Volume 7 • Issue 2 • PP: 23–30 • 2024
Exploratory Data Analysis of International Student Demographics: Trends, Insights, and Implications
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© 2024 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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This paper focuses on Exploratory Data Analysis of the data from the “International Student Demographics,” which is available on Kaggle and comprises data collected through the academic years, as well as total students, U.S. students, undergraduate, graduate, non-degree students, and OPT columns. In the given work, the author intends to provide a chronological overview of the demographic data of international students. Operations like handling missing values and outliers were done to prepare the data for a more elaborate analysis. All descriptive analyses during the study included time series plots and bar charts where time series was used to evidence key trends and distributions. The analyses of the research questions indicate that there has been growth in international student enrollment over the decades, particularly in undergraduate and OPT student categories, with influences from world events such as COVID-19 and the alteration of immigration policies. Country-wise contribution reveals that the maximum number of articles originated from East Asia and South and Central Asia, with a special focus on engineering, social sciences, and humanities. Solutions: The paper articulates the finality of trends affecting educational institutions and policymakers by focusing on the implications of international students’ demographics. Based on the findings above, future research directions are proposed to improve the findings and support evidence-based practice relating to international education.
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