Change of Citizenship Status?

JHS
Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:43:34 +0000

Why do you need to know the answer to even consider applying to Harvard?

If you apply, and you are not accepted, the answer doesn’t matter. On average, that is about a 95% probability.

If you are accepted, and your green card doesn’t get revoked, or you don’t give it up (huh?), the answer doesn’t matter. And you are going to Harvard, congratulations.

If you are accepted, and your green card gets revoked (or something), either Harvard will honor the acceptance and give you financial aid (as it does to all accepted students, regardless of citizenship or immigration status), or it won’t. In the former case, congratulations again. In the latter case, that’s terrible for you, but you really aren’t a lot worse off than if you had never applied. The only way you would be worse off is if following Harvard’s acceptance you had definitively turned down a good opportunity that would not have been withdrawn when your immigration status changed. I don’t know what exactly that would be – but I do know that Harvard would almost certainly take that into account in deciding whether to honor its offer of admission and financial aid.

The real risk may be that the circumstances that led to loss of your green card might prevent you from obtaining a student visa, and make any U.S. college impossible to attend.

But, really, you don’t have to evaluate any of these risks precisely until (a) you are accepted at a U.S. college you want to attend, with financial aid that lets you attend, and (b) you have to choose between that option and some other option that won’t be green-card dependent. That can’t happen for quite some time, and may never happen at all. If and when it does happen, first, you will know a lot more than you know now about whether you are really going to be losing your green card and what the collateral consequences of that may be, and, second, you will be able to talk to knowledgeable people at the colleges involved who can give you an authoritative answer to your question based on the actual circumstances. Not strangers on a message board who, at best, are speculating intelligently about this highly unusual question.

So forget about your question until it becomes relevant. If it makes sense to apply to a college, apply there.

Note, by the way, that only a handful of elite colleges, not all of them, follow Harvard’s policy of need-blind admissions and full financial aid for international applicants. Almost all of them provide full financial aid for international applicants they accept, but most do not accept them on a need-blind basis. Therefore, other colleges may be far more likely than Harvard to view your change in immigration status as a reason to reconsider your acceptance.