To start with an example, Amherst, according to its CDS, accepted a nearly statistically invisible 2.7% of the international students who applied in a recent year.
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Yes, my sense is all US colleges have a limited budget for international aid, and somehow ration it. Some do that by not guaranteeing they will meet need for internationals, and some do it by being need aware. But a few do it just by being so hard to get into as an international generally, they are not worried about enough high need internationals being admitted that it will blow their budget.
When you think about it, this has to be true. If you spend much time in circles with a lot of international applicants, you will see a lot of them saying they need a lot of aid to make a US college affordable, so where should they apply? If there was ever an easy answer to this question, it would immediately get passed around and a huge number of such internationals would apply. And then this hypothetical opportunity would cease to exist due to lack of funding.
The cold reality is the money for subsidizing your higher education has to come from somewhere. Most people in the US are getting it from their state by attending an in-state university. A relative few people in the US are getting it from a private college where donors have agreed to help some people pay. But, neither states nor donors have so far been willing to put up much money to subsidize high need internationals. So there is only so much money to go around to high need internationals, not nearly enough to satisfy the potential demand for it.
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Also seems like a clever way to increase international applicants and manage a lower acceptance rate.
MIT, which is also need-blind for international applicants, has a similarly low acceptance rate. Being need-blind will result in a surge of applications from that cohort, but the result is that such an applicant needs to look at the overall acceptance rate and divide by 3.
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Where did you find this in the CDS?
See the table in section C (First-Time, First-Year Admission) of Amherstâs most recent CDS.
Smaller schools and especially Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) are extremely picky with international students. They have an intake of less than a thousand students a year but still want to maintain fancy statistics like âour students speak X number of languagesâ or âcome from Y number of countriesââŠ
Admissions will (quite literally) pick one student max from a country. And this includes those foreign-born / dual citizen students who already âtick off a boxâ for them
Thatâs quite a statement. Do you have a source for this? Have you worked on an admissions committee?
I note to my knowledge that is inaccurate as stated, in that there will be large countries that regularly place multiple students in a given LAC. I do know some people believe LACs also then try to increase the number of countries they can say are represented, similar to states, but that is more a minimum of one than a maximum of one. And even then, unlike with states where it is a plausible goal to get at least close to all 50, there is no way they could get close to having someone from every country, and in fact I am not sure there is any intuitive number that would be âgoodâ.
Like, I looked up Amherstâs Class of 2027 profile , and it says 40 states + DC and 31 countries are represented:
https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2023/september/a-snapshot-of-amherst-s-newest-students
Is 31 a good number? Bad number? No idea, really.
Incidentally, 13% total was international, out of 488, so 63. 31 countries and 63 total internationals means the average was around 2 per country, and not 1, and I am pretty sure that the actual distribution had a smaller number with more than 2 and then another list with only 1.
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For a counter example of this, Amherst has two first-year students from Ghana on its womenâs soccer roster.
But you left off an important factâŠboth those students attended prep schools in the US.
Most students attending a HS in Ghana have virtually no chance to study in the US, at prep school or college.
That ties into the fact that many highly rejective colleges take a not insignificant proportion of their international students from those who are attending US based HSs, whether private or public.
Of course the real scandal here is only 40 states represented at Amherst! I thought they usually went for at least 48 or 49.
Looks like the proverbial soft-hook/waitlist admit for the marginal applicant from Wyoming is not such a thing at Amherst.
I think two different conversations are going on.
One subissue is whether these colleges actually formally cap their admissions by country. I have never really seen evidence of that.
The other is what it actually takes to get admitted to these colleges as an international, and it is quite right in many cases it takes not just being a normal student from that country. Sometimes it might mean going to school in the US. In some countries, there are now US-style prep schools that feed into US colleges. It might involve going to an A-Level or IB school even if that is not the normal system for your country. Or so on.
But it is quite correct that most countries do not place many, if any, students into highly selective US colleges who have only followed the ânormalâ secondary school path for that country.
There is a de facto connection in that very few applicants from a given country in a given cycle may have followed the necessary path. So very few applicants may get admitted to a highly selective US college. But that is not because of a cap per se, it is because of all the hoops these colleges want their international applicants to have jumped through.
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Maybe the users who want to debate geographic diversity can start a new thread on the off-topic conversation.
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