<p>I’m just looking at the total number of students attending from each country and making a guess. I could be completely wrong.</p>
<p>Oh right, thanks. I am just wondering about my chances and you seem to be a legend around here.</p>
<p>^^ I don’t do chances because I’m not a good prognosticator. I could never have predicted that my daughter would be accepted to Harvard but rejected from Yale and Princeton. Likewise, I could never have predicted my son would be rejected from Harvard (where his sister attends), but accepted to Yale and Princeton. Everyone assumes that selective colleges are all looking for the same thing, but they are not. Each school looks for different qualities and what they look for seems to change from year to year. So, Mafrio – if I couldn’t chance my kids with any certainty, I can’t do it for you, or anyone else.</p>
<p>Okay: here’s my take on it. Some international students <a href=“SOME”>b</a>** feel that they have EARNED their spot in Harvard and EXPECT to be admitted with a full ride; I’ve read, here on CC, the arrogance of their expectations waiting to be admitted unconditionally. </p>
<p>These same students wont even consider looking at other colleges because there is a warped idea, from some international students, that any other university system is decrepit and ancient with poor facilities and with some backwoods professor teaching basket-weaving. </p>
<p>When these students aren’t admitted to Harvard, they are in disbelief; they want to immediately justify why they weren’t admitted with stats and numbers and reasons why they were rejected. The “Why didn’t Harvard warn me that I wouldn’t be admitted???” question. “Nobody told me!” They can’t believe it’s a numbers game. </p>
<p>There aren’t enough spots to cover the hundreds of thousands of students who have applied over the years, and, Harvard has put out enough information about how tough it is to get in, over and over, again and again. There should be no surprises. It’s up to the student to realize that it is a lottery, so chances are slim. Best bet is to apply everywhere! </p>
<p>Believe it or not, the majority of Harvard students come from the US, and I know that sounds tough to accept for international students-that the US actually has good students and that Harvard serves mostly the residents of its own country!-but those are the facts. The US students are what makes the university great! </p>
<p>Where else in the WORLD would a foreign country accept non-citizens, fully fund their educations, and provide a quality education?</p>
<p>The information from Harvard is there; google is there as well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If there were, that would be more seats per thousand than US citizen students get which would be something less than 60.</p>
<p>Ya gotta know going in that it’s a lottery for just about everyone…is knowing your shot is 1 out of 30 and not 1 out of 20 going to affect your decision to apply early…really?</p>
<p>answer to Title/Question</p>
<p>NO.</p>
<p>A private institution may select as they choose…
only when it relates to fin aid and Fed $ should it matter</p>
<p>“More importantly, what does it matter if you find out that admission rates for your country are 1% or 3.7%? What would you do differently?”</p>
<p>This. The information would not help you make a better decision. You know that the rate is in the low single digits for virtually every demographic group, perhaps excepting Boston Latin seniors. Either you take your chances in that pool, or you don’t.</p>
<p>
Wow! I don’t want to comment on this, but I am pretty sure that a Harvard student would not say this in his/her classroom, because there are about 180 of non-US students sit in that room with him/her, who are also his/her friends. Besides, his/her professor may also be a foreigner or was a foreigner too.
It seems that there still is a long way to go to make ONE Harvard and ONE world!</p>
<p>But anyway, this is not what we are talking about here. To OHMomof2s point,
Yes, it could make a difference if an applicant has two very close desired schools to choose for their ED or REA choice.</p>
<p>Lets say if you weight School A as 10 million dollars as your odds, and school B is much the same, but slightly lighter, lets say it is 9.9 million dollars as your odds. If the admission rates are the same for both schools, for sure, you would apply school A. But in fact, you know that the shot for school A is 1 out 30 (which it is 3.33%) and shot for school B is 1 out of 20 (which it is 5%), now what should you do? Remember, for ED and REA, you can only pick one, but not both. </p>
<p>I hope you would understand, here is the issue of opportunity cost. Now lets do the math. The opportunity cost of applying school A but not school B (because you like school A a little bit better) is 495K (5%x9.9M), and the gain of applying school A is only 433K (3.33%x10M+(10M-9.9M)). Then, you will lose 62K (495K-433K) value of your odds if you apply School A, thus, theoretically, you should apply School B but not A, even though you like school A a little more.</p>
<p>Now, if School A is Harvard, and School B is Columbia, I know you prefer to Harvard a little bit more than Columbia, but you also like Columbia very much. Which one you should chose for your ED and REA now? I will let you to decide. </p>
<p>This applies all the applicants (both international and domestic applicants), but just a note for international applicants, you should not take the general admission rates to do you comparison, you should find out the international applicants admission rates. Remember, as aunt bea suggested, you are not as good as the US students! LOL!</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the overwhelming odds as an international student, I know for sure that if I apply my chances of getting in are greater than 0. So I will be applying even if the admission rate is .001% ;-)</p>
<p>It is better to try and all that…</p>
<p>^^ I suspect this type of analysis will never get you into a top school in US.</p>
<p>As an international applicant, EA, ED REA - none of these are relevant. There are schools that don’t even access an early application from them. </p>
<p>They are mostly for American applicants who need to show commitment to specific schools and have certain advantage in being committed to a school. Internationals who need aid and apply to an ED school which does not provide aid to them - the school should simply push them into an RD pile since they can’t commit money at that point.</p>
<p>If there are 85 admits at Harvard and 60 different countries have admits, what does it matter to be an applicant out of 250 from either India or China if only 2 or 3 are admitted from each country?</p>
<p>I have applied to four specific schools - I hope my academic and ECs will give me at least a fighting chance. So we’ll see whether or not I am accepted based on my analysis.</p>
<p>Aussie - You seem to know what you are doing and have a healthy dose of pragmatism.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I really hope no one here would ever make a decision based on this.</p>
<p>If they disclose anything, it would be historical numbers and not the current class that you are competing for, so their would be variability in the numbers. And since you are talking about a 62k difference on a base of 10M, that variability could have a big impact. Secondly, you are treating “international” as a homogenous group - they are not. I would expect that year-to-year there would be changes in the percentages for different countries so depending on what country you are in, you are understating or overstating the actual odds.</p>
<p>And of course, the MOST important factor is that this is not a mainly a matter of odds. If you are a really great candidate from Sierra Leone you have a much better chance than if you are a really bad candidate from Massachusetts, regardless of what the historical acceptance rates are for domestic vs. international or Sierra Leone vs. Internationals as a whole.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some U.S. students don’t understand the reason behind foreign applicants’ often parochial list of prospective schools. They only apply to a small group of top U.S. (and often U.K.) schools because they feel that if they don’t go to a top 5-10 college, they might as well study in their homecountry. Colleges are, after all, educational institutions – applicants may say they want to study in the United States to learn about a new culture, but the main reason they’re applying is for the education they’re going to get.</p>
<p>I’m personally applying to some highly selective U.S. schools, as a Brit. If I do not get into the top 1-5 U.S. colleges, I have another chance at Oxbridge, UCL, LSE, etc. If not there, I might as well go to a not-so-selective college here in the U.K., as opposed to the U.S. That would get me the same education, save me money and headache.</p>
<p>As a private university, Harvard doesn’t have to disclose anything.</p>
<p>As for internationals, I don’t know any Ivy that considers international applicants on the same scale as Americans.</p>
<p>The state college I teach at has at least 40% international undergrad and 90% internationals graduate, to the point that US citizens pretty much get scholarships for nothing other than their citizenship because there are so few possible candidates. A significant number of their international students (around 20% I believe) cannot speak and understand English at an appropriate level for college. But they all pay cash essentially.</p>
<p>And BTW, virtually every international student at the Ivy I went to (it was around 10% international at the time in the 80s) had English as a first language and gobs of money. US citizens ranged from poor to ultra rich, but you could tell the international students because they looked like they just got their hair cut, their clothes pressed, and shoes shined.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why Yale says this then:</p>
<p>"I have dual citizenship. Am I better off applying as an American citizen or as an international student?</p>
<p>The same application is used for all candidates, and it asks you to list your country or countries of citizenship. We are interested in your citizenship chiefly for reporting purposes, but it has no bearing on your chances of admission."</p>
<p>[I</a> have dual citizenship. Am I better off applying as an American citizen or as an international student? | Yale College Admissions](<a href=“http://admissions.yale.edu/i-have-dual-citizenship-am-i-better-applying-american-citizen-or-international-student]I”>http://admissions.yale.edu/i-have-dual-citizenship-am-i-better-applying-american-citizen-or-international-student)</p>
<p>^^ Harvard says the same thing: we do not categorize individual applicants in such a way. We have no quotas of any kind for admission, all applications are evaluated by the same holistic criteria, </p>
<p><a href=“https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/application-process/international-applicants[/url]”>https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/application-process/international-applicants</a></p>
<p>As I said before, Harvard or HYPs wouldnt lie about this because they dont need to. Yes, they do not have quotas for admission. This is true! </p>
<p>But, lets understand what exactly the definition of Quota is. </p>
<p>By Oxford Dictionaries, Quota is a limited or fixed number of amount of people or things, in particular: …
[quota:</a> definition of quota in Oxford dictionary (British & World English)](<a href=“Oxford Languages | The Home of Language Data”>Oxford Languages | The Home of Language Data)</p>
<p>Then, yes, there is no fixed number as the admission limit for international applicants or any regions of the States. It means there are no quotas. But, in reality, there must be a guideline to control the geographical breakdown of the school.
As rhandco posted,
30 years later now since 80s, the number of Harvards international students is still ABOUT 11% despite of the number of international applicants has grown dramatically in the past few decades. How could this happen if there were no guidelines in place?</p>
<p>Also, Harvards admission committee has many subcommittees which represent different GEOGRAPHIC regions. I guess the countries outside of the States must be designated as one of the geographic regions. When an application arrives at admission office, it is directed to a specified geographic subcommittee. If there is no guideline (remember, it is not a quota) for these subcommittees to follow, then how could Mr. Fitzsimmons manage the full committee meeting in the end if there were too many or too less candidates had been selected for him to review? Because the subcommittees would not know how many candidates have been recommended by other subcommittees before they meet in the full committee meeting in front of the Dean. </p>
<p>A Harvard Crimson article even has a section titled as CHECKS AND BALANCES to describe how the geographic subcommittee works.
[Stairway</a> to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/7/7/stairway-to-harvard-span-stylefont-style-italicthis/]Stairway”>Stairway to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson)
How to interpret this articles CHECKS and BALANES is your call. I dont want to make a statement here, but the concept of Geographic Region Subcommittee is definitely a signal of the difference between the regions. </p>
<p>Stop! Dont quickly judge this as a complaint about the fairness of how Harvard treats different regions applicants (includes the internationals). Nobody has made such complaint! Please! This discussion is just for sharing the information for whoever wants it or whoever needs it.</p>
<p>It helps not to assume the review process is limited to those geographical reps. </p>
<p>When you think of a qualified applicant, CC tends to see that in terms of stats, rigor and “obvious” leadership. But as Fitzsimmons notes, it’s not as mechanical as some think.</p>
<p>Maybe we’d like them to disclose this, but if they’re not legally required to, why should they? College admissions are plenty unfair and opaque already.</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but there has been a supreme court decision (Regents of the University of California v Bakke) that found that quotas violated the equal protection clause. This is not directly related to this topic (as far as I know internationals applying to US colleges are not guaranteed equal protection), but you could argue that Harvard’s silent quotas for other things such as race, geography, etc. do violate this clause and the Bakke case (you would need another supreme court case since Bakke changed nothing). And obviously, if Harvard were to publically admit that it has quotas regarding other qualities it would not be a stretch for it to also admit that it has international quotas. </p>
<p>Really though, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the % of international students in the class for each year. Harvard (along with many other selective schools) does have “soft” quotas that may fluctuate slightly from year to year but mostly remain static, so data from recent years likely would indicate how the decisions would fall in the current year as well. You may or may not be able to find this data for Harvard, but it is available for schools of similar selectivity.</p>