How hard is it to get into an Ivy League College? (I'm a Year 12 student from Australia)

Question

If this helps, I'm probably looking at a 99 UAI.

What is the GPA equivalence for that UAI?

So what are the prospects of being able to get in? And are the fees much higher for international students?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are eight Ivy league universities and they range from quite small to small.  All of them together enroll much less than 20,000 freshmen each year, while in the whole USA more than 2,000,000 freshmen start university... so they are only a small part of the US college system. Because they are so famous they get many thousands of applications for admission from the best students in the USA - Harvard, for instance, gets well over 20,000 applications including over 3000 applications from students ranked #1 in their high school. But only about 1200 will become Freshmen at Harvard. So, that's a pretty difficulty competition. American students are eligible for a lot of different scholarships, but in general international students have to pay the price of tuition and fees. At the Ivy League schools this year, that would be about $50,000 USD per year, plus the cost of living in the USA during the time when school is not in session.

Besides the Ivy League there are about 10 or so other elite private universities in the USA. Most commonly mentioned in rankings lists are Stanford, Duke, University of Chicago, and a few others, plus of course the great technical universities such as MIT and Caltech. But, the vast majority of American students do not attend these schools. THey are only for the very best students.