Opportunity costs. Johns Hopkins’s Heng Zhu has fulfilled his scientific dreams in the United States and overcome barriers to travel. eign student enrollment has reinforced that perception. But a closer look at the numbers shows that assumption to be incorrect. Let’s start with higher education as a whole. Yes, the number of overseas students at Australian universities rose by 16% in 2003, to 136,000. But the rise comes after a 10% drop in 2002, which was preceded by a 20% jump the year before. Enrollment—overwhelmingly of undergraduates—is cyclical. An epidemic such as severe acute respiratory syndrome or an Asian economic crisis can constrict the annual flow one year just as a declining Australian dollar or the Olympic games can pump it up the next, explains Jennie Lang, director of international students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), one of the country’s biggest universities.(In fact, one-third of those overseas students don’t even leave their country but attend branch campuses in their native land.) There are also good reasons to believe that enrollments won’t continue to rise.“We’ve reached our maximum on international students, and we are in a holding pattern,” Lang notes. The university has capped the number of international students at 25%(she calls it a guideline)“to ensure that students continue to have an Australian experience—to study with Australians—and to be sure that Australians have a chance to pursue their educational opportunities.” Although the guideline now applies only to UNSW, other educators say it is likely to spread because other campuses are feeling the same pressures. With regard to advanced training in the sciences and engineering, the data fail to support the giant sucking sound that US academics claim to be hearing. For starters, the Australian postgraduate education system is tiny compared with the US system. Last year, Australia’s universities enrolled a total of

539 international students in doctoral degree programs in the natural sciences, engineering, and information technology. By comparison, there are 2.5 times that number of first-year foreign students enrolled in US doctoral programs in physics alone—and physics represents only about 3% of the overall US science and engineering doctoral pool. In addition, Australian educators say the system is already near or at capacity.“We can’t add students unless we get more buildings and more lab space,” says Michael Archer, UNSW’s vice president for research. More to the point, there’s little money to attract international graduate students.“They either bring their own money or pay their own way,” says Lang.“We offer them about 80 to 90 scholarships a year,” she notes, out of a total doctoral pool of 1500 to 2000 students. Finally, country-by-country enrollment trends within Australia belie the notion that Asia’s best graduate students are heading south and east rather than west. For example, the number of Chinese doctoral students studying science and information technology in Australia is half what it was a decade ago, falling from an average of 230 in the 1990s to 108 in 2002. Engineering enrollment has also tumbled, from about 175 for most of the previous decade to 115 in 2002. The trends are scarcely better for the much smaller Indian contingent: There’s been a slight rise in the number of science Ph. D. students starting in the latter half of the 1990s, from 27 in 1998 to 45 in 2002, while the number of engineering students has hovered at around 30.