I definitely do not think LACs, and a variety of research universities, marketing themselves internationally is primarily about manipulating their admissions statistics.
Instead, from reading around over the years, I think the bigger picture is that circa 2010, the domestic population of college-bound students basically leveled off. It is now due to actually decrease a bit. The most popular “national” colleges and universities have still experienced a rise in domestic applications, but the number of unique domestic applicants who are really what they are looking for has not necessarily risen at the same pace, or possibly not much at all.
Meanwhile, though, the professional class is exploding in many countries around the world, primary and secondary school systems are rapidly modernizing, and so on. So, the base pool of Internationals potentially well-prepared to succeed in a US college, and with the means to pay, is rapidly growing.
So, I think many institutions are looking ahead to future years, decades, generations, and so on, and seeing that their market opportunities are looking at best stagnant domestically, and growing rapidly Internationally. And because alums are a critical part of how they market themselves to new cohorts of students, they want to start developing their alum networks in other countries in advance of that future. And that means getting enough of them to apply and enroll now, so they can gradually build up.
And it is working–really well. In some cases, way too well. As in, they are getting many more International applicants than they actually want to enroll, at least for now.
However, I have seen a variety of pretty strong hints that a lot of these International applicants are not really competitive. Not prepared adequately, maybe don’t really understand the educational values of the college, and so on.
But to get a little cynical for a moment, I think some US institutions are basically letting full pay Internationals who are not necessarily as prepared as they should be take their chances anyway. Like, public universities often charge Internationals not just their normal OOS rate, but an additional charge on top of that. And if there are Internationals willing to pay that premium, I am not sure they are always super cautious about making sure those Internationals know what they are signing up for.
But the wealthiest and most selective private colleges don’t really need the money, they more just want to support their long-term International growth plan. At the pace they want to go.
Even so, I have been diving into CDS data and doing some back of the envelope calculations, and to me it looks like at even highly selective need aware college, full pay Internationals may have admit rates very similar to domestic applicants. So these sorts of colleges are maybe not needing to do much to limit full pay International enrollments besides apply their normal standards. And then they limit overall International enrollments just by not giving out much aid, except when they really want to.
Need blind colleges, though, seem to have full pay International admit rates much lower than their domestic admit rates. This implies to me that they are in fact limiting International enrollment generally, and that it is therefore harder for full pay Internationals to get into a college that is need blind than it would be if it was need aware. Which is not a real shock in terms of direction, but the magnitude seems pretty large sometimes. Like as in it might cut the full pay International admit rate to as little as a quarter, maybe even less, when a college is need blind versus need aware.
Anyway, again I really don’t think this is being driven primarily by trying to manipulate admit rates. I think US colleges are looking at their budgets now, looking at their marketing opportunities in the future, and determining International admissions policies in a way that is calculated to serve their institutional interests along these sorts of dimensions.
But what does happen, even if unintended, is that the overall undergrad admit rate is often significantly lower than the domestic admit rate because of a much lower International admit rate. And then at need aware colleges, that lower International admit rate might actually be almost entirely due to an even lower admit rate for Internationals with need, whereas at need blind colleges the admit rate for Internationals with need might be higher than it would be at a need aware college, but then the admit rate for full pay Internationals will be lower than it would be at a need aware college to compensate.