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Central Illinois Gazette

About those international students at the UI

Posted by: Tom Kacich

Monday, March 31, 2008 4:36 PM

From the News Bank archives ....

UI among top 4 destinations for international students
News-Gazette, The (Champaign-Urbana, IL) - November 18, 2007
Author: TOM KACICH

There's a legend around the University of Illinois that a father in Korea was choosing a college in the United States for his child to attend. Safety was dad's primary concern - he didn't want a school near either coast - so he threw a dart at the center of a U.S. map and hit ... Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois.

The story may be apocryphal but there's more than a kernel of truth behind it. It turns out that safety is a major concern for the parents of many international students , that a lot of UI students come from Korea and that Illinois is one of the leading host universities in the United States.

The "Open Doors" report released last week by the Institute of International Education found that the UI's Urbana campus was No. 4 among U.S. universities in the total number of international students last year. The report says there were 5,685 international students on the UI campus. (That number is higher than the university's own reports; the difference may be that the IIE counted students enrolled in a noncredit intensive English program at the UI, according to Carol Livingstone, associate provost and director in the UI's division of management information.)

The University of Southern California topped the list with 7,115 international students (21 percent of its total enrollment). Second and third were Columbia (5,937) and New York University (5,827).

Among other Big Ten schools Purdue was fifth (5,581), followed by Michigan (sixth), Ohio State (12th), Indiana (15th), Michigan State (16th), Wisconsin (19th), Minnesota (22nd) and Penn State (23rd). Purdue has the highest percentage enrollment among Big Ten schools (14.2 percent), while Stanford has the highest percentage among all universities (23.9 percent).

"Many of the students who have been here go back home and tell other people about Illinois. The word gets around," said Wolfgang Schlor, associate director of International Programs and Studies at the UI. "And I think it goes back a long way. In China, for example, I think Illinois has been involved with efforts to keep up a relationship since early in the 20th century."

Schlor said UI officials are aware that as a public university, "we can't just open the floodgates at the expense of our own Illinois students, but for a number of reasons it's good to have international students among our own students."

The presence of students from other countries is the next-best thing to having UI students study abroad, Schlor said. "It's good for our domestic students to be exposed to different people, different cultures, different points of views," Schlor said.

And, it should not be overlooked, international students help the UI's bottom line. Their tuition is about three times what in-state students pay.

Overall international student enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities increased 3 percent last year to 582,984. It was the first significant increase in international enrollment since 2001-02, the IIE said. The increase in enrollments, said Karen Hughes, a former top adviser to President Bush, "reflects the dynamism, diversity and excellence of U.S. higher education institutions in a competitive international environment, and demonstrates the commitment of the U.S. government and U.S. higher education leaders to welcoming international students ."

Hughes noted that the State Department had sponsored high level visits by U.S. college and university presidents to East Asia, South Asia and South America.

"The delegations reiterate Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice's message that 'America's mission in this new century must be to welcome more foreign students to our nation.'"

India sends the greatest number of students to U.S. schools, followed by China and Korea. At the UI, Korea was No. 1 (with 1,179 students in the spring 2007 semester), followed by China, India, Taiwan and Turkey. The vast majority (3,435) at the UI were graduate students, with electrical and computer engineering the most popular discipline.

The "Open Doors" report also said that international students ' net contribution to the United States economy was $14.5 billion, including tuition and fees paid (about $9 billion) plus living expenses (about $10 billion), minus U.S. government support.

In the state of Illinois, the report calculated the net contribution at $661 million. There was no breakdown by individual university, but since the UI had 22 percent of the international students at universities and colleges in the state, their contribution to the university and the local economy could be projected at about $130 million.