So, how competitive is the international pool really?

pRhyme
Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:13:05 +0000

I’m in a bad situation. I am Asian, but I was born in Canada. Then, I moved to California. So unfortunately, since I don’t have a green card yet, I am in the international pool.

The general knowledge, as far as I’m concerned, is that it is about 2-3 times harder to gain an admittance as an international.

I have a question. How competitive is the international pool? I know that Stanford and Yale SCEA, despite having higher acceptance rate than regular pool, are more competitive than their regular pools. Shouldn’t the difficulty of international pool depend on the competitiveness of the applicants as well? I highly doubt that internationals have higher stats (such as SAT scores) than students educated in the United States. If this is true, if I have a high SAT score (say 2300+), wouldn’t it be easier for me to stand out?

I am really curious about how much the statistics of international admissions actually tell about the difficulty of admission. Yale is definitely my top choice, and I truly hope that it isn’t as difficult as it sounds for internationals. Any information about international admissions for top schools would be appreicated. Thanks!