“US President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.”
Source: BBC article
More than 1.1 million international students from over 210 countries were enrolled in US colleges in the 2023-24 school year, according to Open Doors, an organisation that collects data on foreign students.
Source: BBC article
This post, like most (if not all) of mine, isn’t about my personal feelings, opinions, or politics. It’s about curiosity—mine, and maybe yours too.
Given that I was born and raised in the Caribbean, Barbados specifically, and knowing that many Caribbean people aspire to obtain a US-based education, I wanted to answer a simple question: How many students from the Caribbean enroll in the United States?
Enter Open Doors (pardon the pun). This organization has published international student data going back as far as academic year1949/50 (note: the data is not continuous until 1999/00). They also track data on U.S. students going abroad, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. For this post, I’m interested in Caribbean enrollment numbers, in particular, over the last 24 years, i.e.,: 2000/01 to 2023/24.
The first step was to get the data. The Open Doors website makes this easy, you can download an Excel file with all of the relevant data. Once I had that file, I removed all countries except Caribbean countries (which I define for this post as member and associate members of CARICOM). From there, I created some basic charts to visualize the numbers:
Chart 1 shows the total number of students from Caribbean countries enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities between the 2000/01 and 2023/24 academic years. Enrollment peaked in 2003/04 at 15,900 students, followed by a general decline over the next decade, reaching a low of 9,325 in 2015/16. Since then, enrollment has remained relatively stable, fluctuating between 9,900 and 10,800 students annually. The 2023/24 figure stands at 10,807 students, reflecting a modest increase from the previous year.
Side note: For the 2023/24 academic year, there was a total of 1,126,690 students enrolled from across the world. The Caribbean represented10,807 students, or about 1% of the total.
Chart 3 shows student enrollment by Caribbean country. Jamaica, The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti clearly dominate the numbers, with all other countries appearing almost flat in comparison—most with fewer than 1,000 students enrolled per year. Jamaica consistently had the highest enrollment throughout the period. Notably, in 2011/12, student numbers from Trinidad and Tobago and The Bahamas converged after years of opposing trends: Trinidad and Tobago had been declining, while The Bahamas was rising. By 2012/13, The Bahamas pulled ahead and has remained ahead since, as Trinidad and Tobago’s enrollment continued to fall.
Chart 4 focuses on Caribbean countries with lower U.S. student enrollment, excluding the four largest contributors: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, and The Bahamas. With these outliers removed, it’s a bit easier to observe differences among the remaining countries. Between 2000/01 and 2023/24, several countries—including Barbados, Belize, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Dominica—consistently recorded enrollments above 300 students per year, with occasional spikes. Others, such as Grenada, St. Lucia, and the Cayman Islands, showed more moderate or fluctuating trends. A few countries—like Anguilla, Suriname, and Turks and Caicos—remained at the lower end of the spectrum, generally under 100 students per year.
This basic review of U.S. student enrollment data offers a snapshot of how many Caribbean students have pursued higher education in the United States over the past two decades. While the U.S. clearly attracts students from across the region, especially from countries like Jamaica, The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti, I do not have comparable data for the UK, Canada, or other destinations. It would be interesting to examine those trends in a future post to get a fuller picture of where Caribbean students are studying globally.
caribbeansignal.com is the personal blog of Amit Uttamchandani. Posts or comments made by Amit on this blog represent His own personal views, opinions, thoughts, et cetera.