ABSTRACT
On August 1, 1946, U.S. president Harry S. Truman signed the Fulbright Act into law (U.S. Public Law 584). This provision funded foreign student study in the United States for a prescribed period of time, and it marked the beginning of a steady rise in the number of international students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees at American institutions of higher education. By the 1964–1965 academic year, 82,045 international students enrolled from all regions of the world, with students from southern and eastern Asia being the largest group. This figure continued to increase dramatically, ballooning to 154,580 in 1974–1975. For 2014–2015, international student enrollment in U.S. higher education institutions reached an all-time high of 974,926, totaling 5% of the entire student population on American campuses (Institute of International Education, 2015a).
