Does nationality play a role in your chances of being accepted to a graduate program?

[Oplo]

What would happen if an admission committee has two very similar applications (similar GRE scores, academic experience, etc.), one from a local student and one from an international student (with accredited proficiency in English), does any of these applications would have an advantage because of the nationality?
I’m Mexican and I would like to know if this increases or decreases my chances to get into a graduate program in the US or Canada.

[MathCat]

Being an international student certainly can make it harder. Usually an international student costs more for the university to fund, especially for publicly funded universities in the US. There are also often a limited number of spaces available to international students. Your credentials may not be viewed the same way - for instance, some countries have big problems with corruption in their universities, so your grades could be almost meaningless.

 

But really, I think the premise is uncommon. Even if your test scores and experience are the same, your personal statement(s) and letters of reference will not be, and those will play a big part in the decisions.

[TakeruK]

I agree with MathCat on both parts (international students cost more, so domestic students preferred and that it's really unlikely two applicants will have exactly the same credentials).

 

Even for private universities (where tuition costs the same for both domestic and international students), international students have fewer opportunities to apply for external fellowships (most are US citizens only) so there is always potential for higher costs for international students than domestic students.

 

In Canada, there are no private research universities, so you will always cost more as a Mexican than a Canadian would. But the difference in cost in Canada is less severe than in the US, so perhaps this difference is not as strong. 

 

Finally, there is another effect that is hard to determine in advance. Schools usually choose to "project" a certain image of themselves and the number of local vs. international students make up part of this image. Sometimes, schools want to advertise themselves as "more international" because it shows that they are so good, they attract the best people from all over the world. If the school is trying to do this, they will likely provide more incentives/money for departments to take on international grad students so they can boast about their high international student fraction. In other cases, schools will want to show that they are "a Canadian school designed to educate and support Canadians" so they might want to make sure their domestic enrollment is high. It's very possible that the same school might have one attitude for a decade and then switch strategies as they need to. I would say that it's pretty much impossible for us to know what each school's long term plans / internal politics are so it's not something we can really worry about or affect. 

 

I think that on average, it's a disadvantage to be applying as an international student, though.

[Catria]

Being an international student certainly can make it harder. Usually an international student costs more for the university to fund, especially for publicly funded universities in the US. There are also often a limited number of spaces available to international students. Your credentials may not be viewed the same way - for instance, some countries have big problems with corruption in their universities, so your grades could be almost meaningless.

 

But really, I think the premise is uncommon. Even if your test scores and experience are the same, your personal statement(s) and letters of reference will not be, and those will play a big part in the decisions.

 

One would have assumed that, at public schools, even out-of-state domestics cost more than in-staters, and then the difference between a domestic out-of-stater and an international is not nearly as great as the difference between an in-stater and an out-of-stater, assuming that there is no international differential between an international and a domestic out-of-stater. At privates, all students cost the same.

 

But, in some fields (especially true of STEM fields; these guys are usually much less abundant in the humanities) Chinese and Indian students are at a disadvantage over equally-qualified students from other countries. Dr. Larrondo once said that Chinese and Indian kids sometimes tend to spend an entire postbac on preparing for tests and, in the Chinese case, some masters programs really amount to a whole 2 years of test-prep, and that recs from these countries often sound similar from a student to another (Rob Knop). And that's just the honest kids; Chinese kids have another strike against them: if they are honest, oftentimes their personal statements will show a large discrepancy with their GRE/TOEFL scores.