Howdy Education Insights
Published research and briefings from Howdy Education Insights, organized around international student mobility and North American admissions.
Undergraduate-related measures contracted in both countries, while graduate-level trends diverged. A shared academic window and five primary sources clarify what can be compared across North America.
U.S. China-origin graduate enrollment fell 12.3% from 2019/20, while Canadian master's and doctoral program enrolments rose 5.7% and 19.1%.
U.S. undergraduate numbers and Canadian bachelor's-level program enrolments both fell sharply from 2019/20, while Chinese first-year applicants on Common App increased in 2024/25.
Permit activity, year-end permit holders and postsecondary program enrolments all fell from pre-pandemic baselines, but bachelor's, graduate and field trends did not move together.
Undergraduate enrollment, visa issuance flows, active student records and K-12 mobility do not share one post-2020 trajectory. The differences matter for institutional recruitment planning.
The total population and the entering cohort moved in opposite directions. That divergence matters for admissions planning because continuing students and OPT can sustain the total while the next intake weakens.
The three visa classes cover different purposes and very different market sizes. Their fiscal-year changes provide mobility signals, but none is a direct measure of applications or U.S. enrollment.
The data describe a highly concentrated institutional market. They do not rank quality or reveal new-student yield, but they help institutions assess competitive position and recruitment assumptions.
STEM remained dominant, but the fields did not move together: health professions and math/computer science grew fastest, business was flat, and fine and applied arts declined.
The reversal is a useful undergraduate demand signal, but it covers one application platform and cannot be treated as a national enrollment, admission or visa result.
Permit holders during the year, new students and the year-end population measure different parts of the system. Reading them together explains why Canada's intake changed faster than its enrolled stock.
The national funding mix is useful context, but it is not a price-sensitivity survey. Institutions need segment-level net-cost, scholarship, deposit and yield data before changing recruitment strategy.
The sharpest losses occurred before 2022. A modest recovery followed, but the 2024 count remained 65.5% below 2018 and the source-market mix had become more diversified.
The headline total was nearly flat because growing OPT participation offset a much weaker inflow of new students. The result is an early signal, not a country-level census or a forecast of the next admissions cycle.
The national target is not a single admissions quota for every institution or program. Applicants must separate study-permit issuance targets, provincial allocations, PAL/TAL rules and post-graduation work eligibility.
Those differences matter when institutions set recruitment targets and decide what information to provide.
India moved ahead of China in 2023/24. The rank change is only part of the story: the two totals follow different paths and contain very different shares of graduate students and OPT participants.
Graduate students are now the largest Chinese academic-level group in U.S. higher education. The shift was driven less by broad growth than by a much steeper undergraduate decline.
Two official measures peaked in 2018 and remained well below that high in 2024. The larger structural change is China’s declining share of a Canadian study permit population that expanded around it.
An Open Doors-only baseline of the Chinese student population and its broad composition from 2017/18 to 2024/25.
