Indian graduate students are outnumbering their Chinese counterpart in their rush to the US universities for getting higher instructions mostly on science and engineering.

There has been a 12% increase in the number of Indian students seeking admission in the US graduate schools comparing to the last year’s count, according to a Wall Street Journal report published on 30 June.

‘Applications from India have doubled to nearly 1,000 in the last half-dozen years, with most interest in so-called STEM fields, for science, technology, engineering and mathematics,’ the report said.

In spite of being the second-largest pool of international students to US graduate schools, with China on top, 192,000 foreign applicants, out of the total 676,484, were from India, Wall Street Journal reported quoting sources of the US Council of Graduate Schools.

“Right now, the US is a very strong market and a very good value for them,” research and policy analysis director at the Council of Graduate Schools Jeff Allum was quoted to be saying.

This growing influx of Indian graduation seekers to the US has been attributed to the scarcity of seats for graduation study at the Indian universities.

However, the exact opposite has been said about China, which has been able to ensure quality education in the university schools offering graduation.

US graduate schools are receiving less number of applications from Chinese students during the last three years with a 2% fall this year.

Chinese students, on whom US graduate schools mostly rely for offsetting demands from native students, are finding ‘local alternatives luring’.

The decline in the number of candidates from China might be worrying for many US universities, as many of them run physical offices in China ‘to support aggressive recruiting.’