----this artical is a river divided the earth,

                     a break is a stopping during the life,goodbye

                     to everybody,c u next time!  

Foreign students bring numerous tangible benefits. The universities attracting foreign students make a direct monetary gain from recruiting them. Indirectly, research outputs are enhanced by the exchange of ideas inherent in graduate-level international collaboration.

Annan, Jacques Chirac, Bill Clinton and Romano Prodi have many things in common. One is their involvement in world politics – another is that they all studied outside their country of origin. Nowadays, lower travel costs and greater international openness have made studying abroad a much more frequent undertaking. This has benefited students, universities, the countries involved and the wider global community. But these benefits, and the potential effect of policy, must not be taken for granted.

After learning the hard way, the US government has started to make amends for earlier mistakes. The number of students registering at US universities has stabilised, after falling for two consecutive years for the first time since the 1970s. The falls were widely blamed on the increased security procedures and student visa restrictions that followed the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

The Bush administration soon realised that international students were shunning the US in favour of the UK, continental Europe and Australia. It is now pouring resources into improving its visa processes. The motivation is clear: the global market for tertiary education is both large and growing rapidly. In 2003 there were more than 2m students enrolled at foreign universities. This represented a 31 per cent increase since 2000, with China and India among the fastest growing sources of overseas students.At its best, international study has the potential to be an enormous force for good. Wider society gains from the interplay between people of different nationalities, helping domestic and foreign students understand each other's countries. This much is recognised by the various international institutions supporting foreign study, such as the European Commission with its large Erasmus programme.

Yet students have been facing increasingly difficult decisions on where they wish to go to college. Applicants are now weighing different universities' teaching and research reputation against the difficulty of obtaining visas. Excessive bureaucracy, long waits, high costs and no opportunities for work experience are hardly the way to make students feel welcome.

Because the benefits are so significant, public policy should encourage international study. There need not be a trade-off between security and openness. The US example shows that, given appropriate resources, these two objectives can be fulfilled. But countries need make the resources avail-able. The next generation of world leaders may well depend on it.