Ms. Blumenthal suggests one reason for the increase is a lack of space in Chinese colleges for everyone who wants an education. She says students and their parents are also looking for a different educational experience.

More international students study in California than any other state, followed by New York, Texas, Massachusetts and Illinois. For the tenth year in a row, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles led the country, with more than eighty-six hundred foreign students.

The most popular area of study for international students is business and management, followed by engineering.

Some schools are making special efforts to welcome students from other cultures. Workers greet students in different languages at a dining hall that the University of California, Los Angeles, spent five million dollars to modernize.

Peter Angelis is an assistant vice chancellor at UCLA. He says forty percent of the students are Asian, and opinion surveys showed that students wanted more Asian foods.

PETER ANGELIS: "We conduct a survey annually to find out what our students like and don't like about residing on campus. And consistently, through these surveys, we've heard over and over again that cuisines from the various regions of Asia are our students' preferred choice

for choice

. In fact, Japanese food is their top choice overall.

"