Joan Liu didn’t believe it. Nobody did at first. In late April she stood in a Singapore shopping mall, pressing her phone to her ear. No way, she thought. An American university would never do this to kids.
But it was true: Days earlier, the University of Texas at Tyler had revoked the full scholarships it had promised 62 incoming freshmen on the other side of the world. All but two were from Nepal.
Liu, a college counselor, felt the flame of anger. Though she didn’t know the students, she understood their plight: teenagers with little or no money, devastated by a university’s mistake. They had scant hope of finding another college, and a scholarship, at the 11th hour.
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Joan Liu didn’t believe it. Nobody did at first. In late April she stood in a Singapore shopping mall, pressing her phone to her ear. No way, she thought. An American university would never do this to kids.
But it was true: Days earlier, the University of Texas at Tyler had revoked the full scholarships it had promised 62 incoming freshmen on the other side of the world. All but two were from Nepal.
Liu, a college counselor, felt the flame of anger. Though she didn’t know the students, she understood their plight: teenagers with little or no money, devastated by a university’s mistake. They had scant hope of finding another college, and a scholarship, at the 11th hour.
She had a choice. Get involved — or not. But if she didn’t, who would?
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A global saga was unfolding. It began when scores of high-achieving international students applied, mysteriously enough, to a little-known university in East Texas, and then 103 accepted full-ride offers that they thought would change their lives. Next, the university told all but 41 of the teenagers that it had promised more scholarships than it could deliver, leaving them high and dry. It was, by many accounts, the biggest blunder in admissions history.
The incident became a test. A test of a profession’s ideals and resourcefulness. A grass-roots push to help the students would pit hope against the bottom line. It would affirm the power of individuals — and the limits of their power — in a world governed by complex institutions and plodding bureaucracies.
At its best, the admissions process offers applicants few guarantees. And when a college screws up, as Tyler did this spring, students who are wronged have little or no recourse. They can’t call on Superman to serve justice and set things straight. Nobody even knew if Tyler would face any consequences for what it called “an oversight.”
For Liu, the whole thing felt personal. Her father, born in rural Taiwan, got a scholarship from a Canadian university in 1976. Without it, she almost certainly wouldn’t have grown up in the United States, graduated from Cornell University, and become an adviser at the United World College of South East Asia, a K-12 school in Singapore.
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A scholarship isn’t just a pile of money. Tyler, she believed, had handed the Nepali students a passport to social mobility only to yank it right back.
She would do her best to help.
When someone finds treasure, word travels fast. Why did so many Nepali students apply to a regional university in East Texas? Because they thought they had stumbled upon treasure. That’s what a full scholarship is.
For foreign applicants to U.S. colleges, it’s a rare find. Most domestic institutions give relatively little aid to international students, who, typically, receive partial scholarships, covering just a fraction of the total cost of attendance — if they receive any institutional aid at all.
This past year, the University of Texas at Tyler created the Presidential Fellow scholarship, a full-ride offering that covered tuition, room and board, and fees. Though its main purpose was to attract Texans, international students, too, were eligible.
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The scholarship caught the eye of a couple prospective Nepali applicants last fall, and then, one student said, “the information spread like a wildfire.” It spread across continents from friend to friend, and among members of a popular Facebook group for Nepali students hoping to study in the United States. A Nepali student at Tyler, working part-time as an “international ambassador” in the graduate admissions office, often posted links in the Facebook group.
Most of the Nepali applicants couldn’t afford to pay anything close to full freight. Some came from families making less than $10,000 a year. The scholarship would be their best offer. “An average-tier university,” said Roman Shrestha, became “our golden ticket to study in the U.S.A.”
Tyler’s first mistake, as the university would later concede, was not recognizing that it had dangled that golden ticket before a planet of high-achieving, low-income students. Tyler’s top merit scholarship had gone to a total of six international students since 2014-15. Yet those awards, of $4,000 a year, were hardly enough to distinguish the university from hundreds of others.
Tyler also made it easy to apply for admission. Applicants were required to submit only their grades and standardized-test scores. No recommendations. No essay. All applicants with at least a 1350 SAT (or 29 ACT) score got the scholarship, without having to apply for it separately.
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By early winter, more than 100 foreign students had qualified for the award. They got an email from Michael Tidwell, Tyler’s president, describing how the university would cover even the cost of books. “Yes, I’m serious!” the message said. Many paid an $100 “confirmation fee” to claim the award.
Late last year, rumors that Tyler had run out of scholarship money — or had raised the minimum test-score requirement because funds were getting low — popped up on Facebook. So Roshan Poudel, a Nepali applicant, emailed Jessica Sibbing, an admissions counselor overseeing international admissions at Tyler, to ask what was up.
“As I have been told,” Sibbing wrote back, “we are awarding scholarships through March 1st 2018.”
That reassured Poudel, who shared the response with the Facebook group. Nepali students kept applying, getting acceptances, and celebrating their full-ride scholarships.
Then, on April 13, Tyler sent a heart-stopping email. “Due to extraordinary demand,” it said, “our scholarship requests exceeded the amount budgeted for this year. We will not be able to offer you the Presidential Fellows scholarship.”
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Just like that, their treasure was gone.
Some students were too distraught to tell their parents.
One said he felt an earthquake in his heart.
Another ran away from home for two days.
One considered taking his own life.
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Though many heroes would emerge, the story’s villain was faceless. The University of Texas at Tyler’s mistake was a systemic failure that occurred over several months, involving multiple people, under the noses of various supervisors. “We messed up, collectively,” said Lucas Roebuck, the university’s spokesman, who conducted a review of what went wrong.
Though Tyler declined to share many specifics, it’s clear that the admissions office lacked standard safeguards. Yes, the university received 10 times as many international applicants as it expected, but the problem wasn’t that too many passengers showed up: The problem was that nobody knew how many passengers had boarded the ship until it sank under its own weight.
Here are some key factors:
Tyler had a rolling admissions policy.
The university awarded scholarships as applications arrived instead of considering them all at once.
Generally, colleges don’t give full-ride scholarships automatically. Tyler, essentially, did: After admissions officers processed applications and verified students’ credentials, all of the accepted students with the minimum score soon got emails with the offer.
The addition of a full-ride scholarship last year meant that the university’s historical data, indicating that few high-scoring foreign students would apply and enroll, were basically useless.
Admissions offices run daily or weekly reports, with up-to-date metrics on application trends. At Tyler, reports showing a surge in international applicants either did not reach the right officials, or were misinterpreted by those who saw them, or were ignored, or perhaps some combination of all three.
“There were procedural failures and points where human judgment should have kicked in,” Roebuck said. “The appropriate oversight was not in place.”
Tyler apparently realized the mistake soon after its March 1 deadline, though Roebuck declined to say exactly when. Perhaps the most troubling unanswered question is how much time passed between Tyler’s discovery of the errors and its April 13 email to Nepali students. A month? Six weeks? Each passing day would leave them that much less time to find another college.
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Eventually, Tyler officials huddled in the administration building to weigh their options. After several discussions, they “dug deep” and took some budgetary risks, Roebuck said, to preserve 41 of the initial offers. Grasping for a fair way to determine who would keep their awards, the university nudged the SAT score minimum, originally 1350, up to 1400.
After Tyler delivered the bad news to 62 students, Roebuck said, there were second-guessing and frustration, confusion and tears on the campus: “There was absolute heartbreak.”
The heartbreak came with a dash of irony. Tidwell, who became Tyler’s president in 2017, created the big-ticket scholarship to promote college access. Then, in its first year, the scholarship became a symbol of access denied.
After the news broke, Tidwell tried to emphasize the positive while acknowledging the errors. In an email to the campus, he described the scholarship as “a wild success and a game changer” because it had attracted many promising students, from East Texas and other states. He also described the decision to “adjust” some international students’ financial-aid packages as “a hard decision that we did not take lightly.”
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Tidwell was no villain. Known as energetic and approachable, he told students to stop and ask him questions or share concerns whenever they saw him wearing his bright-orange sneakers, which he donned frequently. He knew the global ties that bind higher education, having been a visiting professor in India and Kenya.
In late April, though, Tidwell sounded like any other college president who ever hoped a scandal would just blow over. As calls from reporters came in, he and Roebuck traded texts.
“The best story here is that in our attempt to increase access,” Roebuck wrote, “we dropped a few balls.”
“I am calling all the high level donors and filling them in on what happened,” Tidwell replied. “Can you meet with the fundraisers on Monday and give them a few talking points?”
“This is going to be a pr case study someday,” Roebuck wrote.
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“Yes, let’s hope so. This has gotten more attn here than in Nepal.”
When Roebuck texted Tidwell a few days later to report that the local newspaper planned to publish a follow-up article, the president seemed surprised: “What do they want to discuss now???”
He wanted to know if the reporter wanted to talk about students in East Texas who got the scholarship: “Otherwise I don’t know if there is much more to say.”
Tidwell declined repeated requests for comment. In May he told The Washington Post that he took “full responsibility” for the error, and disputed the notion that the university didn’t care about the affected Nepali students. “Of course we care,” he said. Even so, many of them noticed that he never apologized to them directly.
Those who helped the Nepali students weren’t superheroes. They were an ad hoc, pro bono team of college counselors, led by eight women in five countries, working day and night to fix a broken promise. They called themselves “the Justice League.”
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After Tyler revoked the full scholarships, it offered each student a $5,000 scholarship and said it would charge them the in-state tuition rate. That would still leave them with a five-figure gap. For most, that wasn’t an option.
Before the counselors could scare up alternatives, though, they had to find all the students. Tyler, citing federal privacy laws, told them it couldn’t provide a list of names and emails. So the volunteers relied on social media and word of mouth to track them down. Tyler agreed to forward messages from the counselors to the affected students, but at least a handful said they never got them.
One student created a Facebook group. It became a hub of hour-to-hour support among those whose fates had become entwined, a place where the counselors could advise them on the fly.
Each day, Liu communicated with Selena Malla, an educational adviser at the EducationUSA Advising Center in Kathmandu. She had sent the first call for help into cyberspace. Malla, who had endured a major earthquake that devastated Nepal three years earlier, knew what a crisis required.
Liu, passionate, prone to swearing in moments of frustration, relied on Malla’s calm, her ability to focus on each detail. Each day brought a flood of them — and hundreds of emails. The counselors asked each student to send all the documents that colleges would require, which Malla verified one by one.
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“There were procedural failures and points where human judgment should have kicked in. The appropriate oversight was not in place.”
Early on, SUNY Korea offered full scholarships to three students. Texas Christian University offered two. The University of Akron offered one.
Publicity led to a bizarre free-for-all. Early on, some colleges tweeted at the students, inviting them to apply. In just one hour, 17 applied for a single spot at one private institution.
Later, a technology company called Concourse Global invited the counselors to use its new online college-matching system, allowing them to connect students with interested colleges, which were invited to use it free. That allowed admissions officials to browse students’ profiles before making offers, easing some of the chaos.
Still, many tasks glued the counselors to their computers at all hours. They used Facebook and WhatsApp to advise students and give them pep talks.
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Liu stayed up well past 1 a.m. most nights, and she crashed on her couch because it was closer to her desk.
Though the Nepali students supported one another online, they knew that they were essentially competing for scholarships. Liu called it “Admissions Hunger Games.”
Desperation led to dirty tricks — and a lesson in accountability. After one Nepali student got a scholarship offer from a U.S. university, in May, another student, calling himself “Jack Sparrow,” emailed the institution and disparaged the recipient. “I am very upset right now,” he wrote. “I have better academics, test scores, and extracurricular activities.”
After the counselors discovered Jack Sparrow’s identity, Liu called to confront him. He confessed and cried. Though the young man had secured a scholarship of his own, he hated that one of his close friends had yet to receive an offer.
Members of the Facebook group found out about the email, which threatened to tear it apart. Then Jack Sparrow owned up, apologizing to the other student, to everyone. “I cannot undo what I have done nor can I make you forget the pain my actions have caused you. But what I can do is make a promise … that I will never repeat the crime that I have committed.”
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Then came forgiveness. “It’s time to move forward and put the past behind us,” the student he had disparaged wrote in a post. “We started as a team, and we stand strong together till the end.”
No one knew when the end would come. By late May, only 25 of the students had found seats.
Tyler’s mistake harmed students. But would anyone hold the university accountable?
A Dallas lawyer was willing to try. After reading about the rescinded scholarships, Stephen C. DePaul emailed some of the Nepali students, introducing himself as a former director of global initiatives for the University of Texas system.
DePaul told the students that he would gladly represent them in a pro bono lawsuit. “The abject lack of accountability on the part of senior officers at UT Tyler in this instance,” he wrote in one message, “is simply a naked and stunning betrayal of basic principles of openness and fairness.”
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Would the Nepali students really have a case?
Probably, two higher-education lawyers told The Chronicle. A student whose scholarship was rescinded because of a university’s error could sue for breach of contract, they said. The question would be whether a scholarship offer accepted is, in fact, a binding contract.
Even if it’s not, the lawyers said, there could be a “promissory estoppel” claim. Plaintiffs could argue that the scholarship represented a “clear and definite” promise, which, after being broken, harmed them financially. Like, if they ended up having to pay thousands of dollars to attend another college.
DePaul, who declined The Chronicle’s quest for comment, later discussed the possibility of a lawsuit during a conference call with some of the Nepali students and their volunteer counselors. The lawyer, they said, told them that a lawsuit might help prevent Tyler, and other colleges, from making a similar mistake down the line.
Short of a legal victory, there was no recourse for the students. And the university wouldn’t receive any punishment. After all, the ever-polite realm of college admissions has many rules, but no rulers.
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Some admissions officials and college counselors outraged by the incident urged their membership organization to do … something. Yet the National Association for College Admission Counseling can’t compel a member college to un-revoke a scholarship.
Though some hoped that NACAC would publicly condemn Tyler’s actions, it did not. The closest thing to a rebuke came in a column written by David Burge, the association’s president. The Nepali students “were not treated fairly,” he wrote, and “financial concerns” had trumped concern for the teenagers themselves. He did not name Tyler, though.
Burge, vice president for enrollment management at George Mason University, said that the situation affirmed the need for NACAC’s code of ethics and professional practices, which is meant to protect the interests of students. He described the code as the profession’s “North Star.”
Though the code might guide the way to sound practices, it also protects colleges that veer from them. Alleged violations trigger confidential investigations, the results of which remain confidential. Most inquiries don’t result in penalties, and those sanctions are mild. First offenses typically yield a don’t-do-it-again warning; at most, a college that refuses to comply could be barred from participating in the association’s recruitment fairs.
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Tyler committed two violations this spring, admissions experts say. Though colleges are supposed to give regular-decision applicants until the May 1 deposit deadline to weigh offers of admission and scholarship, Tyler asked for a “confirmation fee” by March 1. And though colleges aren’t supposed to withdraw admissions or aid offers before May 1, Tyler did just that.
NACAC started looking into those violations in April, according to two people familiar with the investigation. Yet that inquiry would in no way help the students affected by the alleged violations.
After the conference call with the Dallas lawyer, talk of a lawsuit faded away. For one thing, there were logistical challenges: The Nepali students hoped they would scatter around the United States, around the world, becoming freshmen.
Some feared that filing a lawsuit would harm Nepali students who enrolled at Tyler. Or hurt their own chances of getting a visa to study in the United States. Or cause problems for their families if other people perceived that the lawsuit would jeopardize Nepali applicants’ shot at a U.S. college.
These weren’t affluent American students, certain of their rights, backed by table-pounding parents. They were exhausted teenagers from a poor country who just wanted to go to college.
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If compassion alone could solve problems, the Nepali students would have received hundreds of generous offers right away. Yet most college officials inclined to help had to confront institutional constraints. How much could one person do to overcome them?
Some presidents and enrollment leaders said they just couldn’t finance a partial scholarship, let alone a full ride. After the May 1 deadline for admissions deposits, many colleges had maxed out their financial-aid budgets and still hadn’t come close to meeting the full financial need of hordes of students who were already coming.
J.S. Elwell, president and chancellor of Eastern New Mexico University, felt for the Nepali students. He worked to come up with a creative solution that would cover all but $4,750 a year for a handful of them. He wished he could do more. But the university gives just 10 full scholarships a year to in-state students, who must complete a competitive, multistep process.
“It wouldn’t be fair to let the Nepali students leapfrog into that,” he said. “I have no fair way to create bigger scholarships.”
By mid-June, 35 students had at least partial scholarships. Joan Liu knew the long odds against finding them all an affordable option. The timing of the rescinded scholarships cast a shadow over everything the Justice League did.
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Still, she woke up early each morning to encourage the Nepali students, talk with admissions officials, and shake loose what she could from the coffers of higher education. All the industry’s talk of opening doors of opportunity means nothing if you don’t have the money to get through the gates.
Liu hadn’t taken calculus in high school, because her family couldn’t afford an $85 graphing calculator. The thought of the Nepali students missing out on greater opportunities, just because they had been stripped of promised funds, propelled her through long, uncertain days.
So did the true stories of people speaking up on behalf of teenagers they had never met. At Robert Morris University, a trustee volunteered to cover one student’s $6,000 gap for four years, enabling him to attend.
Many other stories began with just one person speaking up. When Megan Doerr first read about the canceled scholarships this spring, her first thought was, Dang, I really wish there were something we could do.
Yet Doerr, director of international recruitment and outreach at Central Michigan University, knew that her institution didn’t offer foreign students anything close to a full ride. She didn’t raise the possibility of helping the Nepali students because she didn’t think anyone would be open to it.
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Doerr was happy to be proved wrong. A few weeks later, Jennifer L. Weible, an assistant professor of educational technology, asked her dean if the university could help. Soon the vice president for student-enrollment services asked Doerr for her input: “I was like, whoa, this is gonna happen!”
“Even at large, slow-moving institutions with all this red tape, you can make these amazing things happen that have no precedent.”
Within days, Central Michigan offered two students full scholarships. Doerr secured temporary spots for them in the honors program, with the opportunity to officially apply later on. For weeks she emailed with the students constantly, guiding them through the many logistical challenges of submitting all their required documents and securing visas. Her attentiveness reassured them.
Weeks later, Shashwat Maharjan and Ankrit Gupta would arrive on the campus, bearing gifts for Doerr. She would surprise herself by running up and hugging them.
And she would see a lesson in what had unfolded. “Even at large, slow-moving institutions with all this red tape, you can make these amazing things happen that have no precedent,” she said. “I learned that there’s hope.”
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All summer, Joan Liu and the other volunteers steered the college-counseling caravan through uncharted territory. After two students applied for one seat at Quest University, in Canada, everyone agreed to a novel arrangement: The pair of students would split the difference between one-and-a-half full scholarships and the remaining balance, which would allow them both to enroll.
Each week brought surprises, delightful and devastating. When the New Jersey Institute of Technology offered two students big scholarships, everyone celebrated. When one of those students was denied an F1 visa — once, twice, three times — everyone’s heart hit the floor. Liu heard the young man cry.
The ability to pay for college is one of the main criteria that determine applicants’ eligibility for a student visa. So losing the full scholarship from Tyler lowered the odds for students who didn’t get a full ride elsewhere. By summer’s end, seven students who got offers would see their visa applications rejected.
Several students felt that losing their scholarships to Tyler was somehow their fault. At first, one didn’t want to accept another college’s offer, for fear of losing that scholarship, too.
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In June, Liu flew to Kathmandu, where dozens of the students, some traveling 10 hours by bus, came from all over Nepal just to meet her. At the EducationUSA Advising Center, in a room decorated with balloons and signs that said “Thank You, Ms. Joan!,” they gathered around her and listened. She talked about the importance of sharing your expertise even when you’re not paid for it.
By then, 38 students had spots at other colleges. Yet even as the search for more seats continued, the counselors confronted another challenge: gaps. Many students’ financial-aid packages had left them with big holes to fill. Some families planned to take out loans or sell land; others had no such options.
As summer slipped away, good news fell from the sky. The Catalyst Foundation for Universal Education donated $100,000. That would cover the gaps for three students over four years.
Yet there was little time to find money to help a handful of other students with gaps, some greater than $10,000 a year, which might keep them from finishing college. Liu felt as if she were running a marathon in which the finish line kept moving farther away.
Every crusade prompts some pushback. In July, some of the counselors flew to New Orleans for the International Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference. Though many people there admired their efforts, a few complained that the Nepal story was overshadowing other college-access issues.
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Before the conference, the counselors’ request to hold a session about the Nepali students’ continuing needs was denied. In an email, the association’s board told them that they could not host a “campaign-style event.” The board asked them to consider how “prolonged attention and energies may be perceived by other members” working with students who also faced challenges.
Activism had collided with associationism.
Aaron Andersen, the association’s president, who is director of international recruitment at the University of British Columbia, wrote the email. He later told The Chronicle that he meant to strike a balance between acknowledging the counselors’ efforts (which he praised) and conference programming that would benefit the broadest possible audience: “It’s extremely important for us to build resources for all of our members to use to manage a variety of cases.”
One of the counselors called the email tone-deaf. Sure, students everywhere are struggling, she said, “but these students had something ripped from their hands!”
If college-admissions associations can’t throw their full weight behind a college-admissions emergency, then who can? The situation inevitably raised questions about the responsiveness — and limitations — of big-tent membership groups.
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The Tyler incident prompted some admissions officials to question the confidentiality of NACAC’s investigations, which are meant to serve an “educational” purpose and not a punitive one. But who benefits from that?
“There has been some self-reflection going on, among staff and members, who’ve been asking, ‘What more can we do?’ " said David Hawkins, the association’s executive director for educational content and policy. “We are hamstrung by what’s written in our bylaws. Whether the confidential process is overriding the interests of students is a fair question.”
The investigation of Tyler continued into September, two people familiar with the case toldThe Chronicle. The university said it had overhauled its scholarship procedures. Twenty-eight international students (24 from Nepal) who received the full scholarships ended up enrolling. They were among the largest-ever freshman class at the university.
No one at Tyler, the university’s spokesman said, was fired or formally disciplined as a result of the mistakes leading to the rescinded scholarships.
Ultimately, one of the worst moments in the profession’s history brought out the best in many of its members. A field governed by rituals embraced spontaneity — and showed some heart.
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In three months, members of the Justice League located and advised 57 of the students who had lost their scholarships. Forty-nine of them ended up (or soon will) on campuses in the United States, Canada, Nepal, Qatar, and South Korea. Eight were still looking for seats.
Colleges gave the students, most of whom are the first in their families to attend college, a total of 25 full scholarships, or close to it. Two more donors agreed to fill the holes in two students’ financial-aid packages, leaving eight with unmet gaps, of $3,000 to $14,000 a year. In September, the counselors founded the Everest Education Fund, a nonprofit group, to help raise money for them.
When the dust settled, many of the Nepali students believed they had ended up in a better place than Tyler, Tex. The loss of a scholarship from one university had landed them at colleges where people had lobbied for them, where they felt wanted.
When Liu looked on Facebook in September, she saw them all settling into their campuses.
Biswas Paudel enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where his suitemates were teaching him to ride the skateboard they’d bought for him.
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Ojaswi Piya enrolled at the University of Kentucky, where she was savoring the spirit of the campus, enjoying the food, and posing next to campus landmarks.
Rupesh Koirala enrolled at Robert Morris, where a new friend was tutoring him in American slang (“Killing it, dawg. Killing it.”).
Still, as a new semester began, Liu thought of the handful of students who weren’t going anywhere. Like Pravesh Agrawal, who had great test scores, a love of literature, and $1,000 to contribute to college.
She also thought about the five students the counselors never located. Five students who almost certainly needed help but didn’t get it. She didn’t even know their names.
One surprise often leads to another. First came the nightmare of losing a scholarship. Then the nightmare delivered a surprise of its own.
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Roman Shrestha thought of his experience that way. Weeks after getting the bad news from Tyler, news that sank him into despair, he received a stunning offer: a full scholarship, approximately $65,000 a year, for four years. It came from the University of Denver.
Shrestha, an earnest young man from Chitwan who plans to study chemistry, had lost one treasure only to find another.
That night, he and Liu chatted online.
“I am so happy,” he wrote.
“I am too,” she replied.
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Money was tight in Shrestha’s family. His mother runs a small grocery store night and day. His two older sisters help support him.
All spring, Liu and the other counselors observed the young man’s selflessness, how he encouraged his peers when his own future looked bleak. Before getting the offer from Denver, while searching for colleges with seats and scholarships to spare, he shared leads with other students instead of keeping them to himself.
“You clearly care about others,” Liu wrote the night his offer came. “I am proud of you for getting U Denver. But more than that, I am proud of you for being you.”
It was late. They were tired. Liu knew that Shrestha had lost weight in the anxious weeks since April. “Go get some sleep, Roman,” she wrote. “And GO EAT YOUR RICE.”
Before logging off, Liu shared something her 10th-grade English teacher once shared with her, a quote she thought of as her compass. “When deciding whether or not to get involved,” she wrote, “it is not important what happens to you if you get involved, but what happens to others if you do not.”
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One day, Liu told him, someone would need his help to turn a bad situation around.
“Yes,” he wrote.
It was the first word of a promise, to her and to himself, a promise shaped by what he had learned.
When the time came, he would do his best to help.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.