U. sees rise in international graduate students

Departments have seen a slow and steady rise in international — non-U.S. born and non-naturalized citizen — applicants and admissions since 2009 across doctoral, masters and non-degree graduate programs at the University, according to data made available by the University’s Graduate School.

Over the years, a large portion of international students have gravitated toward programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fieldsacross the United States.There are similar trends at the national level, Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the Institute for International Education, said.

She added that engineering and business management degrees are most popular among international students in both graduate and undergraduate programs.

China, India and South Korea are predominant countries in sending students to U.S. higher education institutions, with places like Saudi Arabia and Brazil easily jumping the ranks in the past decade, according to the IIE’sreport.

According to the Davis International Center’s annual reports, the international constituency of the graduate student body increased from 37 percent in the 2009-10 academic year to 40 percent by the 2014-15 academic year.In 2014, 56 percent of students in engineering programs came from abroad.

The University’s natural sciences programs, compared to other academic areas, have witnessed the largest jump in international graduate students, having grown from 33 percent during the 2009-10 academic yearto 41 percent in the 2014-15 academic year.

Within roughly the same time frame, the overall international graduate student population in the United States increased from 690,923 – 3.4 percent of the total students in higher education – in 2009-10 to 886,052 – 4.2 percent – in 2013-14, based on an annual report published by IIE called “Open Doors.”

In 2009, over 4,000 U.S. higher education institutions were hosting over 293,000 international graduate students; by the end of 2014, that figure had grown to nearly 330,000 students total.

Though it is without professional schools, the University awards master's degrees in finance, architecture, public policy, engineering and in the sciences of engineering and chemistry.

The Wilson School offers two-year master’s degrees in public affairs and public policy, as well as joint-degree programs in partnership with other peer institutions.

Jaime Beja, a first-year MPA student at the Wilson School from Mexico City, Mexico, said that he found the Wilson School attractive for its small faculty-to-student ratio and rigorous curriculum.

“It’s very rigorous in terms of its quantitative material — economics, statistics — and the focus that it has, being a small school,” he said.

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Beja said that his cohort of first-year MPA students is the largest the Wilson School has seen so far, at 70 students total. Twenty-five of them are international students.

The diversity of student perspectives and international experiences has proven enormously rewarding even in the first few months of the program, he said.

“Learning from all these backgrounds and experiences… many of the domestic students have backgrounds and work in international countries, so that’s a great piece. You learn something new every day about another region, another country. It’s like a huge pot where everybody gives in some kind of way and we learn something. That’s amazing,” he said.

As for the long-term future, Beja plans to return to public service in his home country.

“I see myself in Mexico, giving back somehow what I’ve come to learn here, and mainly working in the public sector — either in the government or NGO," Beja said. "My vision has always been to give something back through the government, particularly Mexico. It’s a country where a lot can be done. There’s been a lot of advances in the last decade, but the road is still very long.”

Another first-year MPA student in the Wilson School, Rafael Almeida, from southern Brazil, said he applied to public policy programs after seven years’ work in various departments in the Brazilian federal government.

Almeida said he had served in a number of capacities — from organizing health and education systems to combatting human trafficking and money laundering — and realized he needed more than a bachelor’s degree for the work he wanted to pursue.

“My decision to go to graduate degree in public administration and public policy was [because] I had hit a point in my career where I knew I had to acquire more skills — so my focus was on domestic policy but I knew I had to acquire some international affairs skills,” he said."That is why I decided to apply to the top graduate programs and, of course, Princeton was one of them."

Almeida said he was drawn to the University’s deeply interdisciplinary approach to what is often a very practice-oriented degree. He noted that he appreciates the interdisciplinary aspects of the program that allow students studying in different areas, like international affairs, domestic policy, international development and economics policy, to work together.

Like Beja, Almeida has discovered a community rich with diverse and wide-ranging policy backgrounds.

“From the beginning I was really impressed about the experiences of my colleagues.They have had amazing international careers in Africa, Italy, South America,” Almeida said."And of course not only international students because American students have a very vast international experience. This is an incredible community where we have been learning a lot from each other and there’s a sense of cooperation, a sense that we are living in this community but we are also very worried about how we can change aspects of reality when we leave this school. It’s a really amazing, right-minded community."

Bhandari pointed to the quality of American universities as a selling point for many international students.

“I think one of the things that most attracts international students is the very solid reputation of U.S. higher education, the reputation of high-quality institutions and the fact that students who are research-oriented are really attracted to the research facilities of U.S. campuses,” she said. “Students are also really attracted to the fact that the U.S. has a range of institutions — we have over 4,000 institutions: community colleges, small liberal arts institutions, large doctorate degree institutions. There is really something for everyone and every type of international student,” she said.

Further, Bhandari said she observed that the intellectual, cultural and knowledge-based contributions that international students provide to the American campus are unmistakable.

“I think one of the biggest contributions that international students make is to really globalize and internationalize the American classroom on campus, because keep in mind that barely 10 percent of all American students study abroad,” she said. “So for those who are not going abroad, if they have international students in their classroom, that’s going to be really mind-expanding for them to be able to sit next to students who are from another country and really learn about the different perspectives and cultures, and I’m sure the types of academic knowledge will be very different from their own.”

For example, Beja noted that his pre-Wilson School experience working and living in a developing nation has allowed for an interesting contribution of knowledge and different perspectives among other students in his cohort.

When it comes to the benefits of globalized knowledge exchange, certain social science disciplines have just as much to gain as engineering programs have historically.

The economics department at the University is 75 percent international, according to the former department chair and economics professorGene Grossman. In an address at the City University London’s Cass Business School, Grossman acknowledged the critical value added by foreign students and scholars.

He said that, like in the natural science and engineering fields, the social science disciplines required international integration in order to promote the growth of new and creative ideas, theTimes Higher Educationreported last month.

Grossman, who is on academic leave this year, could not be reached for comment.

So Kubota, a fifth-year graduate student in the University’s economics department, said he believes that an increasingly “internationalized” trend within a discipline like economics simply makes sense.

Kubota obtained both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Japan prior to coming to the University. According to Kubota, the University is ranked in the top five in the world for macroeconomics study, and he said the program’s excellenceoutweighed his general nervousness about life and language barriers in the United States.

“Princeton is the best research university in the United States, at least in my area,” he said.

Drawing a comparison to areas like sociology and politics, Kubota explained that macroeconomics has an inherent international aspect to its work that makes cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration easier than in other fields.

“Economists share the same method, like mathematical models and statistical methods, to study the society, so it’s a kind of globalized field, like mathematics or physics,” he explained, then laughed. “We don’t need to use English so much because we can use mathematics.”

Yuyang Fan, a fourth-year graduate student from China in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, said that his research advisors and partners directed him to the University’s program.

“What made my decision to come here is really that the faculty are outstanding, the research facilities are unparalleled to other places, and very important is the people here — the students. You feel happy being surrounded by those people,” he said.“Back then, when I was applying, people coming to the U.S. for undergraduate was not a very common thing but it’s getting a lot more popular. [Now] you see people here and that’s not uncommon either. I can see that and that’s the trend: people are trying to come here earlier.”

Almeida said there’s no mistaking what his experience as a graduate student at the University has meant to him.

“I think I can speak for my colleagues in this: we are really amazed about how much attention we have in this school, and this is certainly a very unique feature in the Woodrow Wilson School,” he said. “Students can share experiences in a very close relationship, so it’s a really important aspect of our experience here so far.”