More than a million international students are drawn each year to U.S. colleges and universities for their wide range of academic programs, cutting-edge research opportunities and culturally diverse campuses.
First-time international student enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities remained strong, with 298,705 new international students in 2023-2024, on par with the previous year’s total and pre-COVID-19 levels, according to the Open Doors 2024 Report on International Educational Exchange.
Jennifer Zhao from China says she was always interested in American culture and education. But it was her short-term student exchange experience at St. George’s School in Rhode Island that made her “totally confident that I want to go to the U.S. for college.”
She applied to 17 U.S. schools and is enrolled at New York University, where she is earning a bachelor’s degree in economics and a minor in business studies.
Here are three of the biggest reasons to study at a U.S. college.
U.S. Degrees Have an Outstanding International Reputation
American universities are among the top-ranked institutions in the world and are known globally for their reputations.
“Higher education in the United States is still the gold standard for both personal and professional development and advancement,” says Linda Gentile, executive director of the Office of International Education at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
[READ: What to Know About the U.S. College Experience Before Applying]
The U.S. is the world’s leader in higher education, “setting a global standard for flexibility and research opportunities,” says Richard Beatty, senior associate provost for enrollment management at Stony Brook University–SUNY in New York.
Beatty notes that the U.S. is home to the highest number of Nobel Prize winners “who were either born abroad or studying here at the time of their award,” including multiple Stony Brook faculty members.
The reputation of U.S. schools was a big draw for Eleni Kytoudi, who is from an agricultural village in northern Greece and the eldest child of farmers.
“After spending two summers in the U.S. at college preparation summer programs facilitated through my high school, I knew I wanted to come here,” says Kytoudi, who graduated with a degree in economics and government from Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
Many international students are drawn to U.S. schools for the training provided and high academic standards, which can be advantageous for job opportunities anywhere in the world.
A U.S. degree and work experience can help an international student stand out as a job applicant and “will show employers that they are adaptable, bilingual, experienced and willing to take on a challenge,” says Amy Malsin, vice president for university communications at The New School in New York. This can be critical when applying for jobs in their home country or when using connections in the U.S. to get work visa sponsorship.
The Education System Is Flexible and Offers Research Opportunities
Another major reason to choose a college in the U.S. is the large variety of courses and programs, and the flexibility schools offer.
For example, unlike universities in the United Kingdom that require students to choose a major when applying and to remain in that field once enrolled, U.S. schools allow students to declare their major later and switch majors.
[4 Next Steps for Accepted International Students]
“There is much more flexibility in deciding majors and changing majors as interests and strengths are determined,” Beatty says. About 80% of students change their major, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. .
International undergraduate and graduate students also have many research opportunities at U.S. schools, experts say.
For instance, the University of California–Berkeley provides opportunities for students to interact with faculty engaged in cutting-edge research, says Ivor Emmanuel, director of the Berkeley International Office. Students are placed in an experiential learning environment that offers the latest research and teaching across multiple disciplines and “work closely with mentors, deepening their knowledge and skills,” he says.
During his master’s program in computer science at Stony Brook, Indian national Smeet Dinesh Chheda worked on a research project with Brookhaven National Laboratory through its affiliation with the university’s on-campus research laboratory, Exascallab.
“I received this wonderful opportunity to work and collaborate with an excellent researcher through the university,” says Chheda, who is in the school’s computer science Ph.D. program. “I’d say that it would be much more difficult to get the same opportunity if it weren’t for the university lab.”
Chheda is part of the Exascallab research group in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and is collaborating with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
[Read: Why International Students Should Seek Mentors at U.S. Colleges]
U.S. Colleges Recruit International Students
Many U.S. Colleges and universities are stepping up global engagement efforts to recruit international students.
Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania identifies and enrolls international students “from a diverse array of countries, cultures and backgrounds, which has resulted in four straight years of record applications from international students to the college,” says Hannah Kim, the school’s director of international recruitment and admission.
Kim says recruitment has involved in-person and virtual opportunities in many of the same countries the school has historically recruited from, like China, India and Vietnam.
“However, due to post-pandemic diversification efforts, we have also seen an increased interest in applicants from many new regions such as Mongolia, Turkey and Greece, and West Africa, especially Ghana and Nigeria,” Kim says.
More than 50 countries are represented on campus, Kim adds.
Beatty says Stony Brook saw the largest increase from China last year and steady growth from across South Asia and East Asia, thanks to recruitment efforts.
“Our new international students doubled last year,” Beatty says.
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3 Biggest Reasons to Choose College in the U.S. originally appeared on usnews.com
