Tue 20 May 2008
Financial Aid for International Students
Posted by David under Financial Aid, International Admissions
Posted at 12:52 pmIn the ever increasing category of Things-That-I-Was-Wrong-About, today’s entry is international financial aid. In discussing the Korean prep school story, I had speculated that the increasing wealth in countries like Korea, coupled with the high (relative) income of the sorts of families who would send their children to English-speaking high schools, meant that many of the international students would not be as expensive, in terms of financial aid, as their peers in the past. HWC suggested that I was wrong about this. And, as so often happens, he is right. Consider the College’s 2007-2008 Common Data Set document:
If institutional financial aid is available for undergraduate degree-seeking nonresident aliens, provide the number of undergraduate degree-seeking nonresident aliens who were awarded need-based or non-need-based aid: 127
Average dollar amount of institutional financial aid awarded to undergraduate degree-seeking nonresident aliens: $43,484
Total dollar amount of institutional financial aid awarded to undergraduate degree-seeking nonresident aliens: $5,522,437
Those are big number. Since there were a total of 132 international students at Williams, only 5 are paying the full price, as opposed to around 50% of US students. Moreover, I think that the maximum possible award is not far above (?) the $43,484 given to the average aid-receiving international students. So, HWC is correct. International students are, still, very expensive.
And, at the end of the day, this is one reason why I constantly rail against all the money that the College wastes of local pork. Instead of spending millions on these boondoggles, the College should admit another 25 international students. Having the best students in the world at Williams is much more important than the marginal increase we get in faculty recruitment/retention by spending money on local services.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
That’s kind of an odd, random comparison, since it’s not at all clear that those are competing priorities for the same dollars.
I am a fan of the college’s international financial aid policies, obviously, since that allowed me to attend, but I am also aware that a number of faculty members weigh the quality of local schools very highly when choosing Williams over any other institution; I have spoken to tenured faculty with younger children who have noted that, if anything were to make them leave Williamstown (which in most ways is an ideal place to raise a family), it would be the pathetic state of Mt. Greylock high school.
Money spent on helping local schools is a heckuva lot more important than the endless construction projects of recent years.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
dkane:
You shouldn’t feel bad. I made the same mistake years ago when I fell for the urban legend that these schools use international students as full-fare cash cows. Then, I started looking at the aid numbers you cite and realized that, for all intents and purposes, international students are typically getting close to full price discounts.
It is very, very expensive to enroll internationals. The supply is unlimited as we’ve seen with Williams’ apps jump from 500 to 1500 per year. Elite colleges can enroll as many as they are willing to budget for.
A lot of the much-ballyhoo’d drop in acceptance rates is caused by a glut of international applications — applications that really don’t impact the underlying chances of a given student’s admission. It’s like trying to dissolve more sugar in a pitcher of sweet iced tea. At a certain point, you simply can’t make it any sweeter. 500 international apps? 1500 international apps? One billion international apps? What’s the difference?
May 20th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
BTW, international aid is one of the few areas where you find signficant variance among Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore.
All three end up at the same place with roughly 7% internationals in the student body. The percentage of internationals receiving college aid grants, however, varies considerably:
Williams: 92%
Amherst: 68%
Swarthmore: 51%
Williams considerably outspends Swarthmore and Amherst on international price discounting, both in per capita dollars and as a percentage of the overall price discounting.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
BTW #2:
International admissions is like one big impenetrable fortress to me. I feel like I have some feel for the way domestic admissions works. I can, at least generally, make informed predictions if I see a complete enough picture of an applicant’s application and high school. There’s bee a lot written on the subject, starting with the suberb book, The Gatekeepers.
International admissions? Nobody writes about it. No apparent rhyme nor reason. I wouldn’t begin to predict for any applicant. I offer some advice to a few international applicants here and there on CC and just stand in amazement about why a kid from a “small” city in China gets accepted ED on a full discount scholarship and someone else doesn’t. I also stand in awe of the guts some of these kids show in packing up and moving halfway around the world for college.
I have a working hypothesis that networks of feeder schools nurtured by colleges over the years play a disproportionate role in international admissions. The same school names crop up today with the regularity that my freshmen entrymates wore Choate t-shirts back in the day. I get the sense that places like Raffles Junior College have a tacit understanding that they will send “x” number of students to each elite college and select the appropriate students for each college each year. They send the “Williams” student to Williams, the “Swarthmore” student to Swarthmore, and so on and so forth. These feeder schools are all over the place from Nepal to India to Singapore to Hong Kong to Korea.
I also have a nagging feeling that there is scholarship money in the system from governments, corporations, etc.
Maybe someday, I’ll come across an expert in this field.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Are Swat and Amherst need-blind for international students? If so, how long have they been?
May 20th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Those numbers make me shake my head even more about the amazing domestic students that are rejected every year by the likes of Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore etc.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Amherst’s board voted to become “need-blind” for internationals about a month ago.
I’m not sure what that really means. They are are “need blind” for domestic students, but miraculously end up with the same percentage of full-fare customers, year after year after years. Might have something to do with the fact they ask, right on the application, whether they will be applying for financial aid.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
hwc: as someone who went to something of a “feeder” school (about half of our class ended up at US Ivies and top LACs, the remainder went to the UK), I can assure that there is no “tacit agreement” of the sort you describe.
I can’t even imagine how a college counselor in Korea or India or Bulgaria would go about differentiating the “Swarthmore” students from the “Williams” students. The notion that one can make such meaningful distinctions in high school, from halfway around the world, and with students who have probably never visited the campuses in question, is just silly. For the purposes of guidance counselors at these high schools, one elite American school is as good as any other (as long as it’s not Cornell).
Students apply wherever they like, often with little to no guidance from their high school (even at the best schools, the level of awareness about Williams is very low), and the patterns that emerge tend to reflect the overall excellent educational opportunities available to these students, as well as their high awareness of and desire to take advantage of opportunities in the West, more than any specific plan to send ‘x’ number of students to a given college.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
The maximum possible aid award is ~50,000. For 2008-09 it will be:
Tuition+Room+Board+HouseFees = 47530
PersonalExpenses+Books = 2000
Vacation Allowance = 450 (International only) (Necessary as many students do not have places to go and campus is closed in december)
Health Insurance (Mandatory) = ~1000
Travel (One round trip a year for internationals. Two round trips a year for domestic, although the amount is lower) (2000 a year if you live on the other side of the world, ~1400 if you live in Europe, 500 x 2 if you live in Cali)
Minus amount expected to be earned through student job = -1600 (1450 for the first year)
Total: 51380. Subtract Loans (no longer applicable), and summer earning expectation (zero if parental contribution is <4000 a year, up to ~3000 otherwise)
This number was 1000 lower last year, and 1000 lower the year before. It seems to grow at approximately that rate.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
One day some university in the world is going to go “National origin blind” and the proverbial excrement is going to hit the fan.
Given ~1 billion dollars and a national origin/need blind institution, in 10 years it would be by far the best academic institution in the world. And I think it would be it will be about 30-40% Indian + Chinese, simply from the representative population spreads.
It will happen, but I doubt it will in the US, give the super high levels of patriotism here. Currently only the US colleges have money, which is why other places can’t do it. But I except that inequality to be broken eventually…
May 20th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Past a certain point, there will be raised the policy question, “to what extent should U.S. ad valorem and income tax payers financially support infra-structure and other benefits to U.S. educational and other tax free charitable institutions which are substantially providing services to a large number of aliens at prices below fully allocated cost”? It is primarily a financial question concerning a level playing field in international trade and not a patriotism question.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
frank:
That’s a very legitimate point. There is no reason that US taxpayers should subsidize the education of foreign nationals.
In the long run, it may actually be in our national interest if highly educated foreign nationals become US citizens after college. However, it’s certainly a legitimate question.
It will be interesting to see the extent of foreign national contributions to alumni funds. We know it’s rather large at Williams (Bronfman). Who wants to see how much the bin Laden family has donated to Harvard over the years?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:11 am
hwc: that was a disgusting comment. Would you bring up Ted Kazcynski in a discussion about how Polish-American students fit in at Harvard and other elite colleges? Or maybe consider Seung-Hoi Cho as representative of Asian-American students’ behavior?
Just dropping the bin Laden name like that in this discussion, even though you know nothing about their donations (or lack thereof), as if they are a good indicator of international students’ behavior after graduation, is just sickening and low.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am
Uhhh. Hello. The bin Laden family has been reported to be a major Harvard donor. The plane that was arranged to take them all out of the United States the day after 9/11 had a pickup in Cambridge.
I think frank raises a perfectly valid point. If US taxpayers are going to subsidize the education of foreign nationals in the form of tax-exemptions, there probably should be some transparency.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:36 pm
As an international student who attended Williams before they became need-blind, I am happy to announce I have contributed nothing of value to society, but some of my peers have.