ROOKE: American Colleges Have A New Slogan: Foreigners First

Image altered with Gen AI; source photos from Getty / Ian Tyas; Hulton Archive

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This Wednesday, we discuss how the U.S. higher education model is broken because it doesn’t uplift American students.

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There is a video circulating right now of students from an elite international prep school in El Salvador, Escuela Americana, celebrating their acceptance to top U.S. universities, including Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, and Tufts. There were about 13 students featured in the video, and each student was accepted into an average of 3 U.S. colleges and universities.

Watching it on loop was probably not the wisest decision I’ve made recently, as it just further radicalized me against our elite institutions. I’ve heard horror stories from friends and acquaintances about their children not getting accepted into their top school, much less their so-called safety schools. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill students either. We are talking about kids who played multiple varsity sports, chaired clubs, logged significant volunteer hours, all while maintaining a 4.0 GPA and scoring highly on the SAT and ACT.

And I know that the ivory tower is going to scream down from its balcony, claiming that international students face steeper odds at the schools that matter most, like the ones mentioned in the video. They’ll argue that it’s hyper-competitive for all students, not just U.S. citizens, and that, actually, the acceptance rate for international students is lower than that of........

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