Foreign F-1 Students and Program Statistics

As the new school year is underway at many colleges and universities across the U.S., it is interesting to share some statistics and profiles relating to the F-1 foreign student visa program.    The data has been released from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) as of June 30, 2011.    As of June 30, 2011, there were 10,364 SEVIS-approved schools and 784,481 active F-1 students.

Schools

Approximately 35% of all of the 10,364 SEVIS-approved schools were located within California, New York, Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania.   Only eight schools have more than 5,000 active students, and out of the 10,364 SEVIS-approved schools, approximately 6,700 have less than 10 students (approximately 3,700 schools have no foreign students).

Among the top schools were the City University of New York with 10,000 active students, University of Southern California with 7,600 students, Purdue University with 7,000 students, University of Illinois with 6,700 students and Columbia University with 6,500 foreign students.

Students

Country.   China is the country with the highest number of active foreign students – 150,899.  South Korea is second with 101,652 and India is third with 99,180.

Program of Study.   Business Management, Marketing and related is the most common major – over 160,000 active F-1 students pursue it.   Second is Engineering with 106,000 active students.

Degree.   Over 69% of all active students are enrolled in Bachelor’s  (234,465), Master’s (192,966) or Doctoral (116,372) degrees.   The number of foreign students in English-language programs is 93,603 and the active students pursuing Associate degree are 73,504.

State of Study.  More than half (55%)  of all active students go to schools within seven states – California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida and Pennsylvania.