Does affirmative action apply towards international students as well?

Question

I know that when picking and choosing students for a new cohort, many prominent US universities tend to use affirmative action to support those from less affluent backgrounds. Does this also hold when admitting international students, or deciding on which international student to provide scholarships? In other words, would a top school prefer to admit more students from Africa and China as opposed to Germany or Japan, and prefer to provide scholarships disproportionate to the number of students attending; i.e. more scholarships per capita for students from third world countries?

Answer 1

This is not a complete answer, but I would like to point out that the question is somewhat misguided. Affirmative action in the US is primarily race-based. Affirmative action based on socioeconomic status in theory exists, but is at best implemented sporadically. (In fact, much of the the opposite still exists with legacy admissions.)

In the race-based affirmative action system, Asian* and White/Caucasian (i.e. European-descent) students are disadvantaged by the system, while Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino students are favored.

Asian-Americans are usually the mostly disfavoured group under affirmative action, as despite being a minority, they are not an "underrepresented" minority. In fact, the recent supreme court case was primarily from a group advocating for Asian-Americans, not White Americans.

To address the question here, affirmative action as practiced for American students probably does not apply to international students, as the racial grouping of students usually only applies to domestic students. In fact, when looking up statistics on demographics of US-university student populations, often "international" is listed as a separate category. So it could be that admissions officers are trained to treat all international applicants equally.

In general, affirmative action exists to increase diversity and to benefit underrepresented groups. So to that end, if international student affirmative action exists at all, it probably would not favour students from e.g. China or India, who are overrepresented in the US. (In the case of China, given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and China, it is hard to imagine being from China being any advantage; if anything, there has been frequent talk in the US these days of restricting students from China.)

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*officially, "Asian" in the US usually means all of Asia with the exception of the middle east, as those people fall under "white/Caucasian". In practice most people think of "Asian" as either East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam) or South Asian (Indian subcontinent).

Answer 2

Affirmative action first was required from government contractors "to ensure to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin" by J. F. Kennedy (see wikipedia). For university admission, affirmative action is now based on self-identification of applications as belonging to a certain racial category in order to allow the admission process to achieve a student body that reflects the racial makeup more representative of the population at large. Since many institutions are free to implement admissions as they see fit within general guidelines, a general answer cannot be given, but at least some will ask international applicants to self-identify racially and some might take the answer into consideration. This would give an advantage to international applicants of Hispanic heritage or Black-African heritage.

Answer 3

For all metrics that matter to the University bottom line (minority serving institution status and access to funding streams which that entails), international students are all under one similar category regardless of country of origin.