Foreign student enrollment rebounds in U.S.

"It was a combination of long term and short term problems," said Stimpson. "The global competition in education intensified, and you have the U.S. government tightening student visa, making it look like a series of hoops to jump through."

Many research institutions felt the international student crunch in the labs and classrooms that had relied on international students as researchers or teaching assistants.

“Students today are very likely to have a colleague, a client or a business opportunity from another country after they finish school, so meeting people from other cultures while still in school enhances the educational experience even for local students,” said Michael Brzezinski, director of Purdue University’s international program.

To better assist international applicants, many schools introduced online application systems, making it easier for students out of the country to track their application status. Some assigned application counselors familiar with visa issues to help international students navigate through the process. Other schools wrote letters to U.S. consulates overseas to support their students’ visa applications.

"Our schools really became more proactive in reaching out to foreign students. They started doing the kind of things they used to do only for American students," said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of IIE. "They used to think international students were going to come anyway, but the situation has changed."

NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences sent Vice Dean Jim Matthews to an American university-sponsored recruiting fair in Shanghai last year, a first for the school. Matthews called the fair productive, and is going to another one this fall in Wuhan, a city in central China.

The U.S. government, realizing the unintended consequences of its student-visa policy, did its part to reduce the red tape.

Since the initial decline in the number of student visas issued, the State Department has added a staff of 570 in consulates worldwide and made processing student visas a priority. Students now generally get faster appointments than tourists and business travelers. The department also said it invested heavily in technology to speed up the clearance procedure required in applicants studying sensitive disciplines, which could have held up a visa for an extended period of time.

Last November, the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs organized a high-profile delegation of university presidents to visit Japan, Korea and China, all top countries in terms of sending students to the U.S.

"The trip was not for immediate recruitment purposes, but rather to spread the word that foreign students are still welcome in the United States," said Stephen Curtis, president of Community College of Philadelphia, who was on the trip.

As a locally focused community college, Community College of Philadelphia would have once been considered an unlikely candidate for international recruiting. The school today has 156 international students, although that's still less than 1 percent of its total student population.

“The student body of community colleges mostly grew up in the community, never left the region and probably don’t have many opportunities in study-abroad programs, so bringing international students in really gives them an opportunity to experience cultural differences,” said Judy Irwin of the American Association of Community Colleges.

International students pay out-of-state tuition to attend community colleges, which on average is double that of local students. In some community colleges in California, Texas and Massachusetts, foreign students now make up about 10 percent of student body.

In total, the more than half a million international students spent $13.5 billion in tuition and living expenses in 2005-2006, and about 70 percent of funding comes from sources outside the United States.

Still, the U.S. is expected to continue to face intensified global competition. Although international graduate school applications began to rise again in 2005, the total number for 2007 was still 27 percent lower than 2003, according to CGS.

"The competitive landscape has changed and we simply have to compete a lot harder," said Stewart of CGS. "Even (with) that, I think we won't be able to get back to where we were in 2002. The game for us now is more about quality than quantity."

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