When Abhijeet Bhanoori decided he wanted to pursue a master’s degree, he looked online first. He wanted to find a good school where he could learn management and that didn’t require prior internship experience. He found the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. He was impressed by the iSchool’s high ranking by US News and World Report and made the decision to go to graduate school on the other side of the world.

Bhanoori, now a second-year master’s candidate for information management, made the decision to leave his home country of India and earn his master’s degree from the United States.

International students make up a quarter of the graduate student population and 5 percent of the undergraduate population at SU.

The trend of students from outside the United States choosing to attend college in the U.S. has been steadily on the rise since 2001, with the exception of a brief drop after Sept. 11.

Karen Bass, a senior undergraduate official in the Office of Admissions, who oversees undergraduate international student recruitment and admissions, said there has been a definite increase in the number of international students that applied for admission for fall 2009.

‘I think this is happening on many college campuses,’ Bass said. ‘It’s a common trend. There’s more applicants from certain parts of the world like China for example, where the economy has gotten better and more people can afford to send their children to school overseas.’

George Washington University has also seen an increase in the number of international applicants since 2001. Joachim Knop, the director for institutional research and planning at GWU, said that the university has seen an increase in international students primarily from Asian countries. Due to the number of applicants, GWU has implemented several changes to their international student application process.

‘There is more oversight for the students,’ Knop said. ‘We constantly monitor enrollment of the international students.’

In fall 2007, GWU had 2,046 international students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, 11 percent of whom were from China, followed closely by an almost 10 percent Indian population. At SU there is a more dominant Indian presence than a Chinese one at the graduate level.

Bhanoori said many of his Indian friends are also in the engineering program at SU. ‘One of my friends said there were 50 Indian students in his engineering class of 60 students,’ Bhanoori said.

According to an SU Fall 2008 International Annual Students’ Report, the two most popular colleges at the undergraduate level for international students are the College of Arts and Sciences, which has 39 percent of international students, and the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, which has 22 percent. However, on the graduate level, the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science has 38 percent of the population. The iSchool is in second place with 15 percent.

The survey found that most international graduate students are of Indian descent. Indian students account for 30 percent of international students university-wide.

In one of Bhanoori’s information technology classes, he said Indian students comprised 20 of the 60 students. ‘Most of all the graduate students in the information technology and engineering programs are Indian or Chinese students,’ he said.

The total number of international students at SU, graduate and undergraduate, for the fall 2008 semester was 2,103. There were 640 undergraduate international students in fall 2008, which is an increase of 177 students. In fall 2007, there were approximately 1,998 international students making for an increase of 105 students.

‘I think part of it has to do with the fact that the dollar is so weak that it costs less to study in America,’ said Elane Granger, the assistant director of advising and counseling at the Lillian and Emanuel Slutzker Center for International Services at SU. ‘Plus the global economics and globalization of the world brings everyone together.’

Internet capabilities are also allowing students to explore options across the globe. Bhanoori used the Internet when he was looking for graduate schools while still in India.

Ashish Mare, a student who is currently in India and planning to join the SU Class of 2013 to major in manufacturing engineering, said in an e-mail that he looked up engineering management on Google and went through all the colleges and results.

‘SU was a decent college and wasn’t really outdated,’ Mare said. ‘I wanted to go outside of India, because I felt that there is something better in the West as far as my course load is concerned.’

Bhanoori’s situation was similar. After he earned a bachelor’s in communication from Osmania University in Eastern India, Bhanoori wanted to get a master’s in management from a U.S. university. After seeing the credentials of SU online, he knew that he wanted to come to SU.

‘I saw the Web site, networking and monitored the rankings on US News and World Report and saw that SU was at the top,’ Bhanoori said. ‘So then I decided to come here.’

Despite the distance, international students continue to come study at SU.

‘It’s been a great experience,’ Bhanoori said, ‘If I hadn’t taken the step and come to school here (U.S.) I wouldn’t have been as independent as I am now. I’m learning life, and learning about a different culture. And I learned how to cook.’

kaoutram@syr.edu

Published on March 18, 2009 at 12:00 pm