I recently have been lurking on the Reddit forums of select colleges and on the Apply2College sub-Reddit.
One interesting trend that I have seen is a huge number of international applicants. Far, far more than I would have expected. The internationals seem to far outnumber the domestics, at least in terms of the number of posts generated.
Some of it is understandable. The internationals are less familiar with the US and need some questions answered.
But this got me to thinking…
I know that at many T50 schools, 10-20% of the students are internationals.
But what percentage of APPLICANTS are international? Does anyone have any sense for this?
I am just curious as the number of internationals on Reddit was truly surprising.
For private universities often mentions here or in A2C, take the percentage of international students in the most recent admitted class and multiply by 3.
Only problem is that implies a 33% admit rate for internationals and 50% for public flagships. I would imagine that this varies by school.
Perhaps another way to ask…are international admit rates generally higher or lower than domestic admit rates? Even then…I am betting that “fully funded” internationals have very high admit rates while “high need” internationals have very low admit rates.
Not sure if this type of data is compiled anywhere or exists within CDS info.
Again, depends on the school, but generally much lower. Figure half for full-pay internationals at need-aware universities and 25-30% of the domestic rate at need-blind schools and at need-aware when seeking aid.
I’ve recently started looking at that section of the CDS and for a few schools, the international acceptance rate is so low that it’s pulling down their overall acceptance rate by several percentage points.
And yes, I need a hobby. Or actually I need to get this kid off to college and resume my old hobbies!
I think International applications are the key to lowering your acceptance rate. If you have a reputation overseas for being “generous” with aid to international students, then you could have hundreds of kids from one area apply.
Reddit also has more kids than parents posting and is very popular with international students.
It is really interesting. Take Bowdoin for example, I still haven’t forgiven them for waitlisting me 30yrs ago, so I’m picking on them.
In state acceptance rate is 16.8%
out of state is 11%
international is 1.86%!
The common data set actually has information on this, though not every school fills it out. Here’s the data for the need-blind + meet need for international students schools for the class of 2027:
Harvard: 15,934 international applicants (27.9% of applicants), 301 admitted (15.3%), 268 enrolled (16.2%)
While I see the point about the share of the applicant pool, for clarification I would emphasize the various acceptance rates:
Harvard domestic 4% vs international 1.8% vs overall 3.5%
Princeton domestic 5.1% vs international 2.4% vs overall 4.5%
Amherst domestic 14% vs international 2.7% vs overall 9.8%
Bowdoin domestic 11.4% vs international 1.8% vs overall 8%
I actually had not really grasped until I was recently looking at this in the 2023-24 CDSs how much Internationals were affecting the overall acceptance rate at some colleges. To the point I think some colleges for some domestic kids could reasonably be reclassified (Reach to Target or Target to Likely).
Like Rochester ex-Eastman had an overall acceptance rate of 35.8% (7440/20723). The way our feederish HS ordinarily does things, this should result in Rochester being classified as a Target for a lot of kids.
But then that breaks down as domestic 50.0% (6546/13087), 11.4% International (874/7636). At that point, high enough number domestics could treat Rochester as a Likely.
Which in fact we did, based on SCOIR numbers–we have enough Rochester data to make those meaningful. But in this case, it seems to me like our SCOIR numbers were just reflecting what you can now see in their CDS as well.
By the way, I think some of these rules of thumb are actually too generous at many colleges like Rochester. Meaning particularly in relationship to domestic applicants, the acceptance rate for even full pay Internationals is likely well less than half, and then very likely the acceptance rate for Internationals with need, particularly a lot of need, is likely well less than half of even that.
And even nominally need blind for International colleges like Amherst and Bowdoin are getting to similar results, implying they are really just making it way harder up front for all Internationals.
But again the flip side of this is that Rochester is not as bad for domestics as it might have seemed. And for that matter, neither are Amherst or Bowdoin, although those would still be Reaches for domestics. Just not quite as bad of Reaches as the numbers including Internationals might have made it seem.
Adding that at some/many selective schools a not-insignificant proportion of the accepted internationals attended HS in the US (whether public or private) or relatively well known private ex-US HSs…too bad we don’t see those data points.
That’s a great point, and in fact our HS is sending some such Internationals to those sorts of colleges.
So whatever the acceptance rates are for Internationals who did not go to US high schools or International US-feeder schools are undoubtedly much lower still.
So yes, all those Reddit kids like that are facing even more daunting odds.