<p>Well, if you need financial aid, you may get admitted to colleges but not get the aid you need -- most colleges do not promise to meet the full need of internationals. </p>
<p>I agree with you that it helps to study grammar -- but it can be very hard for an individual to learn a foreign grammar that has no parallel in their own language. So one example you see frequently would be Asian immigrants who may be very highly educated and have extensive and sophisticated vocabularies, but are still having difficulty with the use of articles in English and matching subject/verb tense. The problem isn't that they haven't studied - it is that their own language does not have any grammatical equivalent, and some of the nuances of grammar are kind of hard wired into the brain at a very early age. So its quite difficult to develop the kind of inner grammatical sense of a language which comes with a very different structure. </p>
<p>Anyway, my point is simply that I do think you should be complimented on your fluency... and at the same time, I don't think we should draw adverse conclusions about students who have a harder time making the transition. There are probably a lot of different factors that go into the mix.</p>