A Comparative Study of Arima, Prophet and LSTM for International Students Enrollment

International student enrollment is a critical driver of financial sustainability for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). While advanced forecasting is standard in the corporate sector, its application in educational planning remains limited. This study addresses this gap by comparing the predictive performance of ARIMA, Facebook Prophet, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models. Using a publicly available annual dataset from a US-based institution (2000–2022), the analysis employed a strategic partition training on 2000–2017 and testing on 2018–2019 to validate models on stable, pre-pandemic data. Empirical results revealed that the statistical ARIMA (2,1,0) model demonstrated superior accuracy, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 1.26%. Conversely, Prophet (11.81%) and LSTM (13.84%) struggled with the limited sample size, failing to generalize effectively compared to the linear approach. The findings suggest that for annual enrollment trends, parsimonious statistical models outperform complex deep learning architectures, providing administrators with a robust, accessible framework for data-driven strategic decision-making.