This article is SATIRE. Quotes, attributions and facts are fictional.
LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. — With the madness of college application season finally over, Los Alamitos High School seniors now enter the season of commitments. While many remain preoccupied with their own decisions, the public wonders where the school’s top students are ending up, more specifically, Levi Vanderbilt.
Levi Vanderbilt is set to graduate from LAHS with a 5.0 weighted grade point average and 4.0 unweighted GPA. Vanderbilt set the record at LAHS for taking every single Advanced Placement class available and receiving nothing short of an A+ in all of them. Extracurricularly, Vanderbilt is the president of 15 clubs, fluent in 10 languages, interned for President Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and published a book on quantum physics. Most notably, Vanderbilt worked with the Chief Executive Officer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to help launch the first rocket to land on Pluto.
“Vanderbilt is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met in my entire life. He is definitely going places,” said Jared Isaacman, CEO of NASA, in a 2025 interview.
So, where is Levi Vanderbilt going to college? As of March 30, 2026, Vanderbilt announced his commitment to Foothill College.
Foothill College, located in Los Altos Hills, California, has an 100% open-door admission policy. Accepting all high school students, Foothill College has no minimum grade point average or scholastic assessment test requirement. It goes without saying that many are wondering, “Why is Levi Vanderbilt going here?”
Overall, the answer is simple. Yield protection. Out of the 25 colleges Vanderbilt applied to, 24 rejected him. This includes: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California Los Angeles, Caltech, University of Chicago and more. Surprisingly, all of these prestigious schools saw Vanderbilt’s extraordinary statistics and thought he was simply “too good” for their school; thus deciding to reject him to leave room for “less competitive, competitive applicants.”
“Yield protection refers to the theory that colleges reject or waitlist applicants who are ‘overqualified’ because they predict those students will choose a higher-ranked school and decline admission,” said an EduAvenues article.
However, these top universities collectively came together with a “yield protection overdose” for Vanderbilt. Nevertheless, luckily for Vanderbilt, Foothill College decided he was an honored applicant, not an applicant at risk. Even better, Foothill College is known to be highly effective for transferring to the UC system, UC Merced may just be in Vanderbilt’s near future!
