<p>@saif2 thanks for sharing the international ranking – very interesting! </p>
<p>As far as UC goes, I am instate and a UC employee with a soon-to-be Cal student child, and I have been concerned about international and OOS admissions. But my understanding now is that they are a small percentage of overall admissions and that CA taxpayers are currently paying the smallest amount ever to support our universities. My understanding is that very few tax dollars (relative to the past and other states) actually go to support the UC system. </p>
<p>Contrary to MrMom, there are plenty of students who don’t see Tufts or WashU as backups. There are kids who apply there ED, and others who don’t but are thrilled to attend either one. And as the parent of both an Ivy graduate and a WashU graduate, I can say that my WashU kid got just as an amazing education and in a more supportive environment. Further, the WashU name was highly respected when it came to graduate admissions, resulting in admissions to top PhD programs, including Ivies. </p>
<p>@saif235 – 5,645 is more students than the entire student body at many colleges. That’s 5,645 spots that, in my opinion, should have first been offered to CA students. Every year, there are many CA kids with outstanding test scores and GPAs who are rejected by Cal. They shouldn’t be. It’s wrong, and you won’t change my mind by saying that’s only 15%. Let the foreign nationals pay state taxes retroactively and then they can attend our state-funded schools.</p>
<p>"Chicago is an excellent school and always has been. WashU is not as good as it thinks it is. Anything connected to the medical school is excellent, and it’s certainly the best school in Missouri, but it doesn’t really deserve the ranking it has. Better than UVa, USC, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, Cal-Berkeley, Georgetown, Emory, Notre Dame, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Cornell? Really? Really? "</p>
<p>Sure it deserves its rating. You’re using the typical “well, it’s in Missouri, and I’ve never heard of it before CC, so it can’t be any good.” Most people haven’t heard of Haverford either - doesn’t make it not good. WashU deserves where it’s at. </p>
<p>“Contrary to MrMom, there are plenty of students who don’t see Tufts or WashU as backups. There are kids who apply there ED, and others who don’t but are thrilled to attend either one.”</p>
<p>Of course. It’s the usual provincial mindset that everyone wants to attend the same schools in the same order. Tufts and WashU have plenty of good things to offer; why wouldn’t they be some students’ first choices? Gee - check out the size of their applicant pools in ED. </p>
<p>@LongRangePlan don’t those international students subsidise your in-state students? Tuition would have to be substantially higher, or spending lower (or taxes higher but that’ll never fly in California), if it weren’t for the internationals.</p>
<p>@ LongRangePlan According to this website, <a href=“Budget Analysis and Planning | UCOP”>Budget Analysis and Planning | UCOP, the state currently provides roughly $7500 per instate student, and in-state students pay $12,800 in tuition. Few if any internationals get any financial aid, and pay $35,000 in tuition. So given the current state of the budget crisis in California which has cut per-student funding in half over the past 20 years, I would agree with keepittoyourself that these internationals are keeping tuition down for in-state students. I don’t see how your tax dollars are going to support international students.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl: you seemed to ignore the part of my post that said “one of the reasons.” Did I ever state that it was their selectivity alone that helped them climb the rankings? Try reading next time. </p>
<p>@tk21769: I agree that it was ONE part of their strategy. That is why I said that it’s “ONE of the reasons they climbed the US News rankings.” </p>
<p>The one part you singled out only represented 1.5% of the equation in the ranking methodology, but you made it sound like a big part, hence pizzagirl’s response and mine.</p>
<p>@LongRangePlan Cal is a large public university, not a medium sized private school. Thus to compare the number of international students at Cal with the population of “some colleges” makes no sense. Every school has some international students. Cal, being a large school, has a larger number than most. However since 75% of the Cal freshmen class of 2012 were California residents (and 90% were US nationals) I really don’t see your argument. Cal is not only the “best” UC on paper (best public school in the country, third best engineering school in the country), it also admits the highest percentage of instate students out of all the UCs. Additionally if a California student is academically qualified he/she is guaranteed a spot at a UC school if he/she doesn’t get into any of those that he/she applied to. What more do you want from the California school system? If they were to turn away every qualified international applicants in lieu of less qualified Californians they school’s reputation, ranking, and overall quality would go down. And since International students pay double the instate tuition, admitting internationals helps reduce the tuition for instate students. </p>
<p>Uhhh, I live in St. Louis, and have almost my entire life, so sorry, this is not provincialism, I know WashU pretty well. My kid’s HS has a long running trend of 50% acceptance into WashU. Midpoint for acceptance is 31-32. 3.8+ and a 30+ will give you an 75% acceptance rate. Get a 32+, and you can have a 3.5 and still be at a 75% acceptance. It’s only hard to get in for you out-of-towners. And for those who do get in, most choose not to go there - the vast majority of kids from our HS who choose to go to WashU are those who go there for free because a parent works there or they get a big chunk of financial aid. Virtually anyone paying full freight chooses to go somewhere other than WashU, unless they were accepted at no other comparable college - yet they would give their left kidney to be accepted to the med school four years later.</p>
<p>Great school, yes, but the locals choose to go elsewhere if given the chance, even supposedly lower ranked competitors. Maybe that’s true for every school and it’s locals, but it’s certainly true for WashU.</p>
<p>@LongRangePlan But given how much foreign students subsidised CA residents, it’s likely that without those foreign students, there would be even fewer slots for CA students. If they stopped admitting so many foreigners, then either the universities would have to shrink, tuition would have to go up (a lot), quality would have to decline, or CA taxes would have to go up.</p>
<p>@LongRangePlan, state support, both in dollars and proportion of revenue, has been decreasing in the past 10 years at UC Berkeley. So those foreign students whose presence you decry are help make up for the lost revenue. You can’t have it both way - fewer foreign student tuition AND less state revenue support. Take a look at the financial reports at the Cal site. The 2011-2012 financial report has a nice chart showing the decrease of state revenue and increase in revenue from student tuition and clearly addresses this issue.</p>
<p>Echoing keepittoyourself and SlackerMom’s points. Urge your state representatives (and mine–I’m a CA native and a Cal alum) to increase funding to the UCs (and the Cal States, and the community college system, for that matter). Be willing to pay increased taxes and/or have a restructuring of how the state collects revenue. </p>
<p>Any particular reason the complaining is only about foreign students and not OOS students? </p>
<p>"Not surprisingly, UChic is one of the universities that sends out the most mail. "</p>
<p>This is one of the reasons. Chicago’s promotion mail is among the first batch my sophmore daughter received and I anticipate there will be more in the future.</p>
<p>Another reason is: Most people didn’t hear about Chicago and thought it is a city university before Mr. Obama’s name and where he worked/went to schools were on the news. These news went overseas as well. After that, Chicago and Columbia had a bump in many univsrsity rankings (due to higher scores on the name recognition category).</p>
<p>^^
Not to mention a former POTUS could be your neighbor in a couple years. </p>
<p>It’s interesting to hear what a well-kept secret UofC was until recently. Sort of the reverse of the Rutgers-effect (a number of midwesterners have noted that some people around here assume that Rutgers is a private—and likely prestigious—school based on its name).</p>
<p>And I’ll admit that until recently I thought University of Rochester was a SUNY school and William and Mary was a private university…so I’m not giving myself any points when it comes to that, either. </p>