54
year ago, when Bianca Argueta was beginning
her senior year at Richmond Hill High, she felt
pretty excited about what the fall of 2020 might
hold for her. Richmond Hill is a big, old-fash-
ioned public high school in central Queens, the
alma mater of Rodney Dangerfi eld and Phil Riz-
zuto, and Bianca was a top student there, full of
ambition, part of the leadership club, taking A.P.
classes. Her parents didn’t have college degrees
— her stepfather was a metalworker, and her
mother did accounting for a Long Island dairy
operation — but from an early age, Bianca was
told by her mother that a college degree would
be essential. ‘‘She always knew I was going to
be the kid to go to college,’’ Bianca told me. ‘‘She
would remind me that I have to do better. I have
to want more for myself.’’
Bianca had been receiving emails from St.
John’s University, a private Catholic college
in Queens, encouraging her to apply, and one
Sunday in October, she and her parents drove
to the campus for a freshman recruiting event.
It was an exciting day. They were met by a wel-
come team of St. John’s students and staff lin-
ing the route to the parking lot, screaming and
cheering, decked out in school colors. Johnny
Thunderbird, the St. John’s mascot, was there,
waving his fuzzy red wings. The prospective
students and their families packed into the
gym for inspirational pep talks about what
their future could be like at St. John’s. Bianca
was transfi xed. ‘‘They really got me with the
speeches,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t even look at my
phone. I know it sounds cheesy, but it just made
me realize, Wow, I could do a lot more than I
thought. If you push yourself, you can pretty
much do anything.’’
Students at Richmond Hill don’t come
from privileged backgrounds. They are most-
ly immigrants or the children of immigrants,
Guyanese, Punjabi, Dominican. Eighty-two
percent of them meet the federal defi nition of
economic disadvantage, and 22 percent speak
a language other than English at home. When
Richmond Hill graduates go on to college, they
usually attend the City University of New York,
the city’s massive public university system,
which at any given time is educating more than
a quarter million students in its 11 four-year
colleges and seven community colleges. But
Bianca aspired to something more. ‘‘I felt like
private schools had a lot more to off er than a
community college,’’ she said. ‘‘Not to sound
shady toward people who go to communitycollege, but I just felt that I worked really hard
through high school, and I didn’t want to let
my work go in vain.’’
Bianca applied early to St. John’s, and at 6
o’clock one morning in early January, the email
arrived. She was in. ‘‘I just started screaming,’’
she told me. ‘‘My mom thought someone was
trying to break into my window.’’
For a while, spirits were running high in
Bianca’s home. But a few days later, the talk
turned to money. Tuition at St. John’s was
more than $43,000. The school off ered her
some fi nancial aid, but her family’s bill was
still going to come to more than $27,000 a
year, even if Bianca kept living at home. One
afternoon, Bianca’s mother sat her down at the
family computer and showed her a big spread-
sheet she had created with all of the family’s
fi nancial information: income, bills, rent, car
note. However she fi ddled with the numbers,
she told Bianca, they couldn’t possibly aff ord
to send her to St. John’s.
‘‘It was a very tough moment for us,’’ Bian-
ca said. ‘‘I was crying. I felt like I had pushed
myself so hard for nothing.’’ Bianca’s mother
was upset, too. ‘‘She felt defeated,’’ Bianca said.
‘‘She felt like she couldn’t provide me with
what I had wanted.’’
Bianca’s fallback was CUNY’s LaGuardia
Community College, a collection of densely
packed buildings in Long Island City, right
next to the Sunnyside railroad yard. Bianca
wasn’t too excited about LaGuardia, but it had
its advantages. It was relatively close to home
and right on the E train, and tuition was about
a tenth of what St. John’s was asking. ‘‘I kind
of just sucked it up and got over it, basically,’’
she said. ‘‘It was just, like, you know what? It
is what it is.’’
And then the pandemic struck.
It was a scary time for Bianca’s family, as it
was for everyone in Queens. Her great-grand-
mother, who lived in Sunnyside, died from
Covid-19, and her grandmother got sick, too,
but recovered. Bianca fi nished her senior year
of high school at home, online. In April, she took
a job working at a McDonald’s in Ozone Park,
eight-hour shifts in a mask and gloves, passing
takeout bags under big sheets of plexiglass.
Late that month, she spoke on the phone
with her assigned adviser from LaGuardia,
who helped her register for the fall semester.
Bianca requested classes in the middle of the
day, so that she could keep her regular shifts at
McDonald’s. But the schedule she got back was
all jumbled up — one class at 8 in the morning,
another that ended at 9 at night. When she tried
to get back in touch with LaGuardia to change
things, no one replied to her emails or answered
her phone calls for more than a month.
As the days went by without a response,
Bianca started having second thoughts about
LaGuardia. And as the toll of the pandemic
rose, her mother grew anxious about Bianca’srisk of infection in crowded college class-
rooms. She told Bianca she didn’t want her to
end up being a test subject for the government.
Bianca knew CUNY might go virtual in the fall,
but that prospect wasn’t any more appealing.
She’d had a hard time with online classes in the
spring, always procrastinating and doing her
work at the last minute. Starting college that
way seemed like a waste of time and money.
In June, Bianca withdrew from all her classes.
She decided to defer her freshman year until
January, at least.Richmond Hill High School was devas-
tated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The school is
just a few miles from Elmhurst Hospital, arguably
the epicenter of the city’s outbreak. Scores of
Richmond Hill parents and family members of
students got sick last spring, many were hospital-
ized and more than 30 parents of students died.
Hundreds more lost their jobs, often in families
that were already living on the edge fi nancially.
For Richmond Hill’s teachers and adminis-
trators, the spring was frantic and emotionally
draining. Their educational aspirations sud-
denly became much more elemental: trying
to keep their 1,700 students alive, online and
decently nourished. But for a core group within
the school’s staff , another worry soon emerged:
How could they stop the coronavirus from
undoing the progress they made over the pre-
vious few years in getting students like Bianca
to college?
Back in 2014, only about half the school’s
freshmen were graduating from high school on
time, and only 40 percent of those graduates
were going on to college. That was the year Rob-
ert Schwarz, a vice principal, was put in charge
of improving those numbers. At the time, there
was just one college counselor at Richmond
Hill for almost 600 seniors — a typical ratio in
New York City public schools and a thoroughly
unmanageable one. Schwarz teamed up with a
local nonprofi t called South Asian Youth Action
to hire a second college counselor, a young man
from East Elmhurst named Joshua Khan.
Then he got word of a local nonprofi t group
called College Access: Research & Action, or
CARA, which provides a schoolwide coach-
ing and training intervention designed to
improve college-going rates at New York City
high schools. After visiting a couple of schools
where CARA was working, Schwarz invited Jan-
ice Bloom and Lori Chajet, CARA’s founders, to
bring their program to Richmond Hill.
With CARA’s help, Schwarz set up a dedicat-
ed college advising offi ce, recruited Richmond
Hill’s guidance counselors into the college
process and introduced into the curriculum a
college-application class for juniors. Together,
the various interventions made a diff erence.
The on-time graduation rate at Richmond Hill
is now about 70 percent, and in 2019, 75 percent
of those graduates went directly to college.A
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
⬤ THE EDUCATION ISSUE
9.13.20