I wanted to share some learnings from the experience of an international STEM applicant. Here are my conclusions:
If you want to go for graduate studies after bachelors (true for almost 100% internationals), they should strongly consider applying to LACs. Undergraduate research opportunities, close interactions with Professors and helpful administration department is generally unmatched except may be for top R1 private schools. Only exception could be if you are confident of getting into Honors college in a large Public University.
If you have budget constraints definitely consider LACs. It is far easier to get merit and need based aid from there than state Universities as well as R1 private Universities.
Do not consider obscure state colleges which have less number of internationals. They don’t care about internationals and sometimes don’t even know how to evaluate their grades. They lose applications, ask you for third party validated transcripts and hardly much recourse considering the lethargic and apathetic admissions department. We had bad experience with Mizzou, Virginia Tech, Florida Atlantic and even Penn State on the other hand LAC admissions department will help you and work with you to make sure the process is smooth. This experience especially considering most state colleges have substantial application fees leaves bad taste in your mouth.
Anyone who doesn’t want to do job immediately after Bachelors and doesn’t want to do Engineering should have LACs as their top choice.
Flipside is no one in your country knows what the hell Amherst college or Bowdoin college is. So if you care about brand recognition in your country/with relatives then large R1s public or private it is.
It is much easier to get admission to a large R1 public school. Due to tuition differential in in-state and international the yield rate of internationals is quite low and that translates to lower ranked profiles getting admitted as compared to in-state students. No merit or need based aid though so costs are very high.
Very good write-up Andy. It’ll be useful to future international applicants.
One thing I’d like to clarify though, to avoid any misconception: VA Tech and Penn State are both well known and well regarded public schools; not “obscure state colleges”.
Both have approximately 10% international students.
Yes I agree. It was a shocker of an experience for us. Our Penn State application still shows “Under consideration” :-). We tried to send email once long time back to which they sent reply saying, yes it is under consideration!
That is a pretty good summary. I would just add that different universities may be well known in different countries. So it is worthwhile seeing how well known the university you want to attend is in the country where you want to work.
Brand names especially with relatives in foreign countries is a funny game! You can tell people you are going to University of California and get wows without people knowing the difference between UCB and UCSB.
Liberal arts colleges are the worst for this so not too many Indians apply :-). If you say you are going to Amherst College most people will confuse it with UMass. No one knows what kind of animal Bowdoin is and Colgate is just a Toothpaste :-).
I think your post sets us an unrealistic dichotomy- for most international students, it’s not “LAC vs. R1”, it’s “which institution best meets my goals, where I can get admitted, where I can afford to go”. Most international students need to cast a WIDE net in order to do all three of these things simultaneously.
You are also ignoring what happens on the back end. Some colleges have terrific support for going from a student visa to an LPT/OPT (important if a student wants to work for a year or two before grad school) and some colleges have lousy support and a staff which cannot keep up with the changes in immigration policy every year. Some colleges have fantastic career services so that the kid who wants to work has lots of options and avenues to explore, and some colleges will hand the kid a binder and say “here are some job postings”.
And on the affordability issues- some colleges have emergency funds to help a kid travel for a grandparents funeral, handle other non-budgeted expenses-- and an easy and confidential process for applying for those funds.
And others? Kid is on his/her own to figure it out or not.
Don’t assume that your own experience is universal.
Yes. These are my experiences specific for a non-engineering STEM applicant who doesn’t care at all about getting a job after bachelors but cares a lot about the CPTs since that experience would be useful for graduate schools. If a smaller college has 10%+ international students then I feel their CPT/OPT process may be more easy to use than large R1s.
Again I do not claim that this experience is based on multiple applicants and is universally applicable but just one applicant who due to lack of prior knowledge ended up applying to Large R1, both prestigious and non prestigious as well as LACs prestigious (REED, Oberlin, W&L, Grinnel, CC etc. ) and somewhat lower ranked (Kalamazoo, Wooster Rollins, Hendrix etc.).
One thing we observed is LACs even the ones which didn’t admit us were always willing to engage both administrators as well as professors. R1 hardly so except for UVMs.
If considered by student profile, it seems many international applicants have been willing to pursue “brand recognition” downward. When standardized testing was a generally prominent aspect of college admission, only one UC placed within the top 50 in the U.S., for example:
Yes. In India it is definitely a huge thing. We consider ourselves little less influenced by brand recognition but even then it is quite disconcerting to see the looks on people’s faces when you tell them that you are going to a Liberal “Arts” college and then the name they do not recognize at all! Out of LACs Reed has a good brand name probably because Steve Jobs is a drop out from there :-). Other than that may be Pomona would be recognized but no other even amongst educated people who have good international and US exposure. I agree I didn’t know about any LACs other than these two before we started exploration for college targets.
I think the issue you identified has little to do with LACs vs R1s, but with resources. Some R1s are even better resourced than any well-resourced LAC.
Frankly, I’d say even in the United States, and even among people broadly familiar with “good universities”, there are many highly selective LACs with great placement that many of those people may know little or nothing about. There are lots of reasons why that might be the case, including lack of D1 sports, much smaller size, regionalism, lack of pop culture references (a sort of feedback cycle), and so on. But the bottom line is your International relatives may not be far behind many applicants’ US relatives when it comes to properly “recognizing” the value/achievement associated with attending a lot of great LACs.
And then all the same virtues apply to US applicants too, including if they are going on to graduate or professional school. Which might well placate the relatives, although who knows–some great graduate programs and professional schools are at universities not necessarily known as the “best” universities overall. But the employers hiring from US universities in those fields know what is what, even if your relatives never will . . . .
There are other majors where a student interested in them would have to be very selective with LACs in terms of finding suitable departments and offerings.
Math for students who have completed math beyond single variable calculus while in high school – such students may want more depth (graduate level courses) and/or breadth in upper level math than many LACs can offer.
Physics, where some departments are small enough that the expected core upper level physics courses are not reliably offered frequently enough.
I find it hard to believe that any well-resourced R1 with many international students (who are often full pay) wouldn’t allocate sufficient resources to help those students. Any particular R1s that you have in mind?
Also, adding to what @ucbalumnus said, I’d say a well-regarded R1 would most likely offer more depth in almost any STEM subject, by definition. Another area an R1 would potentially offer more depth is in research. Granted, only some students in STEM take advantage of those benefits.
I am not saying public R1s are bad at all. They will have more opportunities but only for a few.
In any case I am not making a blanket statement that everyone should prefer LACs over public R1s but if by reading this discussion a few more internationals think about those seriously that would be good.
I note, consistent with your appropriately-worded statement, that research opportunities can end up a complicated subject.
Obviously there are typically far more research opportunities at an R1 in raw terms, and I agree they will typically go deeper in any given subfield.
However, typically many of those research opportunities are being taken by graduate students. So whether a given undergrad will in practice have more access to research opportunities at an R1 or rather than an LAC is a complex question.
And I don’t think there is a universal answer for LACs. Some seem more committed to encouraging their faculty to do research AND to using undergraduates to assist that research. Indeed, I gather some have pretty robust funding programs at the college level designed to make sure there are specifically paid research positions available in many departments, including ones that typically get less grant funding. But I wouldn’t guarantee every LAC did this, or did it equally well.
This is the feeling which we got when we tried to contact Professors from top public R1 we had an admit from. Most said they either don’t take undergrads or said they take may be one per year. I feel if you are driven and good you will find opportunities to do it in large public R1s.
On the other hand almost every professor from most LACs contacted responded positively and many spent time on video calls.