Chidanand Rajghatta
American mandarins often gripe about balance of trade issues with India, fretting about how difficult it has been to break the country's protectionist walls. But one of America's big exports to India is not counted as a trade item — its college degree.
It is a credential so prized that Indians have spent billions of dollars over the years to acquire it. Education has been a money spinner for America.
Let's crunch some numbers: In recent years, some 70,000 to 80,000 students from India go to the US annually for a college degree.
The number has gone up gradually from about 30,000 in the early 1990s. It's fair to say close to a million Indians are US-educated since 1990, perhaps two million going back to the 1960s when the groves of American academe really opened to Indians. It is anyone's guess how many have returned.
No US or Indian agency keeps a record of returnees, and at best we can extrapolate the numbers. That's another story.
The idea here is to look at the business side of higher learning. US experts estimate that the country earned about $14 billion in 2004-2005 from foreign student enrollment on American universities.
Last year, the US took in close to 600,000 foreign students. If we divvy the numbers, then bright-eyed bushy-tailed Indian students haring to the US, who make up close to 14% of all foreign students, are ponying up $2 billion annually for their American degree.
There is concern now about whether the Virginia Tech (VT) massacre and its fallout will keep foreign students out.
The top three countries sending students to the US in order of ranking are India, China, and Korea.
Will China and Korea cut back because of any oriental stigma? Will Indian students and parents be funked?
Most stories in the Indian media post-VT incident don't suggest so, which must be a big relief to the American education machine. But there was bad news for them even before the VT massacre.
There has been a slowdown in Chinese student inflow to US for some years now as China's own education system tidies up. China used to top the list of countries sending students to US till India overtook it in 2000.
Now India too may be reversing gear. Last year, the number of Indians going to US dropped for the first time in several years (from approx. 80,000 to 76,000). If the numbers drop further this year, then it could be a trend. The famed US degree may be losing sheen.
Some of it is plain purse string matter. For example, till recently, Indian students heading for an MBA in the US coughed up to $100,000 (helped by liberal education credit), secure that freshly-minted from a top B-school, they would easily land in a $150,000 per annum job in the US in no time.
But if American companies are going to send them back to India to work at half or a third or fourth of that salary (a situation compounded by tighter visa and immigration rules), spending 100K and a lot of sweat doesn't sound great. Especially since in India right now, anyone who can muster a bit of English and some dash looks likely to land a job.
