The plight of a broken promise: when the future of 61 youths becomes jeopardised

The 2nd writer’s fortnight talk that I attended was about 61 Nepali students, their entire career and professional life ahead of them, getting their scholarships to the UT Tyler in Texas revoked a month and a half after the deadline. This was an unprecedented situation in the history of the United States admission process, for never has a university revoked seats this late after the deadline. Joan Liu could not believe what she was hearing when a colleague first approached her with the news. “I thought it was a joke”, she recounted, stating how in her time as a university counselor for the school, she has never seen something like this.

Typically, universities have until April 1 to get back to applicants to inform them whether or not they managed to be allocated a seat within the university, and b May 1 the students have to make their decision on whether or not they want to accept or deny the offer. These kids from Nepal gave up offers from some of the best local universities, including the “MIT of Nepal”, to pursue their higher education in the US. The struggle they went through to obtain offers from the US is much more than others around the world, with factors such as limited use of English in the country, minimal knowledge on how US admissions work, and also the lack of proper university counselors in their school. The University of Tyler accidentally admitted 61 more people than they could accommodate, and they had to fix the problem. “Think of it as a plane. If there are more people than seats, then some people get taken off and left behind. Once the plane leaves, the passengers left on the tarmac can wave and shout all they like but the plane won’t be coming back for them”, said Joan. This was the situation that the 61 kids found themselves in. “The question wasn’t ‘Why should we do something about this?’ but rather ‘Why wouldn’t we do something about this when we have the power to?'”, she recounts.

She went on to talk about how perhaps how the inward- shifting mindset of Americans towards foreigners and immigrants played a part in the fact that it was only foreigners that didn’t make the cut, and how the timing was very questionable too. The talk was very interesting in terms of the UWC community and how we can apply our skills to help others who could really benefit from our help and intervention, and how we can put ourselves outside our comfort zone to actually take action rather than stand back and watch the situation unfold, which is what most people would do.

 

One thought on “The plight of a broken promise: when the future of 61 youths becomes jeopardised

  1. So what angle might you take on this? the idea of being the bystander? America’s treatment of foreigners? An increasingly divided world?

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