Questions are mounting over Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s repeated claim that she secured admission into Stanford University for medicine at age 16 — with experts describing the story as implausible and a former admissions officer flatly denying it.
Badenoch has said she got into Stanford “pre-med” on partial scholarship, but Stanford offers medicine only at graduate level and has no pre-med major.
The Conservative Party told The Guardian she “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” — a claim experts called “impossible.”
Jon Reider, who handled admissions at Stanford at the time, 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. O-levels would not have been sufficient, and we would have been very nervous admitting a 16-year-old.”
He added Stanford never offered partial aid: “If an applicant needed $30,000, we offered the full amount. There was no point offering less.” Other academics agreed, noting they had “never heard of any exemptions – not even for child prodigies or royalty.”
Despite this, Badenoch first told Huffington Post in 2017: “I had actually got admission into medical school in the US – I got into Stanford pre-med…” and reiterated in 2024 that her SAT scores earned her a partial scholarship.
Stanford’s official website makes it clear: “Stanford does not have a pre-med major.
