The American Connection

Felix Twaalfhoven '79 is half Dutch, half Swiss. His parents were educated in the United States, his father at the Harvard Business School. Twaalfhoven's roommate at the Atlantic School in Wales was from New York. "Harvard is just a name to people over there--like Oxford is to people here," he says.

Mimi Le '79 was born in south Vietnam. She lived near the University of Chicago between ages two and nine, then returned to Saigon until last spring. Her parents are academicians. She was the only one in her Vietnamese school to take the SAT tests.

Dani Rodrik '79 went to the American School in Istanbul, Turkey. His college advisor there was a Harvard graduate. According to Rodrik, Harvard knows his school well and understands that "standards are high."

Seamus Malin '62 was born in Dublin. He came to the States when his father took a job here. Malin is now director of financial aid at Harvard and the admissions officer responsible for overseeing the selection of undergraduate foreign students.

"Most foreign students at Harvard have an American connection,' either first-hand or tenuous," says Malin, from his office on the third floor of Byerly Hall. That connection may be established through family, friends or previous visits to the United States--as the careers of these freshmen indicate--or in other, unknown ways. "We ask on the application how students learned about Harvard, but that's a loaded question. They give us the answer they think we'd like to hear, that it's known all over the world, has famous professors, etc.," Malin notes.

But apparently telling Harvard what it wants to hear is not enough. While approximately 19 per cent of all applicants are accepted to Harvard, only about 10 per cent of foreign candidates (not including foreign students applying from U.S.schools) get thick envelopes.

As a result, the admissions committee sees no need for an active recruiting program. Harvard clubs and individual alumni abroad do conduct some interviews--usually on a "catch as catch can" basis, Malin says--but students by and large apply on their initiative, without any encouragement from the University.

This is not to say Harvard gets to the world's top applicants. The best two or three students in a European high school would normally apply to Oxford or Cambridge if they intended to study outside their own countries, Malin says. Nonetheless, the qualifications of those accepted are very high, according to Malin. "You really do have to be a little extraspecial to get in as a foreign student," he says.

Not surprisingly, one of those extraspecial traits is an ability to take standardized American tests. Like Mimi Le,85 to 90 per cent of all foreign students accepted, regardless of where they come from, take the SAT tests. Malin acknowledged that the admissions committee "tends to give a break to foreign students taking these tests," since SAT's are a "middle-class oriented, unique American phenomenon," but admissions officers nevertheless demand some proof of academic proficiency.

Predictably, a minimum requirement is good understanding of English. Malin states flatly that without "100 per cent conviction that a student is fluent in English we won't take him."

After that, however, standard criteria give way to a more subjective evaluation. Because the usefulness of test scores is limited, students must eventually be judged in the context of their own respective cultures. While a comparable problem exists in U.S. admissions processes, sorting out educational systems on an international scale is infinitely more complex. Malin devotes an entire office bookshelf and much reading time to pamphlets explaining the varying educational philosophies of different nations.

None of this would have been nearly as necessary 15 or 20 years ago. "Harvard-Radcliffe has not always been that high on having foreign students," Malin recalls. Change didn't really come until the early sixties, when the applicant pool began to grow steadily. By 1969, growth had leveled off and the last seven years have seen little variation in the numbers of foreign students flocking to Cambridge.

No attempts to accept more students from Third World countries have been made in recent years, for instance. "Our main effort for recruiting from ethnic populations is on the American scene," Malin says, adding that "if the [admissions] committee was forced to make the choice, it would be more likely to take black Americans than black Africans." According to Malin, however, the University has been able "to have its cake and eat it too" since the admissions office has stepped up U.S. minority recruitment without cutting down the number of foreign acceptances.

Malin also notes that the amount of financial aid given to foreign students has remained constant over the past few years. Proportionally more foreign students are on scholarship than nonforeign ones, since foreign families which maintain an upper middle class standard of living still may not be able to afford Harvard's tuition.

Malin explains the comparatively small number of female foreign students by recounting the story of a Latin American woman victimized by a double standard in her family that kept her home while her brothers went to college. "In some countries it is simply not acceptable for a woman to leave her family. It implies something about the family as a unit," he says.

Naturally, feelings about home also play an important role in the lives of those who do decide to come. "In their own minds they represent their schools, communities, families and countries," Malin says. This brings with it a heightened sense of responsibility to perform."

And despite the usual first-term problems, Malin feels most foreign students at Harvard do just that.