<p>First thread ever! Quick question here. The admissions website claims that the significantly more competitive international application process is justified "because of our generous financial aid". However, by offering admission to international students that commit to pay full tuition, MIT would gain a little money that would SUPPORT both domestic AND international financial aid, not weaken it. </p>
<p>Why, then, does MIT give American citizens - many/most of which are in need of MIT's financial generosity - an easier time getting in? Wouldn't financially stable non-citizens actually be giving money to MIT and strengthening its capability to grant need-based aid? </p>
<p>I'm curious as to why they aren't considered in the same pool as American citizens, seeing as they're not draining MIT's financial resources (like the admissions website implies) but rather increasing them. Or is it just that 99.9% of MIT's international applicants end up applying for aid?</p>
<p>At peer institutions like Caltech, international applicants that aren't in need seem to be given equal treatment to American applicants (i.e. they too can apply EA, unlike at MIT).</p>
<p>Does anyone understand why things are the way they are?</p>
<p>MIT can afford not to give preference to wealthy applicants, so they don’t. </p>
<p>Limiting international students isn’t unique to MIT. Caltech has only a slightly higher percent of international students than MIT (11% vs 9%), so they’re likely limiting international admissions too. Being American universities, it seems reasonable that both give preference to American applicants.</p>
<p>Are you suggesting that international students who do not need financial aid should be considered in the same pool as domestic applicants, while international students who do need financial aid should be considered in a separate pool with lower admissions rates? That sounds to me very much not in line with the way MIT does things. As far as I’m aware international admissions are need-blind, just like domestic admissions.</p>
<p>As for gaining a little money, I suspect the amount of money MIT could gain from “financially stable non-citizens” is indeed very little. And MIT already has the capability to grant need-based aid. As you noted, MIT has generous need-based financial aid.</p>
<p>
The answer to your question is beyond the scope of this web site, and maybe the entirety of human science and art.</p>
MIT’s requirement that international applicants apply RD isn’t directly because of the quota per se, but because they would like to compare all international students together, since they can only admit such a small percentage of those who apply. It wouldn’t make a difference to them if they required all international applicants to apply EA instead – the intent is just to read all the international applications together.</p>
<p>
In short, MIT is the recipient of a great deal of money from the US government, and the government expects that their money will go toward primarily educating American citizens. The cost that MIT charges for an undergraduate education is heavily subsidized by the school (the endowment) and by ongoing partnerships with government agencies. If MIT admitted more foreign students, it’s true that they would be able to cover the cost that MIT charges, but they would not be covering this hidden subsidy. </p>
<p>Most American universities, and probably all, do have institutional limits on the number of international students they feel they can afford to educate. In MIT’s case, and likely in the case of others, those limits are set much higher up in the administration than the admissions office. MIT is just one of the few places that talks about it openly.</p>
<p>A few years back, the director of admissions at MIT mentioned the international student quota was placed on it by the government and it was about 100 students. I vaguely recall the number was lowered to the 100 range after 9/11/2001.</p>
<p>One of the admissions blogs (from 2005) adds support for that comment.</p>
<p>Thank you, everyone, your responses do clear up my doubts.</p>
<p>lidusha, I do agree that need-aware admission doesn’t sound at all like MIT. What was (and still kind of is) bothering me is the fact that, in the end, MIT is citing its financial aid as the cause of scenarios when an international applicant’s file ends up on the rejection pile - but, had he been competing in the U.S. pool, he would most probably have been admitted. This would still be their “excuse” if said international applicant was perfectly capable of paying for the entirety of his education.</p>
<p>Then again, the point you’re all making is perfectly valid: need-blind, not citizenship-blind.</p>
<p>Well, putting it simply, I’m questioning the fairness of leaving room for international students getting rejected when they would’ve been admitted if they had competed with MIT’s entire applicant pool.</p>
<p>There will hopefully come a time when there are no wars or countries and we all make science and art together and share our resources. That time is unfortunately not now.</p>
If there is a cap on the number of internationals because of MIT’s government funding why does it only seem to apply to undergraduates and not graduate students [~10% of MIT undergrads and ~40% of MIT grad students are international students]? There is some certainly some funding that is restricted to US citizens and permanent residents but that is no different at the graduate level.<br>
International applicants almost certainly have to be separately from the domestic admissions process simply because international education systems are often very different and so international readers need to be familiar with all of those education systems while general application readers will not have the requisite knowledge. I’m not familiar with any schools that actually evaluate international applicants along with domestic applicants although I could be wrong about this.This will probably require setting separate enrollment targets for domestic and international students.
Having established (2) it is not clear if the current percentage of undergrads that are international is optimal. Financial constraints imply that to increase the number of international undergrads either (a) the financial aid budget would need to be increased or (b) MIT’s financial aid formula would need to made less generous or (c) MIT would need to become need-aware for international students. Obviously none of (a), (b), or (c) are particularly desirable although none of them seem insurmountable either. There appears to be a general but by no means universal consensus (see the Open Borders movement for more on this) that putting the welfare of your citizens ahead of the welfare of non-citizens is morally justifiable which is essentially what MIT admissions process does.</p>
My understanding is that the cap applies to the total number of international students, undergrad and grad, and this is just the way they are divided. But my source is an international undergrad in a Random Hall kitchen so I don’t actually know firsthand.</p>
<p>No one said that US schools have to be fair in their acceptances; there is no law that requires fairness to university guests of the US. Thousands of US kids are rejected and understand that it’s the university’s choice to accept whomever they want.</p>
<p>The universities receive money from the US government; the government is funded by its US citizens who pay an enormous amount in taxes through their paychecks. Which means that US taxpayers fund the majority of new buildings, labs and equipment.</p>
<p>An international student does not HAVE to apply to MIT. MIT does not have to provide a space for every international student who wants to apply. There are universities world-wide in every country; why aren’t you applying to your university in your home country and helping to fund them with your money? </p>
<p>MIT is an American institution built on American soil, toil and dollars, so, it is more than likely that the spaces are naturally for those US residents whose parents have paid taxes for 20 to 30 years minimum to help build it. That a student from another country can choose to apply to the university is his/her choice; but that doesn’t mean all who apply should be accepted. For you to assume that international students would naturally be accepted in the larger pool is ridiculous. Each school’s admission committee knows what it wants in its freshman and graduate classes. That’s why there’s an application. MIT knows who they want and will accept those that they want.</p>
Well, it’s still certainly easier to be accepted to MIT (or another top STEM graduate program) if you are a US citizen than if you are an international student. Back of the envelope, I would strongly assume that the “boost” given to domestic students is substantially increased at the graduate level.</p>
<p>The second issue is that the departments generally have fairly free rein in determining whom they will admit, and they are also generally responsible for finding funding for their own students. How a given department decides to budget its money for students will affect the number of domestic vs. international students it will admit. I don’t have any information on an MIT-wide quota for international students as lidusha suggests, but it seems plausible. </p>
<p>(Anecdotally, biology grad students are funded when possible from federal training grants, and international enrollment in top biology PhD programs is quite low – in my program, about fifteen percent. The programs are reluctant to spend their money on international students when they can get domestic students at a significant discount. But the calculus is somewhat different at programs down the food chain – the top programs take the best domestic students, so other programs are more willing to spend money on high-quality international students.)</p>
<p>The third issue is that graduate admissions, at MIT and elsewhere, are not necessarily need-blind, and a number of students (master’s students especially) are paying out-of-pocket. </p>
<p>I would be interested to see whether there are departments that have significantly more international students than would be expected given their total graduate enrollment. The international enrollment by department is [url=<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar]here[/url</a>] – if somebody has time and wants to do the comparison, I’d be all ears.</p>
<p>I think the boost in graduate admissions might depend a lot on field. In some fields like math, econ, physics, and EECS a majority of MIT grad students are international which seems inconsistent with a large boost for domestic students. I think in these fields domestic students aren’t substantially cheaper so there is little reason to prefer domestic applicants.</p>
<p>We should ping QM on this – I thought she had indicated before that domestic applicants do receive a boost in math, at least insofar as her department would like to admit more, but they lack suitable candidates.</p>
<p>It’s not just that American taxpayers are funding MIT and so they want other citizens to benefit from them. It’s also that they want the people trained by these institutions to benefit the American economy. People who are trained here and then go back to their own countries do not benefit the American economy.</p>
<p>My understanding though is that most of the government support MIT gets is either because of MIT’s non-profit status (hence donations to MIT are tax-deductible and I think this also reduces property taxes) and grants to do research. In neither of these cases is the nationality of the students important. There is certainly some government funding for training students but my impression is that in most fields it’s not terribly large. Also many international students stay in the US or would if they were allowed to. Even those that return to their home countries can help provide linkages between the US economy and the economy of their home country. Alternatively we could require international students to work in the US for a certain number of years after graduation for MIT as a condition for receiving government support for their education (in practice this would probably mean increased tuition for international students which would be waived if students pledged to work in the US for like 3 years after graduation). Singapore universities do something similar so this isn’t totally unprecedented.</p>
<p>Just the opposite.
The benefit to America is considerable, especially when they’re trained at top US schools.</p>
<p>Many of the foreign students who come here to study (and perhaps stay a couple of years to work) make friends, learn what the USA is really about, and eventually go back home thinking very highly our country.</p>
<p>And many of those same students eventually become leaders in their own countries. </p>
<p>When the number of foreign students MIT was allowed to have was cut after 9/11, I remember Marilee Jones saying that was the biggest long term cost that worried her.</p>