how do college appications work?

Answered

First, American colleges are not like European or Asian colleges. They are not meritocracies for the most part. So in China or India or Germany, your grades and test scores (which inform rank) are really all you need to get into a great college. In the US, we have 4300 4 year colleges and they are all different and 90% of them are private so they all have their own quirky rules. Lets just say, that the public colleges are more meritocratic than the private ones. So if you are just super book smart you will have a better chance at UCBerkeley than you would at MIT or Harvard. In addition to grades and test scores, American colleges want to see some evidence of talent, personality (personal character), leadership capability, excellent expository writing capability, evidence of some kind of intellectual vitality (like being really good at physics or astronomy or inventing patents), and being a varsity athlete also helps a lot. In the US, money talks, so if you have money to pay for your own tuition, room and board, you will get more offers.

There are basically 2 types of colleges, Buyers and Sellers. Buyer colleges need your enrollment because their business model works on having a full enrollment with lots of paying students. So many private schools say the first 3000 of them are buyer colleges. They will discount the tuition a bit but hardly ever give a full ride to anyone unless they are a star athlete they need for their basketball or football team. These can be small liberal arts colleges to big name brand universities. Applying to them as a int'l student is kind of waste of time if you need a lot of financial aid because they will never really fully fund you. You might get 10,000, 20,000, 35,000 but remember a good private college costs between 70-85,000 per year so unless you can come up with the remainder, it's not practical. The Seller colleges are Luxury Brands. They operate like Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Rolex, Rolls Royce, Ferrari. They only make available a certain amount of product each admissions cycle, and demand out numbers the supply by a factor of 50 or more. So the top 25 colleges in America are the Sellers, they don't give out merit aid because everyone applying is super smart, and they make up their own rubric or score card of criteria to determine if you are worthy of admissions. They have the most money to dole out for financial aid yet at the same time they are the hardest to get into. It's kind of like the English public school system. If you are poor and brilliant, you can attend Eton or Harrow or Oxford or Cambridge on scholarship. But if you are not brilliant, and just poor, you have fewer happy places to choose from.

So unfortunately, the trick is to be incredibly brilliant and incredibly poor at the same time. Then you maximize your chances of getting the best financial aid package. Other factor include race. So if you are Black, Hispanic, Indigenous American that's a plus. If are from a marginalized background like being queer, trans, or disabled, that's also a plus. And if you are as I mentioned before poor or come from a background where neither parent has been to a 4 year college, that is a plus. But if you are White, or from an over-represented minority like being Chinese, East Indian, that's a negative. And if you are middle class, upper middle class, or fairly wealthy, that's no advantage at all. You have to have $10,000,000-$20,000,000 to spare to donate to the college if you want to play the wealth card. It's like those wealthy oil sheiks who spend millions on buying a license plate tag with a low number like 14.

So the schools you mentioned as an International student are buyer colleges which means off the bat, they will not give full ride scholarships to International students in general. You might get some good offers but not nearly as good as applying to a better college like Caltech or MIT or JHU or an Ivy.

This is a major conundrum for International students. If you are brilliant you then can apply to most T25 schools with good probabilities to achieving a full ride. If you are one drawer or two drawers down in intellectual acumen, then the options close very fast, especially if you are looking for a full ride scholarship.

To answer your question about scholarships, you indicate on your Common App or Coalition App that you are applying for financial aid. Then you have to fill out something called the CSS profile which is a financial proforma of your families income and assets. This will be sent to the colleges and they will review the condition of your need and decide how much your family should have to pay for your college education that year of admission. Some schools like Trinity College in Hartford CT only make you do this once and give you a 4 year package deal, but most competitive colleges make you fill out the CSS profile each and every year. For Americans, we also have to fill out a 2nd form called the FAFSA annually as well but you are spared that.

So scholarships can be either MERIT based or NEED based. The Buyers hand out either merit or some combination or merit and need based. And the Sellers only hand out Need based aid. So you might get Presidential Scholarship from a school like Fordham University or Syracuse University but they only hand out like 5 or 10 or 20 of those in a class of 3000. So the odds are genuinely stacked against you. There are literally hundreds and thousands of small scholarships you can apply to but keep in mind that they are small fish , mostly $500, $1000, $2500. It's really hard to collect enough scholarships to that are not institutionally awarded to pay for your college education.

One thing you should do is talk to an older student who has done this process from India before. And it's even better if they are attending an American College so they can validate that what I told you is correct. The more information you gather from Indian students who are already in the US studying at good colleges the better off you will be. I do not wish to discourage you but to give you some hard facts so you don't waste your time applying to the wrong schools.

Good luck.