In conversations about international student recruitment in the United States, some things are taken as given: the decentralization of the landscape and the absence of a coordinated recruitment strategy at either the national or state level (save for some consortiums that are narrowly focused on marketing of a specific state), and the perceived difficulty of transitioning from student to permanent resident status if that’s what students desire.
The U.S. hosts more international students than any other country, but while the number of international students at American universities continues to grow, the country's share of the world’s globally mobile students is dropping: the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the U.S. attracted 23 percent of all international students in 2000, it hosted 16 percent in 2012. For a useful exercise in comparison and contrast it might look to its neighbor to the north, Canada, whose share, though far smaller, has been growing, and where both the federal and provincial governments are paying increasing attention to international student recruitment as part of a broader skilled immigration strategy. The number of international students in Canada has increased by 84 percent in 10 years, to 293,505 in 2013, according to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, and OECD figures show that Canada's share of the world’s students has increased from 4.5 percent in 2000 to 4.9 percent in 2012.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/23/canada-push-international-students-and-immigrants