Francisco said the answer was no, and the chemical company representatives said the student’s application would go into a pile of 10,000 other applications that looked just like his. But the company representatives said speaking one or two foreign languages would place that application in the top 10 percent of college graduates who might be hired.

Those representatives further said that if the student showed that he had worked at an internship in a chemical company in a country where nobody spoke the language of his birth, the application would go into the top 3 percent of graduates who might be hired.

“These are kind of the unwritten rules that go into the hiring of our students,” said Francisco, who noted that makes it imperative for the university to share this knowledge with its students.

Francisco also recalled that while he worked at Purdue University, he talked to a student who said he did not need to learn a foreign language. That student said he was returning home to the family farm, which sold its hogs for meat. Francisco said that when he asked the student where those hogs were sold, he replied, “To Japan.”