By Abiola Olawale
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, is facing scrutiny over her claim of receiving a pre-med scholarship offer from Stanford University at age 16.
This is as Jon Reider, the Stanford admissions officer at the time of Badenoch’s application, disputed the assertion.
Badenoch, who was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent parts of her childhood in Nigeria and the United States, has repeatedly referenced the Stanford offer in interviews.
In a 2017 Huffington Post interview, she stated, “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 [the UK] because being a citizen, it was just a lot cheaper.”
She reiterated a similar claim in a 2024 interview with The Times, noting that her high SAT scores earned her a partial scholarship to Stanford’s pre-med program, which her family could not afford.
However, Reider, in an interview said he would have been responsible for offering Badenoch a place and had not done so.
He said: “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.
“I assure you that we would not have admitted a student based on test scores alone, nor would we have mailed an invitation to apply to any overseas students based on test scores.
“O-levels would not have been sufficient, and we would have been very nervous admitting a 16-year-old. She would have had to have an extraordinary record.
“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.”
