Though the campus has seen a noticeably larger population of international students this year, they are mostly undergraduates.

“We traditionally recruit undergraduates for the academic benefits they bring and, to be frank, they improve the bottom line,” said Scott King, the director of the Office of International Students and Scholars.

The university has engaged in an overall movement to boost undergraduate enrollment, but a tight budget means the school hires fewer teaching assistants and research assistants — namely graduate students.

“[International] graduate numbers are highly affected by economic factors,” King said.

Graduate students earn a minimum salary of more than $16,000 for half-time appointment, according to the website for the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students at the UI.

This is no small amount, considering the UI employed 5,529 graduate students in 2008, according to the Office of the Associate Provost for Graduate Education. But King said their contribution is invaluable.

“They do hard work to earn the salary they get,” he said.

Graduate-student work ranges from teaching classes to assisting with research and taking on research projects of their own.

Bingxuan Wang, who joined the UI toxicology program in 2007, said she is working on her dissertation. That means she’s up at 7:30 a.m. every day and in the office on the Oakdale Campus by 8:30 a.m. to do research.

“Research is the most stressful part,” Wang said. “You always want to get the right results and come up with the best projects with the most creative perspective.”

Foreign graduate students face another challenge: the language barrier. Though Wang said she participated in an English exchange program during her undergraduate studies in China, many of her international colleagues find the oral exam “incredibly difficult to pass.”

But money matters, too. Wang said the financial benefits she receives as part of her program provided a major incentive for her staying at the UI.

“If not for that, I wouldn’t be able to afford it,” she said.

Not only does the economy affect whether universities can afford to employ such high numbers of research and teaching assistants, it also affects families.

King said families might set aside money to send their children to school in the United States for a bachelor’s degree, but few consider saving for a master’s degree as well. That financial preparation is crucial to students’ applications to graduate schools.

The national advocacy group, Counsel of Graduate Schools, cites tighter university budgets, a decrease in scholarships awarded, and a decrease in international applicants — especially from Korea and India — for a drop in the number of international graduate students in the United States.

And although the UI’s official statistics for international students won’t be released until later this week, King suspected they will follow a similar trend.

He said he expects to see 50 to 100 more international undergraduates enrolled than last year, but wasn’t sure how the graduate numbers will compare.