Back to episode — Episode 2852 CWSA 05/27/25
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some portion of it anyway is going to be thwarted by your own Congress is such a tragedy. It's almost impossible to understand. It's like we're running as fast as we can toward a cliff and we even have the smartest people in the world trying to prevent it. And even that doesn't help. What is going on here? What is going on? Well, in other news, do you ever have one of these situations where there…
← Previous segment →e and then suddenly one day you realize or you hear something and you go, "Wait a minute, that couldn't have been true"? So here's an example of that for me.
So for years and years and years, I've been hearing that one of the reasons that Harvard and some of the other Ivy Leagues have a lot of foreign students is what? Do you know the answer? Why is it that Harvard and a lot of other Ivy Leagues have a high percentage of foreign students? You know the answer too, right? Everybody knows the answer. The answer is that the foreign students were paying full price, full tuition, and so they'd make more money off the foreign students. Right? Just obvious. Now, as I tell you too often, I've got a degree in economics and I've got an MBA from a top school. And I would hear that and I'd say to myself, "Oh, okay. Well, that explains everything." And then one day, which was just recently, I just realized what an idiot I am.
So here's the assumption you have to make for this to be true. Are you ready for this? If you also believed that was true, here's the assumption that you and I both made. We made the assumption that if these foreign students didn't come in and pay full tuition that the seats would be empty, that the seats would be empty because they wouldn't be able to find a bunch of Asian-American people who desperately wanted to go to Harvard but got turned away because they were Asian-American or that all the white students who knew exactly what Harvard cost and they were applying but they got turned away because they were white, that they wouldn't fill those spaces. It couldn't possibly have been true that Harvard would lose money if they said, "Well, you know, the rest of these seats have to be full tuition." And they couldn't find enough Americans who had a 4.5 average and had participated in every possible thing that you need that wouldn't be willing to pay whatever it took to get a Harvard degree.
I've been laughing at myself for a few days. What an idiot. What a freaking idiot I was. Why did I ever imagine that was true? Now the actual truth I think is a little deeper. I don't know what it is actually. But some people said that the foreign students' parents were maybe making large donations. I don't know how universal that was. Other people said, "No, no, it's the real game here is to educate foreign peop
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le who have become leaders in their own country. So really, it's how the US government controls other countries in the long term by educating them in Harvard." To which I say, really? Sending them to the heart of communism and then sending them home with a Harvard degree is going to help America somehow? That doesn't really track. Then other people were saying, Scott, the foreign students were al…
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