" It was possible, we learned, to be admitted to most public and private colleges regardless of our legal status. But paying for them was a different matter. At the time, there was no way to receive financial aid to state schools unless you had a Social Security number. A few private institutions offered varying amounts of money to admitted students, from small stipends to a full ride. Oscar and I decided that no school was worth bankrupting our families, so we set our sights on the narrow band of "need-blind" private schools — ones that dispensed as much money as students needed could prove they needed — including all of the Ivy League universities.
A few private institutions would also pay to fly in poor high school seniors trying to decide if their school was right for him or her. I qualified. These were mostly small liberal arts colleges, but they gave us a chance to leave Los Angeles and discover what college would be like. I visited five schools — MIT, College of the Atlantic, Williams College, Wesleyan University, and Washington and Lee University — each time waiting until I could tell a financial aid officer in person about my immigration status. All but two schools, MIT and Williams (which worried about losing federal grants), told me to apply anyway.
This broke my heart, because walking around MIT convinced me to become an engineer. I knew immediately that it was the place for me. It was massive and overwhelming, and I wanted nothing more than to conquer it. But the financial aid officer told me on the last day of my visitors' program that I could not legally be admitted. He was sorry, he said. (Over the previous year, I had spent hours on hold with every school on the US News and World Report's 50 best universities asking about my conundrum. If there's one thing I'd learned by then, it's that everybody was always sorry.)"
- Ikhide
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