Archive for the ‘Admission in US Universities’ Category
Indian students opt for overseas education as admissions in local universities get tough
Rishabh Jain, 17, has written his CBSE XII boards this year. A student of science stream at DPS, R K Puram in Delhi, Jain has already made it to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, and Rutgers University, in the US. Jain has accepted the electrical engineering course at the University of Illinois. Not that the US universities he has made it to were the first options for him. Jain’s preference order read: IIT, Delhi Technical University and BITS Pilani.
Jain says: “Competition is tough in India. You don’t know whether you will get in at an institute of your choice.” However, for Jain and other science students in his batch, there is even more uncertainty about the future due to the new avatar of engineering entrance exams. Jain is writing the computer-based IIT Mains, but says “you can never be sure of making it through.”
Radhika Agarwal, Jain’s batchmate at DPS R K Puram and a student of humanities stream, has already made it to UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. For Agarwal too, the first choices were top colleges at the University of Delhi. But with the university deciding to increase the number of years for the undergraduate programme to four years from this batch, Agarwal decided to give the US her best shot. “I’m exercising the US option because of the uncertainty. No one knows anything about the new four-year undergraduate system at the University of Delhi. Plus, there are very few seats in the general category and very high cut-offs to deal with.”
For Reuben Datta, a student of Delhi’s Modern School, Barakhamba Road, Indian colleges were not an option when he started his research in class XI. “DU has changed the system and the first year of a new system is the year of chaos. Even if I get 97% in the boards, I won’t get through to an SRCC. I want to do economics with a minor in music. Do I have that option in India?” Datta asks. He has made it to four colleges in the US.
Here’s the dichotomy. The bright, young future talent like Jain, Agarwal and Datta is taking flight from India though they do not want to. The growing category of students can afford to go abroad for an undergraduate degree, but would be the happiest studying at the creme de la creme institutes here. This year, amidst uncertainty around admissions to the University of Delhi and engineering colleges, more students seem to be heading abroad.
Of every 10 students who come to Mrinalini Batra, Founder & CEO, International Educational Exchange, a Delhi-based firm that counsels students on going abroad, eight are undergrads and only two are graduates. Batra has been sending students abroad for the last 18 years and has seen the trend change 180 degrees. She says: “I see a lot of parents apply to the US as a back-up to top notch institutes in India. They are looking for better quality, better experience.” SAT, the key examinations for admission to undergraduate courses in the US, has seen the number of test-takers reach highest-ever levels.
While The College Board that conducts SAT does not have a break-up of data from different parts of the world, it confirms: “More Indian students than ever are taking the SAT.” The SAT is administered at nearly 7,000 test centres in more than 180 countries. Worldwide, nearly 3 million students take the SAT during an academic year. In India, the SAT is administered six times a year. There are 35 SAT test centres throughout India.
“Relative to the 2010-2011 school year, this has grown 25%,” says Leslie Sepuka, Director, Regional Communications, The College Board. Though she adds that test centre growth and test taker growth are not necessarily proportionate because the number of seats across test centres varies. Some like Urvashi Malik, Director and Senior Career Counsellor, CollegeCore Education, a firm that helps send students abroad, say that the increase in applications from India this year has been upwards of 30% for a university like Yale.
“This has been the upward trend and has gained momentum.” While the uncertainty around DU admissions and engineering exams may have contributed to the numbers, the trend is not limited to just Delhi or Mumbai. Malik has just helped send a girl from Dehradun to the University of Chicago on full scholarship. Batra gets applicants from Agra, Indore, Jaipur and Bhopal and these students are equally well-informed about their choices, she says.
Top universities corroborate the increase in the numbers of applications from undergrads from India in the recent years. At Yale, the number of undergrads from India is increasing faster than the number of graduate students. “We have seen an increase in the number of undergraduates from India. Our enrollment of undergraduate students from India has more than doubled from a decade ago. Our enrollment of all students from India has grown nearly 50% from a decade ago,” says Shana N Schneider, Director of Communications, Yale Office of International Affairs.
According to Yale University, the numbers of undergrads from India for the last three years are: 40 in 2012; 39 in 2011 and 37 in 2010. “We can not, however, disclose application numbers. We can confirm that the number of applications to Yale has gone up each of the last three years,” Schneider adds.
At Princeton University, for instance, the number of undergraduate students has more than doubled in the last five years. This is even when the numbers of graduate students decreased from 84 in 2008-09 to 71 in 2012-13. A total of 59 undergrad students enrolled at the university in 2012-13 academic year as against 50 the previous year and 25 in 2008-09. Its spokesperson Martin Mbugua attributes this to the no-loan financial aid programme, which is available to international and domestic students.
Princeton became the first University in the US to remove loans from financial aid packages and instead replace them with need-based grants that do not have to be repaid. All of Princeton scholarships are need-based (Princeton does not award merit-based scholarships to any students).
“This system makes it possible for our undergraduates to graduate without debt. The University’s admission process is need-blind for both domestic and international students, which means that students are not at any disadvantage if they need financial aid,” says Mbugua. That makes it easier for parents like Sahima Datta, an alumna of University of Delhi and mother of Reuben, to back her son’s decision to go abroad. “US offers a much larger canvas and with scholarships, it’s better to opt to go out,” she says.
Source: The Economic Times, April 16, 2013
US colleges cut fees in drive towards $10k degree
That American degree you so coveted and was unattainable because of high costs may not be so out of reach after all. Some US colleges have taken the first tentative steps to beat down soaring tuition fees by proposing a $10,000 (about Rs. 530,000) degree that also takes aim at the nearly trillion dollar college debt that the country has racked up.
The drive towards the $10,000 college degree will gee up students from India, more than 100,000 of who are enrolled in US colleges any given year. Although most Indian students come to the US for graduate studies, more and more are enrolling for four-year undergraduate degree, which some 10 Texas colleges are proposing to offer for as little as $10,000. Typical cost for a four-year undergraduate degree in a modest college for in-state US residents is around $30,000 (Rs. 1.6 million).
But Indian parents, the wealthier among who are sending their children to four-year undergrad colleges after their Class 12, can rack up more than $100,000 enrolling in elite US institutions. Higher education such as law degrees or two-year MBA degrees from top-ranked schools cost anywhere from $80,000 to $150,000.
While elite institutions and higher degrees may not feel the immediate effect, the first shot across soaring tuition fees in America has been fired by 10 modest Texas schools, following a challenge from the state governor Rick Perry to bring down costs. The 10 schools account for nearly 50,000 students, roughly 10% of undergrads at public universities in the state, according to the Wall Street Journal, among several outlets that described last month’s developments in this area.
First off the block is Angelo State University, a 7,000-student school in San Angelo in West Texas, which announced last week that it will offer a $10,000 degree starting next fall. Various schools of Texas Tech, Texas A&M University, and University of Texas have said they will follow suit. “A $10,000 degree provides an opportunity for students to earn a low-cost, high-quality degree that will get them where they want to go in their careers and their lives,” Texas Governor Rick Perry, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for President, said in a statement.
Not everyone is chuffed about the development. Some have argued that the quality of education will suffer. Others have spoken of fudged numbers, with suggestions that the $10,000 target does not include variables such as campus housing and text books. Fee lowering has been attained in some cases by proposing expansion in the size of class rooms, shifting some courses online, and use of adjunct faculty who will be paid on a per-class basis.
Nevertheless, the drive to lower costs points to growing recognition in the US that education is going beyond the reach of poor and middle-class families, and students often enter the job market with a massive debt burden — a model India is also adopting with growing privatization of education. Both Republicans and Democrats have made this a talking point. Recent reports have shown that Americans owe nearly $1 trillion in student loans, substantially more than the $700 billion they owe in credit card debts.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 9, 2012
Record number of Chinese enter US post graduate courses, Indians far behind
Chinese students entering post graduate schools in the US outnumbered Indians by a heavy margin, registering an 18 per cent growth last semester as against a two per cent surge by Indians, a new survey says. The 2012 fall semester marked the seventh successive year of double-digit growth in applications from China, results of a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), a US organisation dedicated to the advancement of graduate education and research said.
Applications from Indians increased by two per cent, following an eight per cent increase in 2011, while the numbers of students from South Korea too registered a two per cent rise. The survey polled all 500 US colleges and universities that were members of the Council of Graduate Schools as of January 2012. The majority of institutions reported an increase in applications over the last year, with an average increase of 11 per cent at these institutions.
Chinese undergraduate students rose in number as well. The Institute of International Education (IIE), a non- governmental organisation based in the US, reported that Chinese students increased by 43 per cent at the undergraduate level from 2010 to 2011, which largely accounts for the growth this past year.
By November 2011, the total Chinese enrolment in the United States reached 158,000 or nearly 22 per cent of the overall international student population. “The overall growth in applications is encouraging, but there are interesting variations between individual countries and regions,” Debra W Stewart, President of the Council of Graduate Schools was quoted by the state-run China Daily here as saying. “We need to ensure that US graduate education attracts students from around the globe by increasing outreach efforts and pursuing policies that would allow those graduates who want to remain in the United States and contribute to our economy to do so,” she said.
Liu Haishan, a consultant at the New Oriental Vision Consulting Company, an overseas consulting agency said “more and more wealthy Chinese parents prefer to send their children to the United States.” Liu added, “The world’s top 100 universities only include two in China – Tsinghua and Peking University – but there are around 60 in the States. Furthermore, you only have one chance a year to take the college entrance exam in China, but you can take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) six times a year, which means a higher chance of entering a top US university”.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), April 13, 2012
MBA Admissions: Queues at top US B-schools turn shorter
The gangbuster growth of business school applications during the recession appears to be a thing of the past for two-year full-time MBA programs. This year, application volume was down at 21 of the top 30 full-time MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. The decline in applications is a trend that appears to be accelerating, with eight additional schools reporting declines in application volume this year over 2010.
Applications were down at seven of the top 10 business schools, including the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Stanford saw the biggest dip in application volume of the top 10 schools, with 586 fewer applications this year, an 8 per cent decline from 2010. Still, some of the top 30 schools managed to buck the downward trend. Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business, University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and University of California, Los Angeles’ Anderson School of Management, reported substantial increases in applications, with each school receiving more than 200 applications over last year’s total.
The downward spiral in application volume at the top 30 schools is mirrored in the business school world at large: 67 per cent of two-year full-time MBA programs surveyed by the Graduate Management Admission Counil (GMAC) reported a decrease in applications this year, up from 47 per cent in 2010. A skittish economy, coupled with candidates unwilling to leave their jobs, may be causing some to hold off applying to business school, GMAC noted in its latest survey of application trends. “The impact of economic uncertainty on admissions trends for full-time MBA programs may still be underway,” GMAC said in the report.
The smaller pipeline of MBA applications this year meant that getting into some of the top business schools has become easier. Two-thirds of the top 30 business schools admitted a larger percentage of applicants this year, up from one-third the year before. The University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management had the biggest slip in selectivity of the top 30 schools, admitting nearly 41 per cent of students, up from 30 per cent in 2010. More typical were the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management, both of which saw selectivity slip five percentage points. Even Stanford, the most selective of the top 30 business schools, became slightly easier to get into, accepting 7 per cent of all applicants, up one percentage point from 2010.
Source: The Economic Times (Courtesy – Bloomberg Businessweek), October 21, 2011
Indian students eye seat in US universities
With eyes set on an American university, students and parents gathered in numbers at the US education mission student fair held in Mumbai on Friday. Spokespersons of a host of American universities from 15 states assembled under one roof to help candidates clear doubts and students made the best of the opportunity.
Present at this session was the Director General of the US Foreign Commercial Service (USFCS) Suresh Kumar. “The need for education is universal and this is a platform to help students sitting in India to understand American universities better,” Kumar said. He added that one of the main reasons to host the education fair was to save students from applying to universities through agents and touts and to avoid any kind of problems later on.
“Candidates can clear all their doubts, including fees, and be assured that there’s no foul play involved,” he said. While the Indian government’s aim is to increase the percentage of students completing higher education, availability of education institutes poses a concern. Kumar stressed that with more and more American students eyeing Indian universities, availability of seats for Indian students might be in jeopardy. “It is therefore important to ensure that careers of students in India are secure and there has to be an increase not just on quantity but also on the quality of education,” said Kumar. The universities present at the education fair shed light on e-education and student exchange programs.
Niranjan Kasi, 20, was looking for universities offering courses in masters in finance. “Even though we have an array of websites that can give us any information we need, we are always scared to totally trust the information. By personally talking to officials from the universities, we get concrete information,” he said. The education fair also hosted a special session for students explaining to them the procedure that needs to be followed to obtain a student visa without any hassles.
“To know any information about education institutes in the US, one can always directly approach the consulate or the embassy,” Kumar said.
Source: The Times of India (Online Edition), October 15, 2011
Indians 2nd largest foreign student population in US
With more Indians flying to Ivy League institutions, the US State Department held a US-India Higher Education Summit meeting on Thursday at Georgetown University to promote the partnership between the countries. Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the US in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20% in the past year, according to the American Embassy.
Although a majority of Indian students in the US are graduate students, undergraduate enrolment has grown by more than 20% in the past few years. And while wealthy families have been sending their children to the best American schools for years, the idea is beginning to spread to middle-class families, for whom Delhi University has historically been the best option.
American universities have now become “safety schools” for increasingly stressed and traumatized Indian students and parents, who complain that one fateful event – the final high school examination – can make or break a teenager’s future career. This admission season, students exchanged exam horror stories.
One knew a boy who was sick with typhoid but could not reschedule. “I know a girl who saw the physics paper and she fainted,” said Nikita Sachdeva, her eyes widening. Nikita, 19, graduated from Delhi Public School in 2010, with a 94.5%, one point shy of the cut-off to study economics at St. Stephen’s, one of the top colleges at Delhi University. She decided to take a year off and work as an intern at a non-profit group affiliated with the WHO, while applying to American universities.
But for some students, it is not merely the competition that drives them to apply to study in the US. It is also the greater intellectual freedom of an American liberal arts education. India’s educational system is rigid, locking students into an area of study and affording them little opportunity to take courses outside their major beyond the 11th grade. Only a few courses of study are considered lucrative career paths.
Source: The Times of India, October 15, 2011
Squeezed out in India, students turn to US
Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.
But because of her 93.5 per cent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as DU, her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools. “Daughter now enrolled at Dartmouth!” her mother, Madhavi Chandra, wrote, updating her Facebook page. “Strange swings this admission season has shown us. Can’t get into DU, can make it to the Ivies.”
Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending US colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.
This summer, Delhi University issued cut-off scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 per cent in some cases. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which are spread across the country, have an acceptance rate of less than 2 per cent – and that is only from a pool of roughly 500,000 who qualify to take the entrance exam, a feat that requires two years of specialized coaching after school.
“The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”
US universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the US and growing economic hardship among US families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.
Representatives from many of the Ivy League institutions have begun making trips to India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices in India, partly aimed at attracting a wider base of students. The State Department held a US-India Higher Education Summit meeting on Thursday at Georgetown University to promote the partnership between the countries.
Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the US in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 per cent in the past year, according to the US Embassy in New Delhi.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 14, 2011
Strategy for Indian students aspiring for US education
For Indian students aspiring to go to America, a top U.S. official in the city at the head of a delegation of officials from 21 universities has useful advice to offer. “The best part of the U.S. university system is that you have a wide range of courses and pricing options to choose from, so first educate yourself about what you want and what options are best suited to your career goals,” says Suresh Kumar, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Trade Promotion and Director-General, US & Foreign Commercial Service.
The U.S. has 14 of the top 20 universities in the world listed across respected independent surveys, so there’s no doubt about the quality of the education you’ll get, but you’ve got to choose right to get the most out of the system. An alumnus of St Columba’s, Delhi University and the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Sciences, Mumbai, and a former journalist, Kumar should know the aspirations of Indian students better than his peers back home in America. His daughter is a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes scholar; his son studied at Stanford. And he has held top executive positions, including president of Johnson & Johnson’s worldwide consumer pharmaceuticals division, as well as done stints in academia, besides being the Thunderbird School of Global Management’s Distinguished Executive in Residence.
As you’d expect of a first-generation immigrant success story and father of two highly qualified young people, Kumar chalks out a strategy for applying to U.S. universities. He does it by giving an example from an area he’s familiar with — MBA programmes. “If you study business, choose a specialisation according to your interest, skill sets and potential,” he says. Of course, everyone dreams of going to Harvard Business School or to Standford, but their intake rate is 13 per cent and 7 per cent respectively of all the applications filed in a particular year, Kumar points out. So, before applying, do your research and find out which programme is best for your area of interest. If you, for instance, are in love with the idea of counting beans for the rest of your life and making piles of money early on in life, it won’t help your career track if you enroll for an MBA programme that’s prepares its students to become marketing whiz kids. Kumar calls it “understanding the price benefit”. He would recommend Thunderbird, which is in Glendale, Arizona, for students interested in the area of global management.
But Kumar isn’t in the country to offer free career advice. The delegation of 21 universities he’s leading represents what he describes as the “width of choice” that the American system offers. Their visit coincides with the U.S.- Indian Higher Education Summit in Washington, D.C. between HRD minister Kapil Sibal and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. India students, whose numbers added up to a little less than 105,000 last year, represent 15 per cent of the international student population on American campuses.
Source: Mail Today, October 11, 2011
Admission of Indian students for graduate-level studies in US increases by 8%
The number of Indian students coming to the US for graduate-level studies has increased by eight per cent from 2010 to 2011, while those from China topped the list with a record rise of 23 per cent, according to a latest report. The overall foreign graduate admissions rose by 11 per cent from 2010 to 2011, the largest increase since 2006, the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) said in its survey report on admission trends. Last year the increase was just three per cent. Among foreign countries, China topped the list with a record increase of 23 per cent, the report released yesterday said.
“While the growth in admissions is driven in large part by increases from China, it also reflects a broader trend as evidenced by strong numbers from the Middle East and India and a stabilisation in the numbers from South Korea,” said Debra W. Stewart, CGS President. This kind of strong growth in international student applications and admissions is “a real testament” to the quality of the US graduate institutions in an increasingly competitive marketplace, she said.
According to the report, the changes in offers of admission to prospective international students vary by field of study and institution type. Admissions increased in all eight broad fields. The largest increases were seen in business (16 per cent) and physical and earth sciences (15 per cent) while social sciences and psychology saw the smallest increase at three per cent.
Offers of admission increased at nearly the same rate at both private, not-for-profit institutions (12 per cent) and public institutions (11 per cent), the report said. Offers of admission by US graduate schools to prospective international students increased in all four major regions of the United States this year. The West saw the most growth (13 per cent), the South and Midwest both increased by 11 per cent and the Northeast grew by 10 per cent, it said.
Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), August 17, 2011
High cut-offs drive students to US
The intimidating barriers for entry to India’s top colleges have had an unexpected fallout. If the rise in student visa applications this year is anything to go by, students, instead of downgrading their choices and settling for second- or third-best, are increasingly looking westwards and flooding American universities with admission applications.
Data released by the US embassy reveals that the number of Indian students who have applied for visas to study in the US is up 20% over last year. Education counsellors say they are seeing large crowds again, the vital difference being that the students seeking advice are much younger. While 24,500 Indian students were granted visas to join American universiti
es last year, most went there for a Masters and 14.5% joined a grad school. “But this year has seen a phenomenal rise in the number of undergraduate students,” said counselor Pratibha Jain.
Officials at the American embassy confirmed that the number of student visa applications in India was already significantly higher than at this point last year. “The US has greatly expanded its consular staffing and educational outreach initiatives to ensure that prospective students can get the visa appointments and information they need,” said an official. “This effort includes significantly increased funding for the Education-USA advising centers.”
Jain said she had noticed a shift in the attitude of students. “Earlier, they all wanted to go to the famous 10 to 15 universities,” she said. “Now there is a range of good second-tier colleges they are willing to go to. Community colleges that charge about Rs. 1.2-1.5 million annually are also on the Indian students’ radar now.” However, experts said it was too early to forecast the number of actual entrants to American universities this fall. “It depends on how many are accepted at universities and how many meet with consular approval,” said an education consultant.
Source: The Times of India, August 6, 2011
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