nearly 30 percent of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2018, hailed from immigrant families, up from 20 percent in 2000.
….
These students, most of them nonwhite, are the offspring of Indians who came to study in the United States and stayed; the children of Latin Americans who crossed the border for blue-collar jobs; and some whose families fled civil wars around the world as refugees.
Children From Immigrant Families Are Increasingly the Face of Higher Education – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Even in 2000-2001, immigrants or children of immigrants accounted for 1 in 3 U.S. college students.
In California, in 2018, immigrants or children of immigrants accounted for about half of all college students.
An additional 5.5 percent of students in 2018 were international students studying in the U.S. and are not counted in the above figures.
More here in this Harvard report.
But like many children of immigrants, he works almost full time, while studying, to pay for his phone, gas, car insurance and other personal expenses.
I am not an immigrant, nor a child of immigrants nor do I have recent family history of immigrants, yet I also worked from age 10 onward, worked during college, paid all my own tuition and fees, bought my own used car, paid my own insurance and other personal expenses. That experience is not unique to immigrants. The telling of that anecdote in the story, however, is indicative that we think today we believe students, in general, do not work nor pay their own way to college – and that this is the normal state of affairs.
Race-based preferences were created to assist those who experienced effects of past discriminatory practices in the United States. Today, many students classified as minority racial groups came from other countries and did not themselves experience U.S. past discriminatory practices.
Update:
In almost every graduate field that reported increased enrollment, it was due to a big jump in the number of international students, even as the numbers of U.S. citizen and permanent resident students fell.
Grad students have been a cash cow; now universities fret over graduate enrollment (msn.com)
Right now, foreign students, at the undergrad level, are about 5.5% of enrolled students. However, as the U.S. fertility rate remains low and falling, and the cost of education keeps going up and the ROI becomes negative, more and more universities will continue their recent trend of expanding enrollment of international students – who often come with money and pay full price. I would not be surprised that in as little as ten years, about 50% of U.S. college students, including graduate students, will be either international students, immigrants or the first generation of immigrants.
A related issue is how will employers view international students? My guess is very favorably. I made my career in tech. It was common since the 1990s for half of my team – or more – to have been born abroad. Many came to the U.S. to earn a tech graduate degree and then were hired and became permanent residents, or dual citizens. I suspect that there may even be a bias towards international hires – partly for their global perspective, their multi-lingual capability, that many went on to grad school and completed grad degrees – and a seeming view that those from other countries are better than U.S. citizens. The effect is that as we switch to population growth through immigration (a majority of U.S. population growth now comes from immigration and by 2040, 100% of our population growth will be from immigrants), immigrants may be view as “better” than those born and raised in the U.S., and exposed to fewer cultures and global issues.
