American Colleges See Fewer Latin Americans

Andres Oppenheimer

Bad news for long-term U.S.-Latin American relations: New figures of foreign students in U.S. universities show that while Chinese students are flooding U.S. colleges, the number of Latin American students keeps going down.

This year, the number of students from Asia in the United States increased by 5 percent, to a record 435,667 students, according to the Open Doors 2010 report by the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE).

Comparatively, the number of Latin American students decreased by more than 3 percent, to 65,632 students.

AN ACCELERATION

Far from a statistical blip, the figures are a continuation -- and an acceleration -- of an ongoing trend. This year, the gap between Asian and Latin American students widened further because of a larger than usual influx of Chinese students, and a big drop in the number of Mexican, Peruvian and Argentine students.

The number of Chinese students in U.S. colleges rose by 30 percent this year. China is the foreign country with the largest number of students in U.S. colleges (128,000), followed by India (105,000) and South Korea (72,000).

The student flows from Mexico, Peru and Argentina to the United States dropped by 9 percent each. Mexico now has 13,400 students in U.S. colleges, Peru has 3,300 and Argentina 2,200. The region's overall decline was mitigated by the fact that Brazil's numbers remained virtually unchanged from last year at 8,800 students, and other countries' numbers rose marginally.

What's the explanation for the drop in Latin American students, I asked IIE officials. It can't be the economy because Latin America's economies did pretty well this year. And it can't be that they don't think much of U.S. universities: despite all predictions about the decline of U.S. power, the one area in which all major world university rankings agree is that the United States is still way ahead of the rest of the world in its universities.

Peggy Blumenthal, a top IIE official, suggested that in Mexico's case, it may have to do with the country's 2008 economic slump, and the fact that many Mexican students may have been partly financed by U.S. relatives affected by the Wall Street crisis.

More than half of Latin American students coming to the United States are undergraduates, and don't receive economic aid from U.S. colleges. By comparison, most Asian students are coming as graduate students, and many of them receive research or teaching assistant funds from their host campuses, she said.

Alan Adelman, head of the IIE's Latin American division, wrote to me that in countries such as Mexico, the drop is due to tougher immigration and tuition conditions for Mexican students in border states such as Arizona, and to a decadelong decline in post-graduate scholarships from CONACYT, the government's science and technology institute. There are currently 643 CONACYT-sponsored students in the United States, compared to 1,862 in 1997, he said.

My opinion: The drop in the flow of Latin American students is not because the United States has become a less attractive destination. There are fewer Latin American students in other parts of the world as well.

The "Global Education Digest 2009" published by UNESCO, the United Nations educational and scientific branch, shows that Latin American countries are sending much fewer students abroad relative to the size of their populations than Asian countries.

While more than 3 percent of South Korean college students, and about 2 percent of Chinese and Vietnamese college students are pursuing studies abroad -- anywhere in the world -- only 1 percent of Mexican students, 0.4 percent of Brazilian students and 0.4 percent of Argentine students do the same.

'BRAIN DRAIN'

Many Latin American countries fear that helping graduates to get doctorates abroad produces a "brain drain." But, as I saw in recent trips to China, India and Singapore, it's instead producing a beneficial "brain circulation" whereby Asian students getting doctorates in the best foreign universities not only get an international education, but years later become big investors, visiting professors or co-sponsors of scientific projects in their home countries.

Much of the technological leap of China, India and other Asian countries in recent years has been the result of this "brain circulation." But many officials with pre-globalization mindsets in some Latin American countries seem unaware of this.

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