The article explores three interconnected perspectives on young people from the Third World enrolled in Romanian universities. The first is the relationship between Romania’s engagement with the post-colonial world and the provision of higher education to African, Asian and Latin American students. The second is the impact of students’ political agency on Romanian society and foreign policy. Third, the author shows the resilience of racial discrimination, as authorities and citizens struggled to live up to the ideal of solidarity with decolonized peoples. Merging these directions, the article shows that the local communist party was able to strike only a precarious balance among internationalism, economic priorities, and the integration of youth from developing countries in academic and public spaces. The author emphasizes that students contested the policies and attitudes they were confronted with in Romania. Their post-colonial otherness remained an invisible barrier never overcome by party officials and society. By 1989, Arab and African youth became the scapegoats of popular anger against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship.