details about outcomes for the class that entered in fall 2007, including the proportions that:

●Graduated from their original school within six years.

●Graduated from other schools.

●Were still enrolled in quest of degrees.

●Had dropped out or were for some other reason untrackable.

These questions matter because every college student who fails to finish has invested a significant amount of money and effort — possibly going into debt — without reaping any of the economic or social benefits of obtaining a degree. Students of modest means, whose parents never went to college, are often those who face the highest hurdles in the effort to graduate.

This chart shows data for 266 colleges and universities, tracking outcomes for first-time, full-time students who entered college in 2007. See the chart.

One-Quarter of Adults Hold Educational Credentials Other Than an Academic Degree

The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that in fall 2012, more than 50 million U.S. adults, or one in four, had obtained a professional certification, license or educational certificate apart from a postsecondary degree awarded by colleges and universities. This is the Census Bureau’s first-ever report on this topic.

Among the adults included in the report, 12 million had both a professional certification or license and an educational certificate; 34 million had only a professional certification or license; and 7 million had only an educational certificate.

“Getting an academic degree is not the only way for people to develop skills that pay off in the labor market,” said Stephanie Ewert, a demographer with the Census Bureau’s Education and Social Stratification Branch and co-author of the report, Measuring Alternative Educational Credentials: 2012.

Few Plan for College Expenses

Description from the New Strategist:

Only 43 percent of American families know how they will pay for college before their child enrolls in school, according to the latest Sallie Mae report, How America Pays for College 2013. The college cost "surprise" that greets many families as their child heads out the door is one factor behind the rise in student debt.

The typical family with an 18-to-24-year-old enrolled in an undergraduate program paid $21,178 for college in the 2012-13 school year. The funds came from a combination of parent income and savings ($5,727), loans ($5,760), grants and scholarships ($6,355), student income ($2,284), and gifts from relatives and friends ($1,053).

And in a similar vein, The One Comic That Explains Just How Screwed America Is.

Characteristics of Private and Public Schools; School Safety; Postsecondary Info

From the National Center for Education Statistics:

Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results From the 2011–12 Private School Universe Survey
Characteristics of Public School Districts in the United States: Results From the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey
The Nation's Report Card: Trends in Academic Progress
Postsecondary Institutions and Price of Attendance in 2012-13; Degrees and Other Awards Conferred: 2011-12; and 12-Month Enrollment: 2011-12: First Look (Provisional Data)


From the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2012

Census Bureau Reports Fast Growth in Ph.D.s and Master’s Degree Holders

From 2002 to 2012, the highest rate of increases in education attainment levels were doctorate and master’s degrees, according to new statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. The population with a doctorate grew by about 1 million, or 45 percent, while those who held a master’s climbed by 5 million, or 43 percent.

Meanwhile, the population with an associate degree rose by 5 million, or 31 percent. Those whose highest degree was a bachelor’s degree grew at a smaller rate: 25 percent to 41 million. Meanwhile, the number of those without a high school or GED diploma declined by 13 percent, falling to 25 million. The rates of increase for doctorate and master’s holders were not significantly different from one another.

The statistics come from Educational Attainment in the United States: 2012, a series of national-level tables showing attainment levels by a wide range of demographic characteristics, including sex, race, Hispanic origin, marital status, household relationship, citizenship and nativity, labor force status, occupation and industry. Also included are detailed information on years of school completed, showing for each level of attainment exactly how many years of education adults have. A variety of historical time series tables going back to 1940 are also provided, as are graphs illustrating historical data.

Women outnumbered men in 2012 among people whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree (21 million versus 19 million) or a master’s degree (9 million compared with 7.4 million). Conversely, more men had doctorate (2 million versus 1.2 million) or professional degrees (1.8 million compared with 1.2 million). Between 2002 and 2012, however, the gap between the number of men and women with professional degrees shrank.

The tabulations also show that education continues to pay off. Among people 25 and older who had any earnings in 2011, average earnings were $59,415 for people with a bachelor’s degree (but no graduate degree), compared with $32,493 for people with a high school diploma, but no college.

These statistics come from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which is conducted in February, March and April each year at about 100,000 addresses nationwide.

First-Year Undergraduate Remedial Coursetaking

A primary goal of the U.S. Department of Education’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Blueprint for Reform is to improve the college readiness of high school graduates. College readiness is a complex benchmark and has been measured in several ways, including transcript analysis and standardized test scores. One such measure, and the focus of this Statistics in Brief, is remedial coursework enrollment.

Consistent with earlier National Center for Education Statistics publications, this brief defines remedial courses as courses for students lacking skills necessary to perform college-level work at the degree of rigor required by the institution. At the start of their college careers, students who are not sufficiently prepared to complete entry-level courses are often encouraged or required to take developmental or remedial courses. Results from previous surveys conducted by the NCES that collected data on the percentage of students enrolled in remedial coursework found that 28 percent of first-year students who entered 2- or 4-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions were enrolled in remedial courses in both 1995 and 2000.

Choice of College Major Can Mean Millions Over Career

The field of bachelor’s degree makes a considerable difference in a college graduate’s annual earnings, according to 2011 American Community Survey (ACS) data released this month by the U.S. Census Bureau. These differences add up over the span of one’s work-life. For example, among people whose highest degree is a bachelor’s, engineering majors earn $1.6 million more than education majors.

These findings come from two separate ACS reports. The first report, Field of Degree and Earnings by Selected Employment Characteristics: 2011, provides information about the relationship between the field of bachelor’s degrees, median annual earnings, and the likelihood of full-time employment...

The second report, Work-Life Earnings by Field of Degree and Occupation for People With a Bachelor’s Degree: 2011, explores the relationship between how far one goes in school and how much money one might make over the course of a 40-year career (from age 25 to 64). It goes into further detail for people whose highest degree is a bachelor’s by investigating how college major and occupation impact these work-life earnings. This is the first time the Census Bureau has ever analyzed work-life earnings by both field of degree and occupation.

School Enrollment in the United States: 2011

The Census Bureau's annual, national-level statistics on the characteristics of students, from nursery to graduate school. According to the statistics, enrollment in private elementary and high schools was 4.1 million in 2011, down from 4.8 million in 2005 and a high of 6.3 million in 1965. Furthermore, non-Hispanic white children now make up only a slight majority of elementary school students (54 percent), down from 58 percent in 2005.

For the first time, the Census Bureau has developed a series of charts illustrating trends in enrollment from 1947 to the present. These include the distribution of school enrollment by level from 1955 forward, trends in college enrollment by sex and by race, and dropout rates of students in 10th through 12th grades.

Characteristics for selected race, Hispanic origin, tribal, and ancestry populations

The Census Bureau has released 2 new American Community Survey products. This is the first time this level of statistical detail has been available for groups since the Census 2000.

Also, The Population With a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher by Race and Hispanic Origin: 2006–2010.

How Much Time College Students Spend Studying Varies By Major

From the press releases:

Findings show that on average, full-time college students study 15 hours a week. However, study time differed by academic majors, with seniors in engineering averaging about 19 hours per week, while their peers in the social sciences and business averaged five fewer hours per week.
Faculty expectations for study time by field corresponded closely to what students reported, but there were exceptions. Social sciences faculty, for example, expected four more hours per week than the average social sciences senior reported. Students who devoted at least 20 hours per week to studying did not always attend class fully prepared.
These findings, released by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), raise questions about areas where a mismatch may exist between the work asked of students and what they believe necessary to succeed, and also whether faculty expectations for study time may need to be recalibrated.

Note that 2012 will be the last year of the current survey. At some point even the best surveys must be revised and updated, affecting multi-year analyses such as trend studies or pre-post designs. Many measures on the current survey, including benchmarks and individual survey items, are likely to change in 2013. This means trend lines will be interrupted and multi-year results will be less comparable across the two versions.

Metro areas with the Most College-Educated Residents

As another college graduation season draws to a close, the New York Times reports the results of a small analysis Brookings conducted on college degree attainment rates in metropolitan areas. They examined the share of adults age 25 and over in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas who held at least a bachelor’s degree in 2010, versus in 1970. (The Times’ website provides a table with the key data.)

NYC is #10, Albany/Schenectady/Troy is #20, Rochester is tied for #22.

Economic Benefits of International Education to the United States

Source: NAFSA

Foreign students and their families spent more than $20 billion in the United States during the 2010 – 2011 academic year, according to a new NAFSA report released today. California, New York, and Texas welcomed the largest numbers of foreign students, and those states and others across the country each saw a substantial benefit from spending by these students and their families on living expenses, tuition, and fees.

Supplement to Education and Synthetic Work-life Earnings

In September, the Census Bureau released a study that examined the economic value of educational attainment by estimating the amount of money that people might earn over the course of a 40-year career given their level of education. In response to the high level of media interest in these findings, the Census Bureau released a series of supplemental tables. These tables include an estimate for the total population — all people regardless of gender, race, and Hispanic origin. They show that a person with bachelor’s degree working full time from ages 25 to 65 would have $1 million more in earnings than a similar person with high school diploma.
Internet address
News release
Report [PDF]

National Center for Educational Statistics

Beginning Teacher Attrition & Mobility: Results From the First Through Third Waves of the 2007–08 Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study" [PDF]
Dropout Prevention Services and Programs in Public School Districts: 2010-11 [PDF]
Military Service Members and Veterans: A Profile of Those Enrolled in Undergraduate & Graduate Education in 2007–08 [PDF]
Postsecondary Institutions and Price of Attendance in the United States: 2010–11, Degrees and Other Awards Conferred: 2009–10, & 12-Month Enrollment: 2009–10[PDF]
Projections of Education Statistics to 2019[PDF]

"Community college often gets a bad rap, but for years these institutions have helped many students — especially those trying to balance work, family and going to school — get the education and training they need. President Obama has called community colleges one of the keys to America’s economic future, and the new attention and increasingly bigger draw is bound to mix things up in the coming decade. Here are a few examples" of what is predicted to "evolve and even improve about the community college experience."

More HERE.

National Center for Education Statistics data

Numbers and Types of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools From the Common Core of Data: School Year 2009-10 - First Look
Description: This report presents findings on the numbers and types of public elementary and secondary schools in the United States and the territories in the 2009-10 school year, using data from the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system.

Postsecondary Awards in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) by State: 2001 and 2009
Description: These tables provide state-level information on the conferring of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) awards (degrees and certificates) from academic years 2000–01 and 2008–09, both overall and by field.

Educational Attainment in the US – 2010

Detailed Tables from the Census Bureau.