Just how much higher is the bar for internationals?

[DMX]

Profile here:

 

 

Haven't heard from any of the schools.

 

I was/am extremely nervous so I was going through profiles of students at various stat/biostat departments, and I was surprised at the gap between american vs foreign student profiles.

 

I apologise if I sound arrogant, but many American students seemed to have come from decent (but not super competitive) schools, with decent GPAs, and without much research experience (at least what was on their C.V.). In contrast, foreign students almost always came from Beijing/Tsinghua/IIT (if Chinese/Indian), and more often than not had published research (especially from European schools).

 

This was especially true at top biostats programs (so far looked at JHU/UWashington).

 

Do you essentially have to be top-of-your-country type material to get into these programs?

 

 

[crazystat]

It's really hard to say. I would like to say sometimes, letters are pretty important. If a distinguished professor wants to give you letter, then you will get much better chance. Sometimes, you do get good letters from excellent professors in your own country, but the admission committees may not know those professors well. 

 

Similar reasons for other materials. 

 

Also basically, I believe the educational system may be quite different. For example, in US, for undergraduate and/ or master students, it is really hard to write papers or collaborate with professors. Sometime, you may help professors to do some simulation studies, and they pay you money, and your name won't appear on the paper, but those experiences are beneficial for their applications, even though they don't have their own papers.

 

I hope those make sense to you. 

[crazystat]

Actually, I am not US resident or green card holder neither. But sometimes, I feel it is normal to have higher standards for international students. Otherwise, that could be viewed as unfairness for domestic students. 

[yhsu]

Along similar lines, does it help at all if you are an international student attending an American university, in the sense that your recommenders would be better known, or that there would be fewer questions about your ability to participate in an English-speaking program, or even that adcoms would have a better feel for the difficulty of your course load (presuming a relatively well-known American university)?

[applyin&prayin]

I think it might just been a really tough admission year. My stats are very comparable to yours and I'm an american but I haven't heard anything from those schools in addition to cmu, wharton

 

so I'm at a loss as well. 

[creed_the_third]

Also basically, I believe the educational system may be quite different. For example, in US, for undergraduate and/ or master students, it is really hard to write papers or collaborate with professors.

Yeah, I'm in the US now as an exchange student and I spoke with a professor if there was someone in the stats department that needed help on some project and she told me that in stats professors mostly work closely with a few PhD students. I'm from Sweden and there everyone has to do a semester long bachelor's/master's thesis to graduate, but other than that it is even harder to work with professors than the US.

 

I wonder who split up the admission process is between domestic vs international. Is it one big pool where everyone competes against everyone or do they beforehand have a specified number of domestic and international applicants they are aiming for and international competes against internationals and domestic vs domestic?

Edited January 30, 2013 by creed_the_third

[TakeruK]

Along similar lines, does it help at all if you are an international student attending an American university, in the sense that your recommenders would be better known, or that there would be fewer questions about your ability to participate in an English-speaking program, or even that adcoms would have a better feel for the difficulty of your course load (presuming a relatively well-known American university)?

 

 

This really helps, but one major issue is that as a non-American, we may not be eligible for a lot of funding that domestic students can apply for. In addition, some schools, especially public ones, charge higher tuition to international students (because American people pay taxes which subsidize the tuition for domestic students). Since programs generally pay tuition for their PhD students, this translates to a higher cost to the prof/department to take in an international grad student. Thus, they want to really make sure they have a great student if they are taking an international student -- the risk is higher! I think this is the main reason why the bar is higher for international students. 

[Usmivka]

This really helps, but one major issue is that as a non-American, we may not be eligible for a lot of funding that domestic students can apply for.

Exactly this. There are far fewer funding pots for international students, and even those that come with money from their home countries don't often come with enough to cover the true cost of the program. For example, it is great if you are Canadian and have an NSERC award, but the money rarely covers even your full stipend, much less tuition, health care, and ancillary costs. My impression is that Chinese and Korean governmental fellowzships for study abroad are similarly too small to overcome the funding bias. Only the Germans seem to come with enough money to compete on a level playing field.

 

 

I wonder who split up the admission process is between domestic vs international. Is it one big pool where everyone competes against everyone or do they beforehand have a specified number of domestic and international applicants they are aiming for and international competes against internationals and domestic vs domestic?

And sorry for not attributing this, but to answer: in general, at the graduate level, everyone is in the same pool of applicants. Top picks are selected, and then there is a lot of horse trading to decide who gets their favored student and what they have to give up to secure pooled funding. Profs who want international students have to give up more/fight harder since their picks are more expensive (health care in particular is much more expensive for foreign students, because US insurers are bastards). I just asked someone deeply involved in our programs process about this, hence the last minute inclusion.

 

 

Also basically, I believe the educational system may be quite different.

And this as well, but less so, and not because it is "hard" to do research in US labs. European and Middle Eastern programs in particular seem to push through a lot of papers, but they are not necessarily of the same quality or or in the same caliber journals as the US students who do publish. US undergraduate programs also tend to have broader studies (and more may produce more independent students) and more opportunties to demonstrate PhD potential. A major consideration is that BS degrees from most other countries are 3 years, and you simply cannot cover the same amount of material that US undergrads do in 4-5 years, so there is the question in ad coms minds about whether an international student has sufficinent background to get up to speed quickly. A US undergrad applying to grad school is expected to be ready for a PhD directly, whereas someone in the European system would be expected to do a MS first.

 

A final note, "research" means different things depending on context. I see a lot of Indian students especially that have three or more highly structured, short duration research internships. These have more supervision and less opportunity to take charge of the direction and personalization of research than US  universities afford--working in a lab for 3 years may not explicity be labeled a "research experience," but often involves a lot more research and skills development than a 10 week summer "research experience."

Edited January 30, 2013 by Usmivka

[Shostakovich]

Profile here:

 

 

Haven't heard from any of the schools.

 

I was/am extremely nervous so I was going through profiles of students at various stat/biostat departments, and I was surprised at the gap between american vs foreign student profiles.

 

I apologise if I sound arrogant, but many American students seemed to have come from decent (but not super competitive) schools, with decent GPAs, and without much research experience (at least what was on their C.V.). In contrast, foreign students almost always came from Beijing/Tsinghua/IIT (if Chinese/Indian), and more often than not had published research (especially from European schools).

 

This was especially true at top biostats programs (so far looked at JHU/UWash).

 

Do you essentially have to be top-of-your-country type material to get into these programs?

 

I think UW has become a bit more lenient towards international students looking at their admission stats which are posted here: http://www.grad.washington.edu/about/statistics/summaries/2012/rptGsisAnnual_dept2012.pdf

 

Last year their Biostats department accepted ~15% of internationals versus ~24% for domestic, but if you take into account there's way more international applications and the fact that way more funding is available for US citizens/PRs those percentages seem reasonable. It seems like the Stats department had similar figures. I do agree though, the figures for international admissions in the years prior are not too encouraging.

Edited January 30, 2013 by Shostakovich

[health_quant]

I've also been thinking about these UW admissions figures. It may be hard to determine whether those acceptance rates are consistent across the MS and Ph.D. strata of applicants, as those numbers look like they're aggregated across all graduate students. (It would be strange if UW's doctoral admissions rate is that high, even accounting for the yield %.)

 

UW is interesting in that they fund MS students (or at least most of them), but the cost of funding an international MS student would still substantially less than that of funding an international Ph.D. If we had more granular data, we could do some interesting analyses. 

(Agresti actually uses male/female admissions data stratified by different departments at Berkeley as an exercise/example in Categorical Data Analysis.)

 

I think UW has become a bit more lenient towards international students looking at their admission stats which are posted here: http://www.grad.washington.edu/about/statistics/summaries/2012/rptGsisAnnual_dept2012.pdf

 

Last year their Biostats department accepted ~15% of internationals versus ~24% for domestic, but if you take into account there's way more international applications and the fact that way more funding is available for US citizens/PRs those percentages seem reasonable. It seems like the Stats department had similar figures. I do agree though, the figures for international admissions in the years prior are not too encouraging.

[cyberwulf]

Here's my stat/biostat-centric view; ; I'll restrict discussion to elite (top 5-10) departments because it's obvious that the raised bar at lower-ranked places is due to a surplus of good international students not gaining admission at higher-ranked institutions.

I think there are four primary reasons why the bar for international students is higher:

• There is more funding available for domestic than international students. This is particularly true in biostatistics, where a large proportion of domestic students are funded by NIH training grants. Indeed, in order to get their training grants renewed, departments must demonstrate that they have an adequate number of 'training-grant eligible' (read: US citizen or permanent resident) applicants and enrollees to.
• Language ability is often a concern. At top places, many students who apply are capable of handling the required coursework and exams. So, the question then becomes who has the most 'research upside', or (for more risk-averse places) who is least likely to be an 'anchor' once they pass qualifying exams. English-speaking domestic students are generally competent writers/communicators, and so this gives them a decided edge over internationals who may struggle writing a dissertation. The TOEFL provides some guidance to language/writing ability, but it only tells you so much.
• Faculty have less 'feel' for the relative strength of international universities than U.S.-based ones. Whereas most professors have a good sense of -- or can look up -- how the student bodies at (say) Princeton, Michigan, and, Oklahoma State compare, comparing foreign universities is much more difficult. As a result, top departments often accept international students from just a handful of known elite foreign institutions (PKU/Tsinghua in China, ISI in India, etc.)
• Evaluating the performance of foreign students attending U.S. universities can be challenging. From talking to colleagues, it is my impression that, particularly at good Asian universities, the vast majority students are working extremely hard and putting in long hours. Even at elite U.S. universities, most students are not exerting this amount of effort, and so a relatively talented international student with an awesome work ethic can get great grades stateside. Of course, some of these high-performing international students are brilliant, but it can be hard for adcoms to distinguish inherent smarts from excellent discipline/dedication based on the U.S. academic record.

Edited January 30, 2013 by cyberwulf

[TakeruK]

Exactly this. There are far fewer funding pots for international students, and even those that come with money from their home countries don't often come with enough to cover the true cost of the program. For example, it is great if you are Canadian and have an NSERC award, but the money rarely covers even your full stipend, much less tuition, health care, and ancillary costs. My impression is that Chinese and Korean governmental fellowzships for study abroad are similarly too small to overcome the funding bias. Only the Germans seem to come with enough money to compete on a level playing field.

 

Just wanted to add my experience here for any other Canadians looking to go to the US. If you get a higher level NSERC PhD award, you have to decline it and accept the lowest tier ($21k/year) in order to take it outside of Canada. Like Usmivka said, this is very small compared to the actual cost of a graduate student. Many Canadian schools generally increase your funding package if you have an external award like NSERC, so I did ask my US school about this and they basically said that sorry, although they are appreciative of the fact that I was able to bring in outside sources, it really makes very little difference. My immigration paperwork has to list how much the school has to pay (including overheads and other stuff) to have me as a student. It's over $100k/year, so the $21k from NSERC isn't going to make a huge difference. Just to provide some numbers to support what Usmivka said above!

 

Also to add to more "behind the scenes" about international admits: at my last school (Canadian though), I was part of a department meeting where the faculty had to make a decision about the increase of international applicants and how to fund them. Grad students cannot vote at these meetings but they are allowed to attend for informational purposes. At that school, an international student requires twice as much funding as a domestic student. For all students, some fraction of the funding comes from the University (internal fellowships), some from the Department (fellowships and TAships) and a considerable fraction comes from the supervisor (RAships). The Graduate School also provides funding for a small number of International students (only half as many International students as the department would like to have) so they had to vote on whether to (1) stop admitting international students for several years (and continue to operate at a deficit) until the number of international students dropped below the quota, or (2) to decrease the Departmental contribution to the International students' funding and replace it with a Supervisor contribution, or (3) for all faculty members to agree to increase their contribution to ALL of their own students (domestic and international), thereby freeing up some department funding to offset the increased cost of funding international students.

 

After some debate, they almost unanimously voted for the last option, where all profs basically agreed to pool some of their money together to not turn away international students (which was the outcome I was hoping for, although it did not affect me in any way). My point though, is that international student funding is a very complicated issue that requires a lot of people (with potentially differing priorities and funding resources) to work together. If my old department was not as cooperative, the majority of the cost of future international students would be the responsibility of their supervisor, which makes it very difficult for any one prof to take on. I would imagine that in departments that would have voted for option (2), the bar is considerably higher for international students. Some departments might not have the financial ability to choose option (3) even. I spoke with some of the faculty members who had worked in US schools in the past, and they said that the overhead costs for international students in the US is even greater than in Canada. So while an international student was twice the cost at my old school, the prof told me that at his old school, a grad student can estimate their true cost to the department by multiplying their stipend by a factor of 3 or 4 (for both pubic and private schools).

 

Just expanding on my last post and sharing what I know "behind the scenes" of international admissions, for those interested