I’m sure that people will answer this question by saying that Mt Holyoke is committed to diversity. But I also see a lot of post from internationals claiming that they want to go to school hre and elsewhere because the college gives better aid to intentionals than other schools. I’ve also heard that parents from conservative countries won’t let their daughters go to coed schools. Don’t American girls want to go to women’s colleges anymore? Will Americans get low financial aid because it’s all going to the internationals? Please don’t accuse me of being anti-international. I just want to know if my aid is going to be hurt. I’d also like to know what percentage of the applicant pool is from The US. If there are few Americans applying, that is a real concern. . I’m also confused by posts on the admissions site where the admissions officers are jetting all over the world to recruit. Meanwhile, I live in a working clas town 20 minutes away and they’re no where to be seen. Why is all the admissions effort going to internationals?
Wealthy international students who can pay sticker price allow MHC to award more financial aid to non-wealthy US students. So no, your aid may be helped, not hurt by this.
You make it sound like most of the students are from outside the country. It’s about 20% international.
MHC meets 100% of need, so if you get in, it doesn’t matter what they gave someone else. They’re careful to accept a mix of full-pay and financially needy students that matches their financial aid budget.
If I recall correctly they told us they alternate years visiting our high school and the neighboring town’s.
I still think it is sad that they ignore poor towns in the US to recruit internationals. They never recruit in Springfield or Holyoke or other poor towns in Western Mass. And it is more like 25% international. That is higher than other schools, and it makes me think Americans aren’t applying. So, maybe it is time for the school to go coed before it is 50% international and Americans become the minority. I also see lots of internationals saying that they apply to MHC because they can get a “free ride” and more money than other schools are willing to give. In other words, they get full tuition, since the US gov does not provide grants or other assistance for them. It sounds like they get a lot more money than the typical American student, which is horrible. I’m not sure I want to apply to a school like that.
I can’t imagine they would need to go co-ed to fill the campus. As it is they only take 50% of the students that apply. Other seven sister schools (Smith, Barnard) accept less leading one to believe that there are many students still interested in a single-sex education.
As for why they do not recruit when you are so close- not sure. From my visit I can tell you there are quite a few schools in that area that are meet-need schools. Run the numbers and see where you fit.
My take on the international students is that is how they make the school diverse. My D was lucky enough to attend a high school that has a high (20%) international population along with a diverse student body. The world is changing & I think it is important for us that she is exposed to all kinds of people.
Mount Holyoke is a private school- with their own scholarship/financial aide that is privately funded. They were generous to my child, met our need as the calculator suggested.
MHC is a private college–they can do whatever they want. If the OP lives in that area, they should be more concerned about UMass-Amherst (a PUBLIC university) working to get their OOS percentage up to 30% as a source of revenue. This would effectively exclude the children of taxpayers in favor of higher-paying OOS students.
If UMass is increasing its out of state admits, it’s also a sign that a lot of Americans want to go there. Can the same be said of Mt Holyoke? Any school that is almost 1/3 international is doing something very wrong with US admissions or just not appealing to US students. The admissions office might say something like, “we have a commitment to globalism and diversity” but the truth is that they cannot attract enough US applicants. They then get internationals who need boatloads of aid–aid that other schools won’t give them. Of course the internationals apply in droves because they know that few schools will provide the same degree of aid to internationals. Or else the admissions office gets wealthy internationals and uses that money to provide financial aid to nonwealthy internationals. There are only two colleges with more internationals that Mt Holyoke. One is some religious school and the other is Pine Manor, a place with very low performing students. PIne Manor is a joke. The high number of internationals is a sign of desperation, not diversity. MT Holyoke should put more effort into local recruiting or it will also become a joke. It will be sad when US students become the minority there. The admissions office should be honest about how much their recruitment efforts focus on internationals and how much aid they get compared to US students. I see none at my school or surrounding schools and I live 20 minutes away. I guess all the admissions officers are jetting off to China. In one article, they said that they got enough applications from China to fill the freshman class. If over 20 of applicants are from one foreign country, then internationals must account for at least half of applicants.
carman817, are you bitter because MHC rejected you? You don’t seem to understand the situation at MHC at all. The international students enrich the student body, as opposed to taking seats away from US students. MHC is NOT desperate for students. You seem to be focusing on Chinese students, but there are many from the Middle East as well.
Or is this just a case of xenophobia? Our current political climate seems to make bashing foreigners OK, and I’m getting that vibe from you. If you don’t want to be around foreigners, then forget about Mt Holyoke and apply elsewhere.
If you spend any time on collegecofidential, you will soon realize that yes, internationals do apply in droves to all sorts of US colleges, hoping to get boatloads of aid. But few actually succeed – it’s like buying lottery tickets. The reality is that no school gives “boatloads of aid” to “droves” of internationals – because they would go broke.
OK, now you’re claiming something completely different – that private schools use wealthy internationals to subsidize education for non-wealthy internationals. And that claim is probably true – just as private schools use wealthy Americans to subsidize education for non-wealthy Americans. The bottom line is that wealthy students at private schools, whether international or domestic, help to subsidize the education of the less wealthy. The exact same thing occurs at state schools like UMass, by the way, except that at UMass this is accomplished through state taxes (which fall most heavily on the wealthy).
I’m in California, and our top college for internationals is Soka University, with 39% (according to the official US Dept of Education stats at College Navigator). That’s way more than the 28% at Mt Holyoke. And Soka is not financially desperate: their endowment is over $1 billion, and on a per-student basis they are wealthier than most Ives.
If you surveyed female American high school students, you would probably find that most of them would rather go to a coed school than to a women’s college. So you’re right – overall, women’s colleges are probably not that appealing to US students. But so what? It’s OK for colleges to serve small niches; after all, most US high school students probably wouldn’t want to enroll at BYU, Caltech, or Navy either.
In contrast, US women’s colleges have always been popular with internationals. This is partly due to historical factors: most elite private colleges in the US were all-male until 1970 or so. So if you were an international parent, and wanted your daughter to get an elite American education, you focused on women’s colleges. So women’s colleges are a tradition in such families. And it’s not just a historical thing – even today, schools for women-only are much more popular in other countries than they are here.
According to College Navigator, Bryn Mawr is also 28% international. Smith is 19%. Wesleyan College (a women’s college in Georgia, not Wesleyan U in Connecticut) is 18%. Wellesley is 15%. All of these numbers are high by US college standards.
Sort by total number of F-1 visas Weighted vs. total enrollment
Rank (by # of visas)
1 Mount Holyoke College
2 Bryn Mawr College
3 Smith College
4 Wellesley College
5 Vassar College
6 Barnard College
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/04/the-most-chinese-schools-in-america-rankings-data-education-china-u/
@CrewDad 's list is interesting, but oddly specific. It ranks only the (remaining) Seven Sisters and only for Chinese students, so it doesn’t add much useful information to the discussion. The linked article divides schools by how large they are and then ranks them by " school F-1 visa numbers weighted by total (main campus) enrollment;" The graphic implies that you can rank them by total number as well, but from what I could tell, that just reversed the order of the list and ranking and changed nothing. And again, only for China (and says nothing about financial aid.).
@carman817 , what is your actual beef with Mount Holyoke? It seems odd for you to focus on that particular school when so many other colleges and universities admit large percentages of international and out of state students. If you don’t like the school then don’t apply there. I would understand if you were complaining about a state school that subsidized international students (if you could find one).
@PNWedwonk, Carman said “I guess all the [Mount Holyoke] admissions officers are jetting off to China. In one article, they said that they got enough applications from China to fill the freshman class. If over 20 of applicants are from one foreign country, then internationals must account for at least half of applicants.”
A portion of the article was related to her comment wrt China and Mount Holyoke
@PNWedwonk I am focused on Mt Holyoke because I was going to apply there and then I found out they don’t even bother recruiting at my high school 20 minutes away, or at other schools in nearby working class towns. Meanwhile, the admissions office page has info about how they admissions officers are always going to foreign countries to recruit. I also frequently see posts from internationals, here and elsewhere, saying that they’re applying to Mount Holyoke because no one else gives internationals so much aid. I also saw a post from an international that said Mount Holyoke would admit her “if she found a financial sponsor.” In other words, they’d let her buy her way in. They must be focused on internationals because US students are giving them a pass. Internationals flock to Mount Holyoke because they fall into one of two groups: 1) need lots of aid and other schools limit how much aid goes to internationals but Mt Holyoke doesn’t 2) know that they can buy their way in even if other schools won’t take them because their credentials are too low. Also, to reply to another poster, I am not fixated on China or xenophobic. I used China as an example because in one article in a newspaper, the admissions office bragged that they could fill the entire class with people from China based on the number of applications they received. If there are more applications from people in China than Massachusetts, there is a big problem. Also, I am aware that other colleges have a lot of internationals. But the fact is that Mt Holyoke has three or four times as many as most top colleges.
Also, if you look at @CrewDad’s list, you will see, for 7 sister schools, that the schools will the highest number of Chinese students are also least selective. In other words, if you ranked schools based on selectivity, the list would go from Barnard at the top to Mt Holyoke at the bottom–in the exact reverse order that the schools are in now. In other words, the less selective you are, the more Chinese students you have. There’s a direct correlation.
If you want more evidence that internationals are getting all the aid, at the expense of working class American students, check this out. Not only does Mount Holyoke have the most international students of the colleges on this list, it gives 1/3 more aid than then next nearest college. Most schools give less than a third of what Mount Holyoke gives. Since American girls won’t go there, Mt Holyoke has to give internationals a free ride to come. Don’t worry. I’m not applying. I’d just get screwed in terms of aid. I bet the recruiting budget is also much higher for internationals. That lets the admissions officers go on lots of nice trips. American parents should be concerned with the statistics below since they’re the ones paying for the education. Maybe the school could hire more professors or do something else to improve the college as a whole if it wasn’t giving a free ride to so many internationals. Go ahead, call me bitter. I am bitter because even if I did get accepted, I wouldn’t get as much aid as the typical international. Do not call me xenophobic. I am just pointing out the obvious–Mt Holyoke caters to internationals.
There was another post here, easily searchable on the Mt Holyoke thread, that said some internationals students struggled with English. Those must be the full pay internationals. That’s what happens when you let people buy their way in.
Perhaps they think that people who are 20 minutes away can easily visit the campus and meet with MHC representatives on their own initiative, while people who live thousands of miles away don’t have that same opportunity.
MHC has ten admissions staff that have been assigned “regional responsibilities”. Of those, only two are assigned to international regions – and one of those is only partly international, because her coverage also includes Florida.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/admission/staff/admission-staff
MHC, like many private schools, is “need aware” – which means that admissions decisions consider an applicant’s ability to pay. They state this policy up front:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/sfs/first_year/prospective_faq
The need-aware policy generally works to the disadvantage of foreign students (unless they come from wealthy families) because they don’t have access to US sources of financial aid (which increase the ability to pay). If MHC is telling an international student “you need a sponsor”, it means: “you’re qualified, but we’re not going to admit you under our need-aware policy, because we can’t afford to give you all the aid that you would need”.
And if MHC is telling qualified international students that they need to come up with more money if they want to attend, doesn’t that contradict your suggestion that MHC gives internationals too much aid?
Acceptance rate is not the same thing as selectivity (you can see this in the well-known US News rankings, where acceptance rate only comprises 10% of the “student selectivity” score.) Vassar, for example, has a relatively low acceptance rate – but it is now coed, and accepts applications from men as well as women. It’s easier to have a low acceptance rate if you double the size of the potential applicant pool.
My guess is that US News actually rates Wellesley as the most selective school on this list, but I don’t have access to the full rankings right now…
If you see this as a minus, then don’t apply. However, many applicants – both US and international – would see it as a plus.
Incidentally, the US schools with the most internationals aren’t small, undergraduate-focused colleges in rural areas. In general, internationals actually like large universities with graduate programs in big cities. If you look at total student enrollment, instead of limiting the scope to undergrads, then MHC’s numbers aren’t particularly high. For example:
Mt. Holyoke has around 2,200 students, of which about 28% are international, or about 620.
Northeastern has around 25,500 students, of which about 10,500 are international, or about 41%.
https://www.northeastern.edu/ogs/home/
@carman817 I sympathise with you. There have been many instances of leading private (and public universities) that ignore lower income students in their local regions. Off the top of my head, (and not trying to criticise specific schools) University of Alabama has been criticised for ignoring local high schools and Michelle Obama was quoted that U Chicago never visited her Southside of Chicago high school (she attended Princeton). Many schools need to be better neighbors!
Regarding your situation, if you are interested in MHC, reach out to them and let them know that you are interested. First, check with your high school GC and ask if he/she knows anyone there that you can be introduced to.