<p>My friend is a Canadian and he goes to school in Ottawa. Is he still considered as an "international" student by US standards?
Will the case still be the same if my Canadian friend goes to an international school somewhere else?</p>
<p>It depends on the school. Contact each university for details. Whether you are international or not depends solely on your citizenship/permanent residency, and not where you live. Thus, an American living in China will still be considered domestic.</p>
<p>One of the main reasons for the distinction between domestic and international is the availability of financial aid. US citizens qualify for federal financial aid regardless where they live, Canadian and Mexican citizens enjoy a few benefits under NAFTA, other foreign students have to be funded solely by the college they are attending.</p>
<p>If financial aid is available for Canadians, your friend can apply for it by filling out the CSS Profile (but not the FAFSA, in contrast to Americans). But in general that should be the only notable difference in the application process for Canadians and US Americans.</p>
<p>He is considered international student, but he will be placed in the application pool with US citizens and permanent residents. He will not be competing with other international applicants from non-North American countries.</p>
<p>Us Canadians are international enough to require a F-1 visa to study in the US, but not enough to have a cool accent or interesting stories about being from exotic lands ;)</p>
<p>I actually called the admission offices of HYP to ask this question. We are in the domestic pool, but according to them, they don't have separate pools for internationals and domestic anyway. I take it to mean that when CC'ers talk about the increased competition from being an international, it's because these schools informally separate the two pools.</p>
<p>When CC'ers talk about the increased competition from being international, we usually mean that the admission rates for international students are lower than for domestic students. For example, the international admission rate at MIT is 4% while the domestic admission rate is 14%. Either the average international applicant applies with lower qualifications than the average domestic applicant (which I doubt), or international applicants face a fiercer competition for a limited number of spots.</p>
<p>It's completely irrelevant whether international applications are kept in a separate file cabinet for that matter.</p>
<p>But you are right in that the question "am I considered an international or a domestic applicant" doesn't make too much sense because usually there's no clear-cut distinction between the two. Whether or not one has to take the TOEFL depends on the language one has been educated in, which financial aid application one fill out depends on one's citizenship/visa status, whether or not we have to write a supplementary essay might depend on our current country of residence, how our transcripts are evaluated depends on our school system etc. No college has a fixed set of requirements for "domestic" and for "international" applicants.</p>
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For example, the international admission rate at MIT is 4% while the domestic admission rate is 14%. Either the average international applicant applies with lower qualifications than the average domestic applicant (which I doubt), or international applicants face a fiercer competition for a limited number of spots.
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<p>It is exactly the latter. There is fierce competition for a limited number of spots. The number of spots has been limited in large part due to financial aid considerations. B@r!um's example of MIT is one of few schools that guarantee 4 years of full need financial aid to all admitted applicants. That is a fair amount of financial exposure, which in turn has led to a cap on the number of international students admitted.</p>
<p>Is is precisely that distinction which b@r!um misses. Sticking with the MIT example chosen, there is indeed no different or separate set of requirements for international versus domestic applicants, but there are two distinct pools that are evaluated separately (albeit under the same criteria) and it it much, much harder to be admitted as an international.</p>
<p>PS: At MIT which pool you are in depends entirely on visa status. If you are a US citizen or in possession of a "green card" granting indefinite leave to remain in the US, then you count as "domestic", otherwise you are "international".</p>
<p>While I agree that providing international students with financial aid is more costly for a college than giving fin aid to domestic applicants, I doubt that that is the main reason for limiting the number of international students.</p>
<p>If the reason for a cap for internationals was mainly finances, MIT could accept more international applicants by going need-aware. But instead they choose to be need-blind to internationals and restrict the overall number of internationals rather than the number of students they admit with financial aid. If international applicants were admitted and enrolled at the same rate as domestic students, 1/3 of MIT's student body would be international. I think that would just be more international students than they want to have - not (only) financially but (also) campus-climate-wise.</p>