Applying to CAA school as an international applicant

Six of the 29 campuses will not consider you at all

This is the part to settle first, because it decides your entire list. We read all 29 campuses in our directory on 2026-09-24, and re-read NSU's six campuses on 2026-10-05. The answers are not what most people expect.

Six campuses are closed outright. Emory states that permanent residency is required before applying and that immigration sponsorship — an I-20 for F-1 holders, or a DS-2019 for J-1 — is not available. NEOMED asks you to be a US citizen or permanent resident to be eligible to apply. Lipscomb, Kansas City University, Ohio Dominican and UTHealth Houston all say versions of the same thing.

Exactly one campus states the opposite in plain terms. The University of Colorado says applicants on F-1 visas are eligible for enrollment, and applicants on a T visa too — but that applicants on J-1 are not. That specificity is rare and worth the attention it deserves.

One campus sits between the two. NSU's Las Vegas campus states that for the 2026-2027 cycle it is not approved to host international students. Read that precisely: it is about sponsorship, not citizenship. The program is not saying it requires a citizen or a permanent resident, it is saying it cannot issue an I-20 this cycle — so if you already hold status that does not need one, you are not excluded. Ask them directly before you rule it in or out.

The other 21 say nothing at all about visas or citizenship. That is not us failing to look: several of them explain in detail how to get a foreign transcript evaluated, and then never address whether they will enroll someone who needs a visa. Treat silence as a question to ask them, never as a yes.

Nothing about your GPA changes any of this. A CASAA application sent to a program that requires permanent residency is a fee spent on an outcome that was decided before anyone read your file.

Your transcript has to be evaluated, and by a named agency

Programs do not read foreign transcripts directly. They read an evaluation, and they name which agencies they accept.

The two that come up repeatedly are World Education Services (WES) and Educational Credential Evaluators (ECE), submitted through CASAA alongside your official transcripts. Colorado names exactly those two. Ohio Dominican names the same pair and adds that the evaluation is at the applicant's own expense.

Order the wrong report and you pay for it twice, so confirm the agency against each program on your list before you buy anything. Allow six to twelve weeks; this is one of the few steps you can start long before an application cycle opens.

The bigger barrier: where your prerequisites were taken

An evaluation tells a program what your degree is worth. It does not satisfy the prerequisite requirement, and this — not the visa question — is the barrier that actually removes most of the map.

Fifteen of the 29 campuses require prerequisite coursework to be completed at a US or Canadian institution. Case Western is explicit that all its prerequisites must be taken in the US or Canada. South University says deficiencies must be made up in the United States and that no exemptions will be made regardless of degrees received elsewhere. Bluefield, Emory, Medical College of Wisconsin, Ohio Dominican, UTHealth Houston and Mary Hardin-Baylor all require the same thing.

The University of New Mexico goes further still: foreign national applicants are expected to have the equivalent of at least two years of full-time study at an accredited US college or university, and to have all the same course prerequisites on top of that.

None of these programs frame it as a restriction on international applicants. It reads as an ordinary prerequisite rule, and its effect is one to two years of US coursework before an application is possible at all.

Put the two together and 18 of the 29 campuses either close the door or require US coursework first. Eleven have neither barrier on their published pages — and six of those eleven are Nova Southeastern campuses, which is a far narrower field than the directory's size suggests.

English proficiency, where it is required

Programs that require an English exam usually want the TOEFL, and the thresholds are not uniform.

Some programs ask for an iBT score of 100 overall with at least 25 in each of reading, listening, speaking and writing. Ohio Dominican asks for a score of 550 or higher for applicants from a non-English-speaking country — a figure on the older paper-based scale, which is worth clarifying with the program directly rather than assuming a conversion.

Exam requirements are also one of the more common places for a program page to be out of date, so confirm before you book a test date.

The exams and the programs themselves

Most programs accept either the GRE or the MCAT — 24 of the 29 programs in our directory take one or the other, which gives you a genuine choice about which to prepare for.

Programs run 24 to 29 months of continuous, full-time study, with a median of 27. There is no realistic ability to work during them, which matters more when you are funding a degree from outside the US.

The wall at the far end: working afterwards

A degree is not permission to work, and this is the question to think about before you start rather than during your final year.

There is also a geographic constraint that does not apply to every profession. 23 states and D.C. Every program sits in an authorized state, but the reverse is not true, so the map you can job-hunt on is shorter than the map of the country. Our practice-states guide keeps the current roster.

We are not going to advise you on work authorization. Recommending an immigration route is restricted to attorneys and accredited representatives, and we are not either. What we can do is tell you accurately what each program requires and where CAAs are authorized to practice, and point you at the official sources — CASAA and the AAAA roster at anesthetist.org — for the rest.

What to do first

Find out which programs will consider you, before anything else. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it changes every other decision you make.

Then order the right transcript evaluation for that specific list, check whether any of them require US prerequisite coursework, and only then start planning exams and a cycle.

The order matters. Most of the money wasted on this path is spent on steps taken before the eligibility question was answered.