Foreign Flood

Those many alien students

Oglah Smadi, 31, a Jordanian linguistics student at the University of Texas, has helped start the first mosque in Austin; he wants his fellow Muslims to have a place to pray. At Indiana University, the directory of an eleven-story building for married students reads like a Saudi Arabian telephone book. Iranian students have shouted down the Shah in several U.S. cities.

The number of foreign students in the U.S. has risen sharply. Last year there were 235,000 foreigners (many of them graduate students) on college and university campuses, a 15% jump over the previous year; there are even more in the U.S. today. By far the largest foreign contingent is the 36,000 or so students from Iran; other big groups come from Taiwan, Nigeria, Canada, Hong Kong, India and Japan. Soon students from China will add to the numbers.

For most schools, the influx has been welcome. At the University of Southern California, which has the largest foreign enrollment of four-year institutions, the 3,700 outlanders account for 23% of the student body. Says John Callaghan, executive director for International Students and Scholars: "With the predicted decline in domestic enrollment, the slack has to be picked up somewhere if universities are to survive." At Indiana University, where enrollment dropped by nearly 4% this academic year, 1,498 tuition-paying foreign students at Bloomington contributed $1.1 million of that school's $15 million in tuition revenues.

Public universities, which must take care not to turn away the children of taxpayers, emphasize that they do not hand out free educations to foreigners. Says Joe West Neal, director of the International Office at the University of Texas at Austin, which has students from some 90 countries: "A government will come to us and say, 'Here is a check for $400,000. This is for our children. They are our future.' " Private institutions have no curbs on the number of foreigners they can take. At Stanford's business school, which accepts only one in twelve applicants, 19% of this year's students come from abroad.

The presence of so many outsiders inevitably creates some campus tension. At U.C.L.A., for example, Iranian students complain of "racist" graffiti aimed at them. At Indiana University, undergraduates threatened to file suit against the school, charging that they could not understand lectures given by foreign graduate students serving as instructors. The Government, for its part, finds that many visiting students disappear and become part of the U.S.'s alien population.

Mostly, however, the students just seem eager to get a U.S. degree. Of the Japanese, John O. Heise, director of the University of Michigan's International Center, observes: "They view their American education as an exportable commodity. They come, they buy it, and they take it away." And American students often gain valuable international contacts. Take the University of Texas, for instance, where many of the 2,000 foreign students are studying petroleum engineering. When it sponsored an alumni conference on energy a couple of years ago, one 1947 grad came a long way back: Sheik Abdullah Tariki, a former Petroleum Minister of Saudi Arabia and a founder of OPEC.

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