<p>I realize that this is naive but I made some serious decisions about applying to graduate schools based on an understanding of the statistics of admission at certain schools. I felt that if one school listed a lower acceptance rate than others, it would be more competitive to gain entry and so I tried to incorporate a spread of acceptance rates in the schools that I applied to.</p>
<p>I took a closer look at some of the schools I am applying to and looked more closely at the figures making up the acceptance rate. At Duke and the University of Minnesota, I noticed that the acceptance rates for all students were somewhere in the 10-20% range. However, when the international applicants and matriculants were subtracted, those rates jumped to 30-45% chance of being accepted.</p>
<p>Being a domestic student, this provides me a tremendous sense of relief. If I were an international applicant, I might be a little scared off by the prospect of 5% acceptance rates.</p>
<p>Acceptance rates should be analyzed on a per-program/department basis, rather than the entire university. I’m betting there are more international than domestic applicants in many of these top schools.</p>
<p>What do you mean by southern mentality? They don’t have the same acceptance rate for international students? If they don’t, it is probably a good thing. Universities in other countries do it. In-state students always have a better shot than out of state. Why wouldn’t in country students have a better shot than international?</p>
<p>“Acceptance rates should be analyzed on a per-program/department basis”</p>
<p>The information that I had referred to was broken down by department (microbiology), all biological sciences and university overall. This trend was less clear when looking at the university overall but very striking at the department and field level.</p>
<p>Higher acceptance rates for US citizens than for international applicants at southern research universities are probably not a reflection of “the southern mentality”, whatever that is supposed to mean.</p>
<p>I have not found other universities that are as transparent with their graduate admissions data as UW, UMN, and Duke are, but I would be curious if anyone knows of any others.</p>
<p>Yea it is very true that it is very hard for international students to get into a science graduate program. But one positive aspect of it is that, an international student will always be an “over-qualified student” for a particular program whereever he/she gets in.</p>
<p>As an international applicant, I was really disheartened when I saw the admission rates of the UC schools (Berkeley Biology for instance, only took in 2-4 international students out of around 50 total matriculated) When you take into consideration the fact that there are probably more international applicants than domestic, your chances look very dim indeed. </p>
<p>But in the end I suppose its just the name of the game. I highly doubt its due to racism/nationalism or a “southern mentality” as someone above has insinuated. Its all down to money. If schools all had limitless funds, no doubt the discepency between int. and domestic admissions would be narrowed.</p>
<p>I completely understand why this situation occurs amongst public schools- domestic students can attain “in state” status and drop the much higher “out of state” tuition from the departments ledger. What I don’t understand is why this is still the case amongst private schools. Anybody have any thoughts?</p>
<p>The cost of human resources, maybe? I imagine a lot of time and effort goes into converting international transcripts, scrapping together loans (because internationals can’t rely on Staffords or PLUS, and their own countries might not fund foreign study), sorting out US study permit issues, etc.</p>
<p>It might also be that professors are hesitant to take on students whose primary language is not English (silly as that may be in a lot of cases), or schools aren’t familiar with most international departments’ curricula and are wary that students might not have received the appropriate background (also silly, but we say it happens for small unheard-of colleges here).</p>
<p>I think it has more to do with the funding opportunities for internationals…NSF and NIH grants are limited only to the US citizens. most of the internationals who apply to graduate programs do not have their own funding and the university especially the department has to pay for their costs. Because of the fact that almost all of the science graduate programs are funded by NSF/NIH grants, they have to limit their international students number to a few.
I think this information is posted in the most of the programs’ admissions webpage under international student admissions.</p>