Tennessee

Where Tennessee sits

The non-resident share of research doctorates, against the same figure for the country. That is 8.8 points below the national figure of 38.9%. The pattern this site measures nationally is weaker here, not stronger.

Tennessee ranks 42 of 52 states on that share, and 20 of 56 on the number of research doctorates it awards. Rank 1 is the highest. Only states that award doctorates are ranked.

Undergraduate and graduate, side by side

The same institutions at two levels. Undergraduate is the remainder once graduate enrolment is taken out of the total, and both levels carry their own non-resident count. In Tennessee the graduate share is 8.4 points higher than the undergraduate share.

Click any column heading to sort. Click it again to reverse. The panel under the table narrows what is shown — everything is shown until you ask for less.

The two levels diverge most at Christian Brothers University: 6.6% of its 1,204 undergraduates and 57.3% of its 839 graduate students. These are different admissions systems with different applicant pools, different money and different reasons to say yes, and a single state figure hides both.

4,386 of 186,224 undergraduates and 5,721 of 53,128 graduate students. IPEDS reports no graduate enrolment for 5 of these institutions; their rows show a dash rather than a zero, because the file not carrying a number is not the same as the number being none.

What the state figure is an average of

The largest graduate enrolments in Tennessee, each with its own non-resident share. Nothing here is excluded from the figures above. The point is to show what they are made of.

No single institution decides this figure. The largest, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, holds 14.0% of the state’s graduate enrolment, and removing it moves the state share from 10.8% to 10.2%.

Practical training, and the other student visas

A student visa does not end at graduation. Optional Practical Training lets a graduate work on the same visa, and a STEM degree adds a further twenty-four months. It applies at both levels — a foreign undergraduate can take OPT as readily as a doctoral graduate — which is why the undergraduate share above is not the end of the story.

Do not add these two columns together. A graduate who holds post-completion OPT and then a STEM extension in the same year appears in both, and the sum counts that person twice. They are authorisations, not people. Figures are for 2024, from SEVP’s top-100 and top-200 school lists — an institution outside those lists has no published figure, which is a fact about the list and never a zero.

J-1 physicians. Tennessee is not in the published top twelve states for J-1 physicians in graduate medical education, which is the only state breakdown ECFMG publishes. That is an absence from a short list, not a zero.

In-state against out-of-state

Public four-year institutions, FY2024. Every foreign student pays the out-of-state rate, so this is the price attached to the non-resident column everywhere else on this page.

An out-of-state student in Tennessee is worth 2.04× an in-state one to the institution. They are 18.5% of the students and 31.6% of the tuition revenue.

Out-of-state is not the same as foreign. SHEEO counts international students and domestic students from other states in one column. This shows what a non-resident pays, never how many of them are foreign. Figures are net tuition and fee revenue per full-time-equivalent student — what the institution actually collected after its own aid, not the published price. Public four-year institutions only; medical FTE excluded. SHEEO records that Tennessee estimated part of this breakout for this year.

Every institution

Largest first by total enrolment. A dash means the institution awards none of that degree, or that no federal research money was matched to it.

Degrees are pooled over 2021–2025. Enrolment and federal money are the most recent year in the file. “Non-res” means a student here on a temporary visa, almost always F-1 or J-1. A green card holder is not counted in it.

How few institutions this is

Of the 53 institutions in Tennessee, 25 award a research doctorate at all, and the largest two award 45.7% of them. A state’s graduate pipeline is a much smaller thing than its list of colleges.

The foreign share of graduate students, where the survey reaches

The NSF Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates asks institutions directly, and it covers 15 of the 53 institutions in Tennessee. It is a different measure from the degree counts above: enrolled students rather than degrees awarded.

What the state itself puts in

State appropriations per full-time-equivalent student, from the SHEEO finance survey, against the change in the foreign share of graduate enrolment over the same window.

These two rows move for their own reasons. Nothing here shows that one caused the other, and the page does not say it did.

Department by department

The dissertation corpus reaches 2 institutions in this state, covering 35 departments. 11 of them are majority non-resident.

From the dissertation corpus, which is built from what universities publish about their own graduates. It covers the institutions on this site, not every institution in the state, so it is a floor.

What is not published for a state this size

Two of the measures this site uses elsewhere do not exist at this scale, and the reason is the same in both cases: the agency publishes a ranked extract rather than the whole file.

• Practical training is not published here. SEVP releases the top 100 and top 200 schools for OPT and STEM OPT, not every school. An institution outside those lists has no published figure at all. Its absence is a fact about the list, not about the institution, and it must never be read as a zero.
• Student visa counts are not published by state. DHS reports SEVIS records nationally and names a few states per region in its commentary. For most states it publishes a percentage change and no count, so the number of foreign students physically in a state cannot be read off the federal release.
• Enrolment is the measure that does exist. IPEDS asks every institution directly, which is why this page is built from it. It counts students enrolled, not visas issued, and the two are different questions.

Method and limits

• Non-resident means here on a temporary visa. IPEDS defines it as a person “who is not a citizen or national of the United States and who is in this country on a visa or temporary basis and does not have the right to remain indefinitely.” A green card holder is therefore never counted here. Neither is a refugee or an asylee. Those students are reported in the race and ethnicity categories alongside citizens. For students the category is overwhelmingly F-1 and J-1.
• It is not ethnicity and not country of origin. A US-born citizen of any background is never non-resident. The status is recorded when the student enrols, for the enrolment figures, and when the degree is awarded, for the degree counts. These files cannot be split any other way.
• Degrees are pooled over 2021–2025, because a single year at a small institution moves on one student.
• Enrolment and awards are different measures and will not agree. One counts people on a given day; the other counts degrees conferred over five years.
• Federal money is matched to a campus, and a system that reports centrally can carry money its branches spend.
• This page shows composition, not displacement. It records who received the degrees. It does not show that anyone was kept out, and nothing here should be read that way.

Built by scripts/build_state_pages.py from institution_profiles.json, state_funding_and_enrolment.json and university_distribution.json. Compare the country on the national overview.