International Applicants to U.S. Schools Rise

A previous post on this blog discussed the many pressures that the modern college applicant experiences these days—from increased domestic competition from increasingly-qualified peers to ever-increasing college costs that vastly surpass the rate of inflation. Add to that, the now mounting pressure for domestic applicants to compete on an international scale with mass influxes of students coming from other countries to take American college seats.

The economic rise of China has created a parallel rise in its citizens’ standards-of-living. Increasingly so, more middle-class Chinese parents can now afford to spend money on grooming their children to be viable candidates in the college matriculation pool in the United States. From NBC’s Behind the Wall series, which examines trends in China, reports have found that the number of Chinese undergraduates has more than doubled in the last two years. In fact, during the 2010-2011 academic years, the number of international students increased by five percent to 723,277, of which forty-six percent claim India, China, or South Korea as their homelands, according to the Institute for International Education.

The controversy lies in the universities’ willingness to accept students from abroad: from the university perspective, foreign-born students are advantageous because they tend to pay the full cost of tuition, thereby subsidizing those students who are accepted domestically. Take the extreme case of California, where in 2010-2011, over 95,000 students were accepted from overseas to buttress its financially dilapidated school system. With a combination of decreased federal funding and budget shortfalls, school systems that lack the financial wherewithal to finance their operations from domestic students are increasingly looking towards the international community to foot the bill. Moreover, foreign students also benefit the American economy—to the tune of nearly $21 billion a year in tuition and living expenses. In fact, the government finds this figure so appealing that it is working on expanding its visa-processing capabilities in China to meet increasing demand for U.S.-bound students.

What does all of this mean for the domestic student? Competition is going to increase exponentially. In fact, foreign students are posing a challenge to even the brightest of domestic students as they vie for precious American university placements. If this trend is to continue, we can expect the international applicant to comprise an increasingly larger percentage of the American university campus. While diversity at the university level undoubtedly enriches one’s collegiate experience, it is worth mentioning that at this rate of change, college becomes increasingly more elusive to even the brightest American mind.

This post discusses an article posted on MSNBC’s Behind the Wall series.