US colleges look beyond China for new foreign students

BOSTON — 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.

The number of Chinese students at U.S. colleges rose from 62,000 a decade ago to 328,000 last year, and they still make up 31 percent of all international students in the U.S., but growth is slowing.

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.