What constitutes an international student during the application stage in Yale’s eyes? I apologise in advance if this is an idiotic question, but I haven’t been able to find a clear answer online, and I am cognizant of the small percentages of international students that Yale (and indeed any other elite Ivy League institution) admits.
The reason why I’m asking is because I am a US citizen (born in the US, lived in Michigan for 8 years), but for the last 10 years I have been living in Australia, and attending high school in Melbourne. Would this confine me strictly to an international pool, or is there some sort of third category of consideration for a US national/ dual citizen attending high school overseas?
@gibby, do you have any understanding as to what U.S. dual resident status means in terms of difficulty of admission to private U.S. schools (or at least to Harvard and Yale)? I understand that by definition such applicants are “out of state” for any public school, but in terms of private schools does it put an applicant at a disadvantage with a similarly qualified US citizen with domestic residence? The statistical odds for international applicants are generally considered to be tougher.
As far as I know, Harvard and Yale do not publish how many applications they receive from international students, or domestic students or dual citizen students. Maybe you have better information and can provide those numbers so we can calculate the statistical odds of admissions for dual citizens
No, unfortunately I’m not privy to that information. It seems to be commonly accepted on CC that international applicants to top colleges have a markedly lower success rate, but I don’t know how much of that is based on actual data.
I’m curious about the “dual resident” group. If a student grows up in the U.S. most of his/her life and then his family moves overseas during high school, does that put them at a disadvantage in terms of applying to top private U.S. schools?
^^ One reason international students are thought to have lower acceptance rates is that Admissions tends to restrict the number of international students to about 10% to 11% of an incoming class. In terms of numbers that means that Yale tends to admit around 130 to 150 international students vs 1170 to 1150 US domestic students. However, no one outside of Admissions knows how many international students have applied for those 130 to 150 slots and what countries they are from. The same is true of the “dual resident” group, however, the “dual resident” group does not have the same soft-cap as international students.
I don’t know how US citizen dual residents are treated in terms of admissions, but I would speculate that if anything they might have an advantage over lifelong US residents in private school admissions, because many have had some pretty interesting experiences that are hard to replicate in a US high school. Plus a good number have prominent parents who work either in government (military, state dept, etc.) or international business.
It makes sense that schools would limit the numbers of non US citizens, as even private universities like Yale are US based institutions that get a lot of research funding from the US government. They need to maintain political support and admitting too many non US students could erode that support. I don’t believe the same concern would apply to US citizen dual residents.
I could see a distinction though between a US citizen who has been overseas his/her entire life (e.g., someone born here who left at a very young age) - that may seem more like an international - versus someone like the OP who lived a significant number of years in the US.
As @gibby pointed out, Harvard and Yale do not publish those statistics. My guess is, although it will vary by colleges, a US citizen who moved abroad after birth, a dual national born in the US but currently living abroad, and a dual national born and living abroad will often be lumped together as US citizen living abroad for classification purposes. Their chances for admission, again only my opinion, will be roughly the same as an applicant born and raised in the US. The odds for a “true” international applicant will certainly be less, if MIT’s acceptance rate for intl applicants vs. domestic applicants are any indication. http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats