Doubts have surfaced over Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s claim to have been offered a place at a prestigious US medical school at 16, with admissions staff unable to recall the proposal and the university not providing the course, The Guardian UK has reported.
Badenoch has said in interviews that she was offered a place and a partial scholarship to study medicine sometimes describing it as pre-medicine at Stanford University in California, one of the most competitive universities in the United States.
However, medicine is only offered to graduates at Stanford and there is no pre-med degree.
When asked for clarification, the Conservatives told The Guardian that Badenoch had not applied but had been offered the place by a number of US universities, including Stanford on the basis of good exam results in US standardised tests.
Academic and admissions experts have cast doubt on this, describing it as an impossible scenario.
Jon Reider, the Stanford admissions officer at the time of Badenoch’s application who was responsible for international students and the allocation of bursaries, said he would have been responsible for offering her 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.
Reider added that he had admitted a few students based in Africa during that period but not from Nigeria.
“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,” he said.
He further explained,”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.”
On scholarships, Reider 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 enroll.
“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.”
The Guardian also consulted Ivy League admissions coaches, an author specialising in college admissions, several Stanford graduates, and an Ivy League vice-provost.
All of those who spoke to The Guardian said they did not believe it was plausible for a place to be offered proactively on exam results alone.
“One senior US academic said he had “never heard of any exemptions – not even for internationally renowned child prodigies or royalty.”
Badenoch first mentioned her admission to Stanford in an interview with the Huffington Post in 2017, when she had just been elected as the Conservative MP for Saffron Walden.
Asked what she wanted to be when she was 16, she 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.”
Additional detail was given in a 2024 interview with the Times, which says: “At 16, her US SAT scores won her a partial pre-med scholarship to Stanford, but her family still couldn’t afford the place.”
The claim that Badenoch had an early offer from Stanford has also been mentioned in other publications.
A profile in the Spectator in 2020 says Badenoch “won a part-scholarship to Stanford University to study medicine”.
The same claim is made in a profile in the Daily Mail by Lord Ashcroft last year, previewing his biography of Badenoch, The Guardian UK reports.
On its website, Stanford University states: “Stanford does not have a pre-med major.
“For any of the health professions, you may major in any discipline.” Medicine is a graduate degree.
