Partnership Gwinnett is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Korea Channel. Subscribe here for monthly Korea newsletters.
Chavda Law Group is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's India Channel. Subscribe here for monthly India newsletters.
More than 25,000 international students enrolled in Georgia universities in the 2021-22 school year, a record number that marked a return to pre-pandemic highs, though their spending remained slightly down from its 2019 peak.
These students, the majority of them from China and India and pursuing STEM disciplines, spent nearly $835 million on tuition this year, restoring international education to its place as a leading services “export” for the state.
It was a remarkable recovery after a dramatic drop. During the 2020-21 fall and spring semester the overlapped with the worst of the pandemic, enrollments in Georgia fell 11.3 percent to 21,515 students, while spending plummeted more than 20 percent to $662 million.
This year, China, which perennially accounts for about a third of all foreign students in the U.S. as well as in Georgia, saw declines at both levels. Its proportion of the total enrollments in Georgia fell from 33 percent to 30.3 percent, while India’s surged from 18.6 percent to 22.1 percent. Rounding out the top five sending nations for Georgia were South Korea (7 percent), which stayed remarkably steady in its No. 3 spot, as well as Nigeria (2.8 percent of the total) and Taiwan (2.1 percent), which pushed Vietnam out of the top five.
Georgia largely tracked the national figures, though Chinese student numbers fell even more dramatically across the nation amid COVID-19 lockdowns, heightened geopolitical rivalry and moves at some universities to diversify away from what some deemed a dangerously fickle revenues source. Across the U.S., Chinese student enrollments fell 8.6 percent to 290,086, the first time since 2014 the number dipped below 300,000. Indian enrollments, meanwhile, grew 18.9 percent to 199,182. The world’s two most populous countries accounted for 52.4 percent of all international students in the United States. South Korea came in at a distant third with 40,755.
Here in Atlanta, Georgia Tech seems to have been a core beneficiary of the return of international students. While the state’s top five receiving universities all notched substantive gains, Tech’s total jumped 42 percent in one year to 8,040 students. That’s also 20 percent higher than enrollments in the year that commenced before the pandemic in the fall of 2019.
Georgia State University had the next highest percentage jump, with 17.6 percent growth to break the 3,000-student mark for the first time.
According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, this influx led to the creation of 8,276 jobs all across Georgia, with more than half coming to three schools: Georgia Tech ($209.4 million supporting 2,526 jobs), Savannah College of Art and Design ($204.9 million supporting 1,114 jobs) and Emory University ($149.7 million supporting 1,963 jobs).
NAFSA calculates that every three students creates one job through spending on tuition, accommodations, dining, retail, transportation and other sectors. Across the United States, international students contribute $33.8 billion and support 335,423 jobs, the organization says.
If higher education represented a country, it would have nearly cracked the top 10 export markets for the state in 2021, just behind the $860 million in goods that Georgia sold to South Korea.
Only 632 Georgians studied abroad in 2020-21 down from 3,185 in 2019-20.
GSU-CIBER is the presenting sponsor of Global Atlanta's Education Channel. Subscribe here for monthly Education newsletters.