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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Which isn’t at all how PhD programs work. This is a supreme dick move to students are going to be forced to leave with an AbD for no other reason than Trumps ego.

This is going to burn the children of the most powerful families across the world. Monarchies, dictators, owners of international conglomerates, etc all send their kids to Harvard. Destroying their children’s education out of a fit of malice is going to haunt him, and America on top of all the other stuff America is doing to the world.

America first is rapidly becoming America alone.

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Here’s a case in point - future queen of Belgium kicked out of college by the president of the United States:

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5316202-future-queen-...

Considering it’s not 1733, a future Belgian monarch has almost zero power.

You're very wrong if you think harvard accepts children of dictators and monarchies for its graduate programs. It's near impossible to get into those program except if you are a genius (exceptionally high GPA and GRE grades, published valuable scientific papers in prestigious journals). Just check the graduate student's directory to see what I mean.

Or have the right demographic details.

children of the most powerful families across the world

I doubt that most of those people are reliant on student visas.

You cannot jump over immigration requirements "just because you're powerful", and the vast majority of them are not US citizens.

> You cannot jump over immigration requirements

You probably will be able to soon though, and it 'only' costs $5m: "A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms" [0]

I couldn't blame you for not having seen this though. It was quickly flagged and never whitelisted; like so, so many other important stories here this past few months. Check my favorites for more falsely flagged stories.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43921421

They could easily get an E2 entrepreneur visa, and the necessary cash is as little as $300k, most of which can be withdrawn later, so it's effectively a free citizenship as long as you have cash.

E2 visa is not available to everyone. Notably Indian and Chinese citizens are not eligible. And that is a large chunk of international students.

You could probably get round immigration requirements by "gifting" a jet or something

[delayed]

The students absolutely are. Up until now the law applies to everyone. Now, their applications were probably rapidly approved unlike many international students. But there’s no carve out for being powerful (yet).

He's 78 and at the end of his political career in few years, he could care less.

He couldn’t care less.

Or maybe he could care less, but doesn't even bother to care less because caring less would exert effort and he doesn't care enough to exert any effort.

Own the grammar mistake, my dude :)

The grammar mistake was done by a different person

Didn’t do it, Nobody saw me do it, Can’t prove anything.

It's not a grammar mistake. It's faulty logic.

He could care less is the common phrase by now, even if it doesn't make literal sense.

"Could care less" used as a snarky response makes sense, as in, "I could care less, but I don't want to put in the effort." Using that phrase without a sarcastic intonation is still incorrect.

Could care less meaning couldn't care less. It's the same thing as how literally has come to be used with the meaning of figuratively. If you look up "could care less" in the OED you'll find it lists it under American English with the meaning "could not care less."

That’s disappointing. What next? Americans get a pass on using “it’s” when the correct thing would be “its” just because they do it all the time?

This is a tour of vengeance, creating a place in history, establishing a family dynasty of inherited power, and a smatter of narcissistic delusion.

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Making the government small enough to drown in the bathtub? (Grover Norquist's goal)

Big military, big ICE and strong arming universities are not "small government" policies.

These are the pieces controlled solely by the executive branch. The goal is total unequivocal control, not anarchy.

Monarchies, dictators, owners of international conglomerates, etc all send their kids to Harvard

When you frame it like this... it doesn't sound like such a loss. But yeah, it's not the only way to frame it.

The percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category is statistically insignificant. It’s not even worth framing.

It's not about the percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category, it's about the percentage of students in this category who go to Harvard.

Also fairly low. There's plenty of high-prestige institutions in the world.

As someone from europe I'd say Harvard and MIT are the #1 prestige institutions, and a lot of people will not settle for less.

A lot? Those institutions only accept a relatively small total number of foreign students. Everyone else has to "settle for less" whether they want to or not.

If Dad gifts a new building on campus you odds at getting accepted go up tenfold.

I dont see why that is ever considered a problem. They are literally a private institution selling a service. Why shouldn't you be able to pay your way to the front of the line.

It's fine as long as they're open about it. It's when they say "We're a very selective institution that only accepts the academic best of the best from the entire world" and then also allow pay to play, clarifying "Also the people whose parents donated us buildings juuuuust so happen to be the academic best of the best from the the entire world" that people start to question just how selective admission really is, and just how world-class their student body and standards really are.

If they kept stats on who was an endowment/legacy admit and gave them a different colored diploma so people could filter them out when assessing things like grades and graduation rate and they didn't effect the curve I think there would be less criticism of the process.

I think they do keep stats on legacy admits.

I dont see why they would get different diplomas provided they complete the same coursework. If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.

I do think they would be more upfront about options for entry.

>If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.

Not if they're given unearned grades

Everyone at Harvard is given unearned grades. It's the poster child for GPA inflation.

I forget the exact stat, but I think the median GPA there is about an A-.

MIT, really? I think of MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career, not for old-money people looking to make family connections.

> MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career...

Apparently you've not been to MIT in a while - it offers degrees in business management, finance, plus 17 in arts, humanities, and social sciences, not to mention grad programs. MIT admits more than its fair share of fruit-cakes with money:

https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/

Believe it or not, I've never been to MIT.

Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College would disagree.

There is no need for there to be one and only one such institution.

Depends in what. HEC in France is the top for finance.

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I used that example because it’s my family. My mom’s family’s landholdings have grown in value as our capital city grows, so my aunts and uncles are selling plots and buying houses in California in cash. This is after distributing my grandfather’s estate among a dozen kids. From a country where the per-capita GDP is $2,400 per year. How do you think that happened? This background is table stakes for being part of the 0.1% that has the means to emigrate out of these countries and send their kids to elite American schools.

[flagged]

I don’t think my family was involved in corruption. But they are part of a landed gentry class that cooperated with the British colonial administration. My mom’s surname is an honorific reserved for people in a high position within a rigid class hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum

But yes, I think that, in the aggregate, it’s not good to have a large number of people like me injected straight into America’s major institutions. We dilute what I think is a core american value against elitism and hierarchy. And our presence gives our home grown elite permission to drop certain beneficial safeguards on their behavior, such as the WASP taboo against conspicuous consumption. This is highly visible in Northern Virginia where I grew up. It was always full of elites, but now it’s full of elites that don’t feel pressured to keep a low profile and at least pretend they’re not elites.

Please don't cross into name-calling or personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before and your account has unfortunately been continuing to break the rules pretty badly.

That is just insane. How much do you think it costs or how poor do you think people in say france are where only criminals can afford it?

I didn’t say France, did I? I’m talking about africa, the middle east, much of asia, and parts of eastern europe. E.g.., maybe not Poland, but probably Russia.

Then you should be more specific instead of using weasel words like “much of the world”.

Asia, Middle East, and Africa are literally “much of the world.” They account for the vast majority of the world’s population.

There are a lot of ways to group countries and form a majority of the global population. You left it open to interpretation.

It’s still unclear to me why Africa, the Middle East, much (which part?) of Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe are uniquely capable of political corruption that France and Poland are not.

I remember when you claimed the APA didn't apply to this. At least now you don't bother to defend based on legality and are cool with forcing your 'totally not corrupt' single totalitarian viewpoint on the country in order to counter... corrupt totalitarianism.

Get rid of Harvard and the person you mentioned would just... go somewhere else. You aren't actually advocated FOR anything, just saying 'there are bad people in the world'. Um, ok, yeah, we know that. That's why we disagree with you empowering those we see as bad people but that you defend illegally empowering/illegal behavior of because you happen to agree with them.

The APA doesn’t apply to this—issuing visas as a discretionary function of the executive, and thus unreviewable under section 701(a)(2). Where am I being inconsistent?

Have any of the challenges to the administration prevailed on APA grounds in an appellate court?

"In an appellate court" doing a lot of heavy lifting for you, isn't it? How many APA cases has this administration lost in district courts?

Lawyers rely on appellate court decisions to understand what the law actually is or isn’t. District court orders granting TROs don’t even include meaningful legal reasoning. Lots of these are being overturned. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5407923/voa-voice-of-am....

The Supreme Court stands ready to overturn Humphreys Executor. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl.... The prospect of the Supreme Court upholding using the APA to challenge direct presidential action is nil. Courts aren’t empowered to micromanage discretionary presidential actions.

The cases where appellate courts have upheld injunctions against the administration have been mainly on due process and first amendment groups. Courts are empowered to protect individual rights from executive action.

As a percentage of -students- yes but as a percentage of world power children? That’s a much smaller cohort, and is the cohort that matters in this context.

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