South Korea sent more than 72,000 students to America for the 2009-10 academic year, which is down almost 4 percent from the year before. Yet this country has held the No. 3 ranking in the survey since 2001-02. Some 50 percent of South Korean students in the US are at the undergraduate level, and about 32 percent are graduate students.

Vicki Schuster/Brookings Register/AP
From left: Hyemin Park, Krishna Pokharel, and Yihan Zhong, students from Korea, Nepal and China, take a break from class in the lounge of the South Dakota State University Multicultural Center in Brookings, S.D., last month.