I was wondering which countries might be overrepresented at top schools, and which ones might benefit a student (only a handful of applicants each year). Some answers (China, India overrepresented, Fiji or the Comoros underrepresented) are fairly obvious, but others are less so.
What about an applicant from one of Austria/Switzerland/Czech Republic/Slovakia? A friend is also wondering how applicants from Scandinavia typically fare.
Your friend can check the admission stats per school…Harvard for example has about 17 Austrian students, Switzerland 32, Czech 8 and Slovakia 7 students enrolled this year. Compared to India that has 294 students enrolled. I’m pretty sure, your friend’s country will be underrepresented, in whatever college he applies for; considering Harvard gets the most applications from intls.
http://worldwide.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/worldwide/files/2014-15_international_enrollment_school_country_fromoir.pdf
Most students from the region of the world you’re thinking about would considering paying a huge amount of money for university while their home universities are of good quality and are virtually free. So there’s not many of them.
Check from here: http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/Data/International-Students/By-Academic-Level-and-Place-of-Origin/2014-15 (includes all colleges in the US)
Undergrad:
Austria 366
Switzerland 623
Czech Republic 368
Slovakia 193
Sweden 2,983
Norway 1,479
Denmark 523
Finland 335
Sweden has a quite a lot compare to other similar countries
Sweden and Norway are quite wealthy so it makes sense to me that they would send more students to the U.S. than some other European countries.
Im pretty sure the majority of those Swedish students attend a community college for a semester or two. SBCC and SMC seems to be very popular for the scandinavians, anyone who can confirm that?
I think most Swedes fall into 3 categories;
Swedish universities are getting increasingly hard to get into even for Swedes and all my friends/family there think of the U.S. (Especially California) as some paradise fantasy land, so that could contribute to the influx of Swedes at those schools.
what do you exactly mean by overrepresented? I’m a little confused
It means if there are many people of a particular nationality at particular schools. Obviously, there are many Chinese and Indians at many campuses because there are many Chinese and Indians, period. So being Chinese or Indian (an "over represented group) does’t offer the admission advantage that being from, for example, sub-Saharan Africa does (under represented on American campuses.)