<p>I know that at my "need-blind" (doesn't exist) alma mater that puts "socio-ec" tags on applications in an absolutely totally need-blind manner (;)), roughly 7% of internationals are admitted. Take them out of the equation, and all of a sudden "selectivity" goes down. I have heard (but can't confirm) that at ah-hem "need-blind" HYP, it is roughly 3%, and they have huge numbers of international applicants. Take them out of the hopper, and all of a sudden selectivity goes down.</p>
<p>"I fear government meddling in the affairs of our private schools, and I think you see where I'm going with this."</p>
<p>ASAP, please remember how dialectical my posts are in this thread. For what it worth, I can assure that I share your fear of excessive meddling of the government in the private affairs of schools. For example, can we afford to turn a deaf ear or blind eye to the ramifications of the legislation that has been introduced or proposed by Ted Kennedy?</p>
<p>Interestedad,</p>
<p>do you have any information on why, amongst the elite schools, Swarthmore is the only one to deny need-blind admissions to Canadians and Mexicans?</p>
<p>This is an issue for my nephew, who is Canadian and was looking at Swarthmore amongst others.</p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge, the following schools are need blind for Mexican and Canadian nationals;</p>
<p>all 8 Ivies,
Williams
Amherst
Wellesley
Bowdoin
Middlebury
and a few more I'm forgetting, but not Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Mini, it seems that Harvard had 8.1% of foreign students in its 2009 class (and 2% Canucks) :)</p>
<p>There are some numbers available -albeit not current- for Yale</p>
<p>Yale College (B.A. and B.S.)
International Students as a Percentage
Applicants and Admits</p>
<p>1988-89 6% 3%
1991-92 8% 4%
1996-97 9% 5%
1999-00 10% 5%</p>
<p>A rough translation should show:
1999-00 1262 Applicants 125 Admits or about 10% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>I would expect admit rates to rise slightly as incomes of large numbers of potential international admits rise.</p>
<p>Williams is as "need-blind" as their "social-ec" tag on the application allows. ;) (Mind you, "need aware" can be used to increase percentage of low-income students attending as well as to decrease it.)</p>
<p>This "rise" shows up a Yale:</p>
<p>Foreign Students (excluding Canadians) from 1992 to 2001 </p>
<h1>of Matriculants 32 30 43 46 22 46 51 67 66 74</h1>
<p>% of Total Matriculants 2.5% 2.3% 3.1% 3.6% 1.7% 3.5% 3.9% 4.9% 4.7% 5.7%</p>
<p>Xig-If you're talking about the Star proposal, I don't think this is the government meddling in POLICY of college - it's government trying to sway customers, the same way businessses would, by providing an incentive, or bonus, if the school "buys" their product. The fact that no students are compromised, no school's values or desires about whom it admits are being threatened, and the fact that colleges have nothing to lose but only gain out of this proposal also makes it different. The losers are, I suppose, the corporations that have been subsidized by the government in implementing their grant programs, but the schools are not hurt in any way by the change, if it happens. Many Republicans are on board, as they see it as a gain for their communities.
Is it really is a gain to taxpayers as they claim? I don't know - hard for us to know. It may cost more than they think and may be completely pie-in-the- sky unworkable. But it isn't really policy meddling of the kind I was referring to with regard to revoking Pell grants if a school chooses to offer aid to foreign students.</p>
<p>I do see you point, however, about being careful of "meddling" from both sides of the aisle. Point taken. ;)</p>
<p>International Students as a Percentage
Applicants and Admits</p>
<p>1988-89 6% 3%
1991-92 8% 4%
1996-97 9% 5%
1999-00 10% 5%</p>
<p>A rough translation should show:
1999-00 1262 Applicants 125 Admits or about 10% acceptance rate."</p>
<p>Didn't quite get it. If they make up 10% of applicants, and only 5% of admits, then the odds of an international being admitted are only half what they would be for a domestic applicant. With a total admit rate currently of 10%, that would mean that only 5% of internationals are admitted (and most, I would expect, receiving no financial aid.) Did I miss something?</p>
<p>
[quote]
....do you have any information on why, amongst the elite schools, Swarthmore is the only one to deny need-blind admissions to Canadians and Mexicans
[/quote]
.</p>
<p>Swarthmore accepted an endowment gift earmarked for financial aid way back in its history with a stipulation that aid for non-US students not exceed a fixed percentage (10%) of the entire aid budget. At the time, the percentage was so unthinkably high that nobody even gave it a second thought. It is still a high number. Swarthmore has 7% internationals and the percentage of internationals receiving financial aid is higher than for domestic students. However, that provision does put a limit on their international aid, they spend to the limit, and they are honest about it.</p>
<p>Technically, saying that you are need-blind and meet 100% of need REQUIRES authorization from the board of directors to let the financial aid budget increase as necessary to cover those commitments. In other words, you can't have a hard cap on financial aid dollars and be "need-blind" or "100% need". Swarthmore's financial aid office has that authorization to spend what is necessary for domestic students (although, obviously they still have budgeted targets). Because of the hard percentage cap on international aid, they can't claim to be "need-blind" for internationals.</p>
<p>There has been some intermittent discussion of jumping the legal hurdles to change the provision of that endowment bequest. However, at this point, it really hasn't prevented Swarthmore from having market-competitive percentages of international students or market-competitive levels of aid for those students.</p>
<p>If the market evolves to the point where the high-end colleges typically have 10% or more international students, then Swarthmore would have to consider going to court to change the provision. At 6% or 7%, they are OK. </p>
<p>In fall 2004, Swarthmore had 154 students who were either non-US citizens or who had dual citizenship (US and at least one other country). That's 10.4% of the student body. I don't think anyone has ever spent time at Swarthmore and come away thinking there is a shortage of international or multicultural perspective. Some think that it's tilted too far in that direction.</p>
<p>Complete data on citizenship here:</p>
<p>Anecdotal, but - </p>
<p>Back in the 70s, Texas universities had quite a large number of Iranian students (for various reasons they were only charged in-state tuition). I remember their frequent protests against the Shah.</p>
<p>Can't help but wonder what effect the American college culture had on them - positive or negative?</p>
<p>Both of Xiggi's ideas make sense....</p>
<p>Firefly, you might be interested in the bio and writings of Azar Nafisi--author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. </p>
<p>*Washington -- Azar Nafisi is, first and foremost, a teacher. She is also a best-selling author, whose book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" has reached a vast audience in the United States.
It's been a journey full of twists and turns for Nafisi, an Iranian who spent her undergraduate years at the University of Oklahoma, and who held a fellowship at Oxford University. Her recently published book about a literature discussion group in Tehran quickly became a national bestseller in the United States, to the surprise of its author and nearly everyone else. </p>
<p>As a teacher and professor in Iran before (returning) to the United States in 1997, she earned respect and recognition for advocating causes on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth and especially young women. The outspoken Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran in 1981 for her refusal to wear the mandatory veil; she eventually resumed her teaching career in 1987. </p>
<p>Nafisi returned to the United States in 1997, and is now a visiting fellow and a lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), in Washington, D.C. She lectures and writes in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as on the human rights of Iranian women and girls and their role in the process of change leading to a more open society. </p>
<p>... Nafisi says the book not only taught Americans something about Iran, but also taught the author something about America. Asked why she thought the book was so popular among American readers, Nafisi pointed out that both Americans and Iranians share a love of freedom, and a hatred of oppression. She said she was struck by the fact that Americans, with all the choices they have, still choose to spend time participating in book groups, sharing their enjoyment of books. </p>
<p>In her book, Nafisi describes a literature discussion group that took place in her home in Tehran over the course of several years. In the course of the book, she also describes an actual person - a blind censor - whom she sees as a metaphor for the totalitarian mindset. </p>
<p>"The totalitarian mindset doesn't see the world in colors, it sees it all in one color, which is the color of its own mind. And individuality comes in many different colors and many different voices, and so when you live under the rule of the blind censor, you have to accept the censor's black and white universe," she says. </p>
<p>"The only way you defeat the blind censor," says Nafisi, "is not to let him take away that will to life."</p>
<p>As a response, in part, to "the blind censor" mentality, Nafisi has established "The Dialogue Project," a web site and network connecting democracy and culture (<a href="http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu)%5B/url%5D">http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu)</a>. The purpose of the website, she says, is to create a space for dialogue. A network where a democratic-minded community can find support has been a dream of Nafisi's. </p>
<p>"I want people to understand the role that ideology and culture play in the world today, in terms of issues that we see only as political," she says. "In the same way that terrorist groups support one another, going beyond boundaries that are geographical, racial, national, or religious, I think that democratic-minded people should also go beyond those boundaries and genuinely support people who believe in those same values. This is the practical aspect of The Dialogue Project website. But on another level, I want it to be an ongoing dialogue between culture and democracy, and between different cultures."</p>
<p>Genuine democracy comes out of changing mindsets, and fighting ideologies that are totalitarian, according to Nafisi. "The best way to do that is through culture, and also through exposing people to different cultures," she says. </p>
<p>Referring to Iranian students and colleagues who have maintained their resilience despite political oppression, Nafisi marvels that "under extraordinary circumstances, we find out how extraordinary ordinary people are." </p>
<p>"A lot of times we look for heroism in exceptional people, and what I learned from my life in Iran is that those who we call ordinary are the ones who show the most resilience," she says. And there seems to be something ... where people find this inner strength, which they didn't know existed, and that's why I wanted to talk about books, because through my own experiences in Iran I became interested in such extraordinary experiences elsewhere."</p>
<p>"So many of my own students, who had been to jail, who had had their friends and families murdered, and disappeared, and how it made them as if they wanted to speak to life so much more -- they appreciated life so much more than we do over here. They understood how precious life is," she says.
* <a href="http://www.parstimes.com/news/archive/2003/washfile006.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.parstimes.com/news/archive/2003/washfile006.html</a></p>
<p>tsdad,</p>
<p>Good point on the foreign policy initiatives. In that vein, should we target this toward those that we want to influence the most? No more eastern Europeans, that job is done. Target the financial aid to students from Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.</p>
<p>Alternatively, we have a ist of countries where we can not ship certain high tech equipment. Do we develop a similar list of countries where we do not provide financial aid as a matter of public policy?</p>
<p>Hard to know what the right policy would be.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I benefitted from a scholarship that was specifically intended for internationals.</p>
<p>The colleges that are able to offer need-blind admission to internationals are also often those who are able to attract donations from wealthy internationals. Yesterday, Harvard held an inauguration for its newly built complex for Government and International Studies. Among the major donors were several foreign alumni and parents of Harvard alumni/students. </p>
<p>BU has been aggressively courting international for years. While wealthy internationals pay full tuition, I believe the long-term strategy is to eventually turn them into donors.</p>
<p>Quite right. Which is why the percentage of international students at the prestige institutions rises as fewer of them require financial aid. (It's the parents that count.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Quite right. Which is why the percentage of international students at the prestige institutions rises as fewer of them require financial aid. (It's the parents that count.)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Bingo.</p>
<p>While they are clearly quite talented and accomplished in their respective fields, I doubt that the members of the Bin Laden clan who have studied at Harvard were admitted solely on the basis of their standardized testing scores.</p>