India, in today’s day and age has come a long way from where it was a 100 years ago. Seeing tremendous growth in all sectors, the nation is on its way to become a global superpower and the credit lies in various aspects, a major one among which is India’s incredible student crowd. Acclaimed and sought after all over the globe, the Indians have raises their flag high and have yet again, broken records.
In an interesting turn of events, Indian students were issued a tremendous number of 130,839 F-1 student visas in the year of 2023 alone. This event marked a significant 14% increase from the previous year, encompassing more than 20 percent of the overall international students. Interestingly, more than 20 lakh Indian students consider pursuing higher education from the states and the majority of these individuals desire to study STEM( Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
It is also to be noted that the total number of F-1 visas issued in the year 2023 were approximately 4,46,000, marking an 8.5% rise from the 4,11,000 visas issued in 2022. This also means that Indians comprised nearly 25 percent of the overall visa applicants, which of not a considerable feat in itself, also makes India the country with the largest student base in the country.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that this has happened and is actually a second year in a row, when Indians received more US student visas than students from any other country!
This feat sheds light on the excellence of Indian student community and how valuable of a resource they are. The result however, is a culmination of multiple factors like the US’ state of art learning environment, more flexible student debts and the generous scholarships and aids being given by various institutions.
Also, the tremendous rise in applications might also be due to a decline of applications in the neighbouring country of Canada which seems to have taken a toll since the controversial statement it made on the Indian Government.
