Dr. Leah Mason - Research, Evaluation & Learning at IIE

Student mobility from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States fell slightly in 2019/20, with declining numbers from Mexico, Central, and South America, offset by growth in the number of students from the Caribbean. Declining numbers of students from the Middle East and North Africa made Latin America and the Caribbean the third-largest regional sender to the United States after Asia and Europe. The 80,204 students from Latin America and the Caribbean represented 8 percent of international students in the United States. Although smaller in the absolute numbers, gains from the Bahamas (+16 percent), Jamaica (+2 percent), and other Caribbean nations in 2019/20 likely reflected the number of displaced students who sought to continue their higher education in the United States following the devastation of Hurricane Dorian (Drier, 2019). In 2019/20, the number of Brazilian students in the United States increased for the third year in a row, up 4 percent. Gains were also seen in the number of students coming to the United States from Costa Rica (+7 percent), Peru (+4 percent), and Argentina (+1 percent).
 
Although Latin America and the Caribbean remained a popular region for U.S. students receiving academic credit for study abroad, 2018/19 marked the third consecutive year of decline in the number of U.S. students going to the region (-6 percent). Student numbers increased to Mexico (+6 percent) and Chile (+6 percent) and resulted in each country moving up one spot to 11^th and 24^th largest host country respectively. The number of U.S. students going to Peru increased 3 percent. These gains were offset by declines to Argentina (-13 percent), Ecuador (-9 percent), and Costa Rica (-4 percent), resulting in an overall decline in U.S. study abroad to this region.
 
Latin America and the Caribbean continued to lead as a regional destination for U.S. students seeking non-credit learning abroad, including work, internship, volunteering, or research experience, with 34 percent of such students pursuing non-credit learning in the region, most notably in Mexico, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.
 
Open Doors Website

For those interested in more detailed descriptive data, information is available in comprehensive data tables and online on our new website. This site allows users to search and access historical information over the past 20 years. To access the 2020 downloadable Fact Sheet on Latin America & Caribbean, click here. 
 
Open Doors Report

To purchase a copy of the 2020 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange click here.
 
Custom Data Analysis

Interested in a custom data analysis? IIE will consider custom data requests used for scholarly research (with findings published in aggregate), used by educational agencies for the express purposes of facilitating international student exchange, and those used by a company or firm to facilitated student recruitment for employment in the students’ home countries or home regions. For  more information, click here.