Anyone interested in higher education in our nation who fails to appreciate the key role played by foreign students in our colleges and universities labors under the same misunderstandings as those suffering from any other anti-immigrant delusion: A lack of knowledge of the crucial part immigration has always played in the American experiment.

The majority of American college and graduate students are and always have been native-born. But the strong numbers who come from abroad help literally to pay for Americans’ education and bring important new ideas and cultures into our academic melting pot.

That’s why it was good news that, after a very sudden drop-off because of COVID-19, foreign students are returning to these shores in droves.

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“International students attended U.S. universities in surging numbers last year, rebounding from a pandemic slump with the help of a 35% jump in students coming from India, according to a study released” last month, the Associated Press reports.

The number of international students in the U.S. grew by 12% in the 2022-23 academic year, marking the largest single-year increase in more than 40 years. In total, more than 1 million students on American college campuses came from abroad, the most since the COVID-interrupted 2019-20 school year.

“This reinforces that the U.S. remains the destination of choice for international students wishing to study abroad, as it has been for more than a century,” said Allan E. Goodman, CEO of the Institute of International Education.

While it has (almost) always been thus, it is certainly true that there are far more foreign students here than many decades ago. In the early 1950s, for instance, there were fewer than 50,000 studying here, and even by the early 1970s, fewer than 100,000. Now, that number is over 1 million. Over 70% of the international students were from Asia, with almost 35% from China, about 18% from India and increasing numbers from South Korea. Canada comes in a fairly distant fourth.

And California leads the nation, with 16.5% of all foreign students studying in our state — USC, with over 25% of its student body international, is the American university with the highest percentage.

Still, around the nation, foreigners make up just 5.6% of all college students. But because so many of them are studying engineering, computer science, other “hard” sciences and businesses, when they stay to work — and many do — they have an outsize impact on our economy. And because they are almost always charged higher tuition fees than American students, they subsidize college for Americans.

In addition to the larger trend, a smaller survey of this autumn semester shows the “rebound appears to be continuing, with an 8% increase in international enrollment this fall,” the AP reports.