Kemi Badenoch has previously claimed she was offered a partial scholarship to study at the medical school at Stanford University when she was a teenager – but a former admissions officer questioned this
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is facing questions over her claim she was offered a place at a prestigious US medical school at 16.
Ms Badenoch has previously said she was offered a partial scholarship to study at the medical school at Stanford University. But this has been thrown into question after a former admissions officer said this was not true.
The Tory leader came out swinging, insisting Stanford had offered a place. But she admitted she does not have the relevant papers from 30 years ago.
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Asked what she wanted to be at the age of 16 in a 2017 interview with the Huffington Post, Ms Badenoch said: “A doctor, like my parents.” “Going to a very bad school here stopped me. I had actually got admission into medical school in the US – I got into Stanford pre-med – and I got into medical school in Nigeria but I came here because being a citizen it was just a lot cheaper,” she added.
However, The Guardian reported that medicine is only offered to graduates at Stanford and there is no pre-med degree.
But Jon Reider – the Stanford admissions officer at the time of her application – told the Guardian he would have been responsible for offering Badenoch a place and had not done so.
“Although 30 years have passed, I would definitely remember if we had admitted a Nigerian student with any financial aid. The answer is that we did not do so,” he said.
He also cast doubt on the idea of a student being offered a partial scholarship.
He said: “If an applicant needed, say, $30,000 a year to attend Stanford, we would offer them the full amount. There was no point in offering them less because they would not have been able to attend. If we admitted them, we wanted them to enrol.
“We were very generous and could offer only about 30 full scholarships a year. Some turned us down for Harvard, Yale. I made the selections myself, subject to the approval of the dean. I was never overruled by any of the three deans for whom I worked.”
Speaking in Redhill, Mrs Badenoch, who moved to the UK from Nigeria at the age of 16, said: “All I will say is that I remember the very day those letters came to me, it was not just from Stanford, I was 16, I had done very well in my SATs.
“But this is 30 years ago, I don’t have the papers, and what the Guardian is doing is reporting on hearsay rather than talking about what the Government is doing.
“I’m very happy to stand by what I said – when I was 16 I did get an offer, and I’ve explained what that was, and the Guardian can try and cast aspersions as much as they like, but they’d be better off looking at this Government’s woeful record and the CVs of the people who are running the country now, which has been proven to be less than satisfactory.”
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