The bar chart illustrates how international enrollment to the universities in a European nation varied across four different categories from 2004 to 2008.
Overall, an upward trend was witnessed in the number of overseas students coming from the USA and Japan, while China’s data experienced a significant drop. In addition, there were no changes in the figure for Russian scholars. Although the number of Chinese students took the lead at first, it was overtaken by the amount of American enrollment in the last two years.
A similar pattern was seen in all categories in the first three years of the period. Starting at about 27.000, the Chinese statistic went down noticeably to just 18 thousand students in 2006, which reached the same threshold as the figure for the United States (18.000). Before rising to 18.000, it ranked second at 13.000 people studying in the universities of a European country. The figure for both Japan and Russia remained unchanged after three years, accounting for about 7.000 and 3.000 undergraduates, respectively.
The years 2007 and 2008 recorded the growing number of American-originated students in a country from Europe. After surpassing the number of Chinese students, the number of Americans continued to go up and reached about 26 thousand in 2008. In contrast, over 15.000 students from China came to this country to pursue higher education, declining by half compared to the first year. A slight climb to 10.000 students occurred in the figure for Japan. The number of Russian scholars still levelled off at around 3.000 in 2008.