The number of international nonimmigrant students enrolled in U.S. schools has surged in the last five years, according to the most recent data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE reports that as of July, there were about 1.11 million nonimmigrant international students enrolled in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) spread across 8,673 U.S. schools. Nearly half (42 percent) are pursuing coursework in science, technology, engineering and math.
But as of June 30, 2011, ICE reports there were only 784,481 international students enrolled in the SEVP program at the time, reflecting an increase of about 42 percent over the last five years.
The number of visiting exchange students studying in the United States, who are classified separately under the SEVP program, increased 14 percent during the same time frame from 226,205 students to 258,012 students.
Based on available ICE data, while the number of foreign students admitted into U.S.-based schools has continued to grow since the program’s inception, the annual rate of increase has ramped up exponentially over the past few years. For example, the number of enrolled nonimmigrant students increased by only eight percent in the two and a half years between December of 2008 and June of 2011, but jumped by nearly double that amount in the last year alone.
ICE notes that in the past year, “The number of active [nonimmigrant] students studying in the United States grew from 405,308 in July 2015 to 466,964 in July 2016, an increase of 15.2 percent."
Altogether, the number of academic, vocational and exchange students and their dependents currently account for about 1.5 million people currently in the United States under the SEVP program.