Harvard data shows China ahead of India on campus despite US-wide shift

Indian students have become the largest international student group in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors 2024/25 release. But at Harvard University, the mix looks different: Chinese students still form a much larger cohort than Indian students.

Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research and Analytics (OIRA) shows that in Fall 2025, the university enrolled 1,452 students from China and 545 from India across its schools. The same dataset lists 6,749 nonresident students out of 24,317 total enrolment, putting Harvard’s international share at about 28%.

At the national level, Open Doors reports the US hosted 1,177,766 international students in 2024/25, underscoring that the US remains a major global destination even as campus-level patterns vary across institutions and degree levels.

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Harvard vs US-wide: what the numbers show

For Indian applicants, the contrast is a reminder that national trends don’t always mirror elite-campus distributions. Open Doors captures enrolment across thousands of US institutions and programmes, while universities like Harvard have a smaller, highly selective international intake that can look different by school and degree level.

What matters most for students is aligning choices with outcomes: programme fit, costs, career pathways, and—if applying to highly selective universities—academic depth and research alignment.

Bottom line: India’s rise in US-wide enrolment is a major shift, but Harvard’s Fall 2025 data shows that elite-campus country mixes can follow a different pattern.