More and more US colleges and universities are turning to conditional admissions as a legitimate form of attracting international students. The institutions are now seeing conditional admission as part of a more comprehensive recruiting strategy as a growing number move away from a policy of recruiting students purely on their own terms.

Conditional admission is the policy of admitting international students who are academically capable but don’t quite meet the necessary English language specifications, on the condition that they study English before and during their studies in order to meet the requirements. This is a move away from the traditional system of only admitting students who were sufficiently capable in English from the outset.

In most cases, students are given a full academic year to honour their language commitments, but some require as little as one semester to meet the necessary standard. Some universities such as Iowa State University have been offering conditional admission places for as long as three decades. Historically, the institutions that have offered conditional admission have done so because they have their own intensive English language programmes. More recent converts to conditional admission have been able to do so because of partnerships with independent providers such as ELS Educational Services Inc.

ELS Offer intensive twelve-week programmes at fifty-five sites nationwide where students learn grammar and vocabulary as well as practising reading, writing and speaking.  Jeffrey L. Nonemaker, director of international-student recruitment and admissions at the University of La Verne, California has found that going with a private provider allowed the institution to expand its conditional admissions programme more rapidly.

Although conditional admission works well for international students who haven’t the language capacity to slot straight into mainstream study, it can be quite expensive with tuition fees alone for a nine-month programme costing as much as $11,000. It is also fair to say that conditional admission is more suitable for undergraduate study than post-graduate as these programmes take on fewer students and can afford to be more selective.

However, with very high rates of students offered conditional admission accepting places it seems that English is becoming less of a barrier to those students wanting to study in the US.

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