<p>Just curious why. Does it offer the department more prestige? Do they boost scores up? Do they bring their own funding? Are they more motivated students? Is there some sort of quota to keep domestic students because it always seems to be half and half at the engineering graduate schools I looked at. Im sure if grad schools open the gates to internationals they'll be flooded by people coming from china and India( Engineering+Sciences)</p>
<p>Cause they're smarter than we are!</p>
<p>I think one of the major reasons there are as many domestic students as there are is funding -- a lot of the money for science and engineering training grants comes from Uncle Sam, who is quite reluctant to pay full freight for non-US citizens to learn cool stuff.</p>
<p>I don't think that it's that they "like" international students, its that the number of international students applying to graduate school far out number the number of domestic students applying, especially in the science and technology fields. The quota is an attempt to keep international students from inundating graduate schools and increase the number of domestic students attending. It may be 10 domestic and 10 international students in the incoming class, for instance, but that could be 10/200 domestic sudents and 10/600 international students. Many I think are offered TA/RA or bring outside funding through their home country, ie Fullbright, but funding such as NSF or NDSEG require that you be a U.S. Citzen thus schools try to get more domestic students because they qualify for gov't funding. The GRE scores are insanely high sometimes, because of the time some int'l students spend studying for the GRE in comparison to domestic students due to motivation, and it probably does offer prestige for the school to boast that for the incoming class your average GRE scores are 700V 800Q or something or that you average GPA is like 3.9999.</p>