I’m a rising junior and I plan on applying Early Decision to Yale in 2016.
As an international student, I would simply like to ask you if my current grades would be sufficient for Yale. I am aware that this university also takes extracurricular activities, volunteer work, etc. into account and hence I am actively involved in those, but from an academic perspective would these grades be enough:
Freshman year: perfect transcript, ranked 1st in my year
Sophomore year: perfect transcript, ranked 1st in my year
This year I also took the IGCSE exams and I achieved 9 A*s and 2 As. I took 3 first language exams and two foreign language exams, even though I’ve always attended british schools where I had all my courses in english.
What do you think? In terms of my grades, could I get into Yale as an international applicant in the Early Decision round?
Yes, your grades are good enough – however, you need to understand the realities of international applications to US colleges.
Most US colleges, Yale included, restrict the number of international student to no more than 10% to 11% of their incoming class. With a freshman class of 1300, that means that Yale accepts about 130 to 150 international students per year. And not all international students are the same.
Unfortunately, Yale is not as transparent as Harvard, but please take a look at this site: http://www.hio.harvard.edu/statistics. From the pull-down menus, select STUDENTS, HARVARD COLLEGE (the undergraduate school) and your country. Whatever the number – that is the total number of students currently enrolled at the college… Divide the number by 4 to get an estimate of how many students are accepted from your country per year. I imagine Yale admits about the same. So, your chances as an international student are not the same as a US domestic applicant. That’s the reality you face when applying to any US college.
@gibby but on the official Yale website it says that 19% of all Yale College students are international and another official video even said that 1/3 of the students are international… Wouldn’t these two figures also apply to the freshman class?