Answering Questions from International Students Here!

It’s interesting to know who make all these stupid rumors about American universities…

@amewu98 : most US colleges aren’t known abroad. Safety schools wouldn’t be “famous”. But what is a safety depends on your stats and how much money your parents have. As a top student from Ghana, applying to Amherst may be a good move if you have high financial need (super selective). Brown is need aware so if you need financial aid, being the top applicant from your region may be trumped by an applicant that ranks slightly lower but can do the work and whose parents have more money.
If you’re competitive for Brown, safeties may include Dickinson, St Olaf, Whitman, University of Alabama Honors - but you’d need to have a budget of 16,000 dollars or more (you’d still be able to apply to these but it may be harder due to your financial circumstances.)
You may want to compete for Robertson scholars.

As @katliamom says, the primary educational responsibility of American colleges and universities is educating American students.

As GMTPlus7 said somewhere, American colleges are not run by UN.

However, accepting one international student doesn’t mean accepting one less domestic student because they are in completely different applicant pools. So basically, no one is getting particularly cheated…yes it stings a lot when you are rejected from the schools you really want to go, but hey, you should have known from the start this probably would happen. It’s like feeding your own kids then your neighbors’ kids…so I don’t think it’s unfair.

@amewu98, are you thinking that US colleges / universities have a

?

Because they don’t.

and @Dawn001, there isn’t a quota of

. It’s that the tippy-top schools with the famous names have more extraordinarily talented applicants than they can possibly accept, so you are not competing with the best from your country or region, but with the very best from the whole world. They only take about 5-7% of their applicants, and about 10-15% of those will be international. So do the math, using Harvard as an example:

37,307 applicants got 2,081 places for 1665 places (that means that about 400 students said no thanks to Harvard). Of those 2000 people who got places, 12% were international- 240 people. There are about 195 countries in the world. If Harvard made offers to just the very top student in every country, that is almost all of the international students.

Every university in the world favors applicants from their own country- there is no reason that America should be different!

Many international students look only at the famous names- Harvard, Yale, Stanford level- party because of prestige and partly because they have generous aid. Look beyond the big names and your chances improve, whether you are American or International.

hi evryone…can i apply to only one college in the us

@sophieudochi, you can apply to as many colleges/universities as you have the time and the money to do so! Most people apply to more than one; average seems to be 6-12.

i from a low-income family…and i think can apply to only 3 schools

probably harvard,amherst and UPenn…since they give generous aids to international students

If you’re from a low-income family, have your guidance counselor check the fee waiver box on the commonapp. It means that if paying the application fees is a financial burden for your family (if, for instance, your family makes less than $30,000 a year), then colleges don’t want you to worry about it and waive the fee (you don’t have to pay the application fee).
Universities that don’t have financial aid for international students, such as CSUs and UCs, don’t waive the fee, since if you can’t afford the fee you can’t afford being full-price at the university.
I would recommend applying ED/REA/SCEA to one of the three you list, but also apply to public universities with generous merit aid, such as Miami-Ohio, Temple, Howard, or UAlabama Tuscaloosa.

i will be writing SAT around november next year …so is it okay for me to apply early action to harvard next year

Yes, however I question the wisdom of taking the SAT for the first time in November; that would be the latest date you could take for EA, and you will not see your scores before Harvard does.

@MYOS1634 Thanks for the info.

@skieurope thanks…so i should apply EA?

but on their website it says all application materials are due november 1st for early action

@sophieudochi While it is ideal to send everything by due dates, colleges frequently accept a bit late exams like Novemebr ones. You should have taken much earlier though. What else did you NOT take?

Apply EA IF You want to. We can’t choose it for you

Per the Harvard website:

https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/apply/application-timeline

That’s a personal choice.

in my school,we take the igcses and SAT 1 around november and the TOEFL and SAT 2 around december

i guess ill apply regular decision

do us colleges accept 15 year old international students