Yes, the entire premise is flawed. First, the numbers for the total swelled and ebbed, but overall the decrease is < 5% so not even material, much less a collapse. The numbers for individual countries are so small that one cannot talk about treating them with general statistical methods. If I have 2 students from a country one year and 4 the next, that is a 100% increase! Whoo Hoo!! Then it goes back to 2 the next year, a devastating decline?? This is silly.
Second, and more important even, is that the OP has made a serious error of fact. The numbers are for enrolled Asian nationals, but the statement is
No, it shows that matriculation of Asian nationals is declining, slightly. And only at this one school, which hardly would tell us anything of import anyway without knowing what is happening at Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, etc. if one is focusing on what is happening at the most selective schools. The OP has no idea how many were admitted from these countries. Universities in China, for example, continue to improve. Maybe more students have chosen to stay home, and yields have simply declined from these countries. Who knows? Without knowing this there is no intelligent analysis to be made, even if the change in the numbers were of statistical significance.
IMO, poor thread all the way around because the numbers are anything but alarming or “material”, there was no accounting for the fallacy of small numbers, and we don’t have an important facet in the data set to know the real picture.