US colleges look outside China for new foreign students

BOSTON (AP) — As a surge of students from China begins to level off, many U.S. colleges are expanding recruiting efforts in the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America in part to boost budgets that have come to rely on tuition dollars from international students.

Most schools don't offer scholarships for international students, and charge them full tuition costs.

Losing foreign students could hurt college budgets, especially at a time when some public universities are struggling with long-term drops in state funding.

Nations such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Angola have growing youth populations and middle classes, two of the factors that U.S. colleges look for, but some say the region's governments don't offer enough funding to help students study abroad.

Rising tuition at U.S. colleges, meanwhile, has raised the barrier for many African families, said Kelechi Kalu, vice president of international affairs at the University of California-Riverside.

According to the new data from Blumenthal's group, students from Nepal and Vietnam are also among the fastest-growing groups coming to the U.S.