Why are there so many Internationals on GradCafe

[TakeruK]

A professor at UC Berkeley said that 75% of all their applications are from International students.

[skyentist]

On 3/14/2014 at 4:54 PM, TakeruK said:

A professor at UC Berkeley said that 75% of all their applications are from International students.

I wonder if it is the same for less famous institutions (ones that aren't berkeley, stanford, washu, mit, yale etc.) I feel like if international students who want to get a student visa and come study/live in the US would be more likely to apply to schools that are easier to get into. This is just because Berkeley is hard to get into regardless of citizenship!

[TakeruK]

 

That's a good point--but these students must know that they can't stay in the US forever. I guess if they just want to spend some time in the US, do some school, get some worldly experience, then that's great too and yeah, probably they will apply to less competitive schools. But I know that many international students want to study in the US so that they can get US jobs and permanently move. Usually, this means most of us will aim for the top programs. For international students like me (not necessarily wanting to move to the US forever, but also not trying to leave my home country forever), I only applied to top programs because if I was going to go through the hassle of living in another country, dealing with foreign status etc. then I might as well go for a school that is higher calibre than anything in my home country. That is, I only applied to US schools that were better for me than the best Canadian school. 

[hikaru1221]

Some official statistics from Princeton:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.princeton.edu/gradschool/about/docs/admission/admission_stats.pdf