International Student Applying for Financial Aid

Paying for College
1

Intended Major: Neuroscience (Not all have it as a major but they either have a minor or something similar)

I took the most rigorous course load possible.

GPA: 93% (I don’t know what that would be on the US scale because if I understood correctly I can’t just divide it by 25 and get a score out of 4 and how it is calculated depends on school. I believe I have very few Bs and a single C.)
Ranking: Top 20%

ACT: 33
SAT Math 2: 800 Biology: 740
AP: Psychology (5) Biology (4) Calculus BC (5) Art History (3)

All except Biology was self study (BC self studied while taking AB since my school did not allow me to take BC while I was taking Physics C and Advanced Biology due to scheduling).

My extracurriculars are not extreme, they are not things I have been doing for a very long time or I am super good at but they are pretty unique. There is a lot of both depth and breadth. I don’t want to share them for privacy purposes.

I research colleges a lot so I believe I am very good at knowing why I want each school so my “Why Us” essay will probably be strong and unique especially for some of the schools. I did not write the essay essay yet.

One of my recommendations will be pretty good, the other one will be average. My counselor recommendation will be very good.

Here is my reach heavy list. If I don’t get in anywhere or not get enough financial aid I am planning to go to UK or Netherlands or stay in my home country, so you don’t need to warn me about safeties. The list is obviously not complete yet. Any comment on any of these schools would be appreciated in terms of financial aid and the student body.

Stanford
Yale
Johns Hopkins
UPenn
Brown
WashU
Emory
Vanderbilt
Tufts
Pomona
Bowdoin
Amherst
Middlebury
Carleton
Haverford
Williams
Bates
Colby
Hamilton
Richmond
Grinnell
Vassar
Colorado
Oberlin

I like flexible schedules so if a school does not have an open curriculum but is very flexible please let me know. If a school is on my list and has a lot of requirements please let me know.

If a school is terrible or extremely good with financial aid please let me know (international).

If a school has grade deflation please let me know.

If a school has a very competitive environment please let me know.

If there is something unique about a school (Like Colorado’s Block Plan, Haverford’s Honor Code) please let me know in case I don’t know already.

If a school in the list feels way different than others in some way please let me know.

You can also comment on my chances of getting in.

Also feel free to recommend more schools in case I did not already consider and eliminate them.

Thanks!

2

When you say Colorado, do you mean the University of Colorado at Boulder? If so, you should know they don’t give much in the way of aid–merit or financial aid.

With your stats you’d probably get in though.

3

Since the OP mentioned the Block Plan, Colorado would be Colorado College.

4

How much can you afford to pay? Almost every school on your list is need aware to international students. This means that your ability to pay will be a factor in admissions

5

What is your financial aid question? This looks more like a “chance me” post.

We can’t really give you much info regarding financial aid as you gave us no info on your family income. Most of the schools on this list don’t give merit aid…and the ones that do…it’s very highly competitive.

So…what is your parent family annual income?

Your list is extremely top heavy. Some of the schools on that list accept less than 5% of international applicants. You say you can write an excellent “why this college” essay for ALL of these schools…but the only common denominator I see is they are extremely competitive for admissions.

You need to check each college…IIRC, there are some that have limited funding for international students…and your ability to pay will be factored into the admission decision.

I’m curious…how did you make this list? What is the common thing between Stanford and Middlebury? Or Grinnell and Johns Hopkins?

Are you intending to apply to medical school after undergrad? Why a neuroscience major?

6

@thumper1
Yep they are all extremely competitive especially for internationals since most are need aware that’s why my B plan is other countries.
I am mostly just checking my list and the most important factor is financial aid. Haverford used to, as a rule, only award financial aid to 3 students and required that they do not apply ED since they decided on who gets the award in April. I also know, for example, that NYU gives 20% financial aid at most. I am looking for something like this if anyone knows.
The other important factor is graduation requirements and competitiveness.
There is no common thing between Grinnell and Johns Hopkins. I like Grinnell as a liberal arts college. I would eliminate Johns Hopkins by now but I went to a summer program there and it was beautiful so I find it difficult to let go after talking to so many people there. Again, I like Middlebury as a liberal arts college but although I am leaning towards LACs I still want some universities I like in there. I like them individually it’s not the common thing I look for at every school. My chances of getting into Stanford are non-existent anyway.
No I’m not intending to apply to medical school. I want to pursue a PhD.
Annual income is about 35000 dollars.

7

I’ve written responses to international students needing financial aid. You might want to look up those posts. You have a huge gap in your list of schools if you really want to study in the US and want the chance to do so

You researched each college a lot do that you know why each college is what YOU want. But you have not been very diligent in figuring out what the colleges want. Unfortunately you are NOT what they want. It’s a difficult enough issue that they get more students than they can take so that they have to turn down so many kids. They also have little or no merit money, most all are not need blind for international students and do not guarantee to fund them if accepted even if they do so for US students. That is a very big indicator that you are on the bottom of their lists.

It’s fine to give this a try. But you are literally buying lottery tickets and with that list a lot of expensive lottery tickets in just applying. If you are serious about wanting to study in the US, you have the wrong list of colleges. The research should have been on the very rare birds of schools that are not easy to list. The ones that would like to have you. But it takes painstaking work to compile such s list and only you can do so for yourself.

So, go right on ahead and apply. It think you had better put more time and effort on Plan B. Hopefully that’s better researched than this plan.

8

@cptofthehouse I don’t want to study in the US for the sake of studying in the US. Instead of going further down in terms of educational quality (which I can only judge based on student comments) I have better alternatives elsewhere.
I think most of these schools do meet 100% of demonstrated need even for international students. The list for need blind schools to internationals is just MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst. So it’s not a meaningful list.
For the record, I won’t apply to all of them, I’m still in the process of shrinking the list. I thought it was clear.
So then…why would any US college want an international student who needs aid? I don’t think I understand what you mean by finding the schools that would want me. What would be unique about those rare schools?

9

I don’t know where you are from. But there are schools in the South and middle of the US where you are likely to add geographic, ethnic, religious, or linguistic diversity. Those places will want you.

Whether you want them is up to you.

And do NOT pick a college or evaluate educational quality based on student comments. You aren’t buying a sandwich on Yelp. There are much better and more rigorous ways to assess educational quality.

So for example- if you wanted to study one of the engineering disciplines, there are colleges like Missouri M&T which is HIGHLY regarded by grad schools, employers, and engineering researchers in industry. It flies under the radar by the “person in the street”, which is somewhat irrelevant to the quality and rigor of the program.

What are your “better alternatives” elsewhere? Maybe share that with us so we can be helpful.

10

To expand their geographic diversity, and to accept very strong students.

But really…a lot of schools accept international students because they will be paying the full cost to attend…or close to it. Or they only accept the limited number for whom they are willing to give need based aid.

If you are from a very underrepresented country, your chances of admission might be better at some of these places than if you are from say…India…where these elite schools get tons of applicants. Your application will be reviewed with other international students from your region, and some regions have very very strong applicants…and these schools accept 5% or so of them.

11

Together, those three things pretty much wipe out your list.

I am hardly ever this absolute, but

  1. you can only afford to attend a school that will ‘meet full need’, and all of those schools will take the amount of your need into consideration. Taking your family’s annual income at face value, that would mean a full ride- tuitions, room & board. For these schools that means ~ $280,000. So they will look very hard at your application. Are you the kind of star that makes using up that much of their finaid pot look like a good idea? What do you add to their community, now and/or in the future?

  2. looking at stats, no: for most of those schools you look just like their average student (for the top handful, your class rank is well below their average).

  3. ok, what about your LoRs- do they show why you stand out? except for your GC you get to pick who writes your LoRs. If the best you can find is somebody who will only write you an ‘average’ letter that is going to stand out- but not in a good way. The AO’s for the schools on your list are used to seeing really strong, specific recs (and the first half dozen or so are used to ‘this is the most amazing student I have seen in decades’ level of references).

  4. ok, how about your ECs- something special there?

If you haven’t been doing them very long and aren’t particularly good at them I am hard pressed to see how you could have ‘depth and breadth’. You might get points for novelty, but does it say ‘wow, that’s an impressive achievement for a 17 year old’ ?

That leaves only your essay to make the case as to why they should finance your education. As @cptofthehouse pointed out, it’s not just you knowing what you want, but you knowing what they want.

Finally,

As @blossom noted, student comments online are an exceptionally bad way to evaluate “educational quality”.

That is super! then set a $ amount that you are willing to lose (play the lottery, as @cptofthehouse put it), and spend that amount on applications to whichever of the colleges on your list you really like. If you win the lottery, yeah! if not you have your better alternatives.

12

@collegemom3717 Yep, thanks!

13

Okay, I understand that I completely mis-titled the post and the stats part was unnecessary.
Thanks for advising me to do exactly what I intended to do anyway. And I did not get an answer to any of the actual questions I asked which is sad. Seriously, I appreciate all the help but this was very out of point. Sorry for misleading.

14

@student680

Not sure exactly what you want to know. The vast majority of the colleges on your list give primarily need based aid. If you get accepted, it’s possible you will get sufficient need based aid to attend. Possible.

Your stats actually do have a bearing on your question. These schools are highly competitive for admissions and even MORE highly competitive for international students. You can’t receive aid from them in any form unless you get accepted…and at some of these colleges greater than 90% of applicants get rejected.

15

Richmond, Colby, Grinnell, Oberlin and Colorado are probably the only schools on your list which would not have a “competitive” environment for neuroscience. Others may have a different point of view, but the vast majority of colleges on your list admit very strong and academically oriented students who are not particularly laid back once they get to college. These five have a reputation for being a bit more relaxed (not that there aren’t strong and competitive students there, but that the vibe is more chill).

The others? Not so much.

16

Most US colleges are need aware for international students and they don’t meet need. It sounds like you’ll require a lot of aid, and only a few colleges in the US are need blind for admissions. I don’t know how many meet need (as determined by their financial aid office). If you search CC for need blind schools and/or colleges that meet need you’ll probably find them. If you can’t find the list you’ll have to go to the financial aid page of each school and look for their policy on financial aid for international students.

You’re looking for a lot of information. It’s great that you’re thinking about those things, but most of us don’t know the schools well enough to give you those details. Colleges change, so the amount of aid offered and graduation requirements, etc., from last year may not be the same this year. I understand your frustrations. I think the best thing you can do is to find the list of schools that meet need for international students then research them and target the ones where you stand a chance of being accepted.

17

@austinmshauri The list for need blind schools for internationals goes: Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Amherst :frowning: But I will look deeper into if they meet need okay. Thanks!

@blossom Thank you!

18

@student680 the list provided is schools that are BOTH need blind for admissions AND meet full need for all accepted international students. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Amherst are both need blind for admissions AND meet full need for all international students accepted. But getting accepted is your Hurdle as they accept only about 5% of international students who apply.

There are other schools that are need blind for admissions that do NOT meet full need for all international students.

And there are other schools that meet full need for all ACCEPTED international students…but are need aware for admissions, and accept only a limited number of international students because they limit the funds they can dedicate to funding international students.

19

there was just an article in this morning’s Insider Higher education about admission staff looking to recruit international students who are already here in the U.S.

20

@thumper1 I wasn’t aware the need blind but does not meet full need category exists!

@sybbie719 :frowning: