Chinese students coming to the US to study are increasingly going for undergraduate rather than graduate degrees, a trend driven in part by an "explosion" of recruiters, according to a New York City college dean.

A new report on international students studying in the US in the 2014-2015 academic year showed that the number of students from China had exceeded 300,000 for the first time, a 10.8 increase from the previous year. Among them, the number of undergraduates (41 percent) outnumbered graduate students (39.6 percent) for the first time.

The annual Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange is funded by the US Department of State.

"We have been noting that there are more students coming to the states to the undergraduate level," said Juan Carlos Mercado, dean of City College of New York. "I think one of the reasons - I don't have all the information and I don't think the report has this - in the last few years, there has been an explosion of international recruiters."

"They go to China, they go to India, they go to Korea, and they recruit students for American universities," he said at a press conference hosted by the State Department.

Mercado said City College would also be using a recruiter this year because it hadn't formerly paid "a lot of attention in order to enroll students, but now we want to get more students from abroad, because the tuition is higher and this helps us finance part of the budget that the governor is not giving us."

The State Department's EducationUSA program provides foreign students with information on all US colleges without focusing on any particular ones, which is where recruiters come in.

"There are recruiters that are hired by universities, often universities that people haven't heard of," said Monica Shie, a spokeswoman for the State Department. "Harvard doesn't need to do this. These are universities that are usually smaller, that want more foreign students.

"They hire people and pay them, and they go to places like India and China and recruit students and they get paid per student. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," Shie said.

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com