Foreign S&T Graduate Students in the US

According to a new publication of the National Science Foundation:

Graduate S&E enrollment reached 516,199 in 2007 . Of these students, 72% were enrolled full-time, 56% were men, and 71% were U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Thus there were about 145 thousand foreign graduate students in science and engineering in the United States that year. They help pay for the system, and they staff the laboratories of the graduate universities. Many of them stay when they achieve their degrees, and the external benefits of thousands of scientists and engineers are important to our economy.