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Jessica Custer was the editor of her high school paper growing up in Hardwick, New Jersey. She was also a member of the biology team, the chemistry team, the chess club, and the debate club. That résumé got her accepted to a whole slew of prestigious colleges, including Georgetown, Princeton, and Harvard. But in 1995, she made a different choice, one that she believed would set her up for a bright future.

“If I get my degree from Oxford, I can go to any graduate school I want,” Custer said she thought at the time. “I’m golden.”

Jen Mills lived in Redmond, Washington. Like Custer, she believed that studying at Oxford would be a transformative experience—that it wa

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