Photograph by Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times 55
For Bianca, the most helpful piece of the
puzzle was Kerry Fowler, her guidance coun-
selor. Beginning in freshman year, she would
stop by Fowler’s offi ce almost every day, just
to talk about school or life. And as senior year
approached, the subject they talked about
more and more was college. ‘‘For someone
whose family has never been to college, it’s just
an abstraction,’’ Schwarz explained when we
spoke this summer. ‘‘We build up our students
for four years, to get to the point where they’re
confi dent and comfortable that they belong in
college. That takes a lot of hand-holding.’’At Richmond Hill, some of that hand-hold-
ing comes via four ‘‘bridge coaches,’’ recent
Richmond Hill graduates who are recruited
and trained by CARA and sent back into their
high schools to serve as paid part-time col-
lege counselors. The theory behind this part of
CARA’s model is that these ‘‘near peers’’ share a
background and perspective with current stu-
dents and thus are able to connect with them
on a more personal level than an adult coun-
selor ever could. The bridge coaches at Rich-
mond Hill are all graduates from the school’s
class of 2017, all immigrants or the children ofimmigrants and all currently enrolled in four-
year CUNY colleges.
During the school year, bridge coaches spend
10 hours a week in the college-counseling offi ce
on the second fl oor, helping juniors and seniors
with their college paperwork and fi nancial-aid
applications. During the summer, when the
school’s full-time counseling staff is on vaca-
tion, the bridge coaches play a more central
role, fending off the phenomenon known to
college counselors as summer melt. Data show
that among low-income high school gradu-
ates nationally, somewhere around 20 percent
of seniors who graduate in spring with the
intention of going straight into college instead
change their minds over the summer and fail to
enroll in the fall.
There are a lot of factors behind summer
melt: Sometimes a family’s fi nances shift, or a
student loan doesn’t come through, or there’s a
paperwork snafu in the college’s bureaucracy.
Sometimes, though, summer melt seems to
be a case of students who were never totally
convinced they belonged in college in the fi rst
place losing momentum or losing confi dence
as the fi rst day of school approaches. In CARA’s
model, the bridge coaches are the shepherds
responsible for keeping those uncertain new
graduates from going astray.
This year, the threat of summer melt loomed
particularly large at Richmond Hill High. There
were many seniors whom Schwarz and his
team had spent more than three years per-
suading, bit by bit, that college might indeed
be the right option for them. When Covid-19
began to take its toll in the spring, that eff ort
suddenly began to unravel, as students aban-
doned their college plans, often compelled by
economic necessity to try to fi nd work to help
support their families.
At the beginning of the summer, bridge
coaches are each assigned a caseload of a few
dozen students, and they usually spend July and
August encouraging and cajoling them, mak-
ing sure their paperwork is in order and their
plans are secure. This summer, with in-per-
son meetings impossible, bridge coaches had
to rely on digital creativity to track students
down. Sometimes texts and phone calls were
enough. But Erick Perea, a bridge coach, told
me last month that he had started using Insta-
gram direct messages and video chats to reach
his students, as well as multiplayer games on
PlayStation 4. He did some of his most eff ec-
tive college counseling at 4 a.m., he told me,
discussing fi nancial-aid forms with his advisees
on in-game chat in NBA 2K20 and Brawlhalla.For the fi rst year or two of high school,
Raj Bala Chaudhary, another member of Rich-
mond Hill’s class of 2020, wasn’t thinking about
college at all. She was planning to join the Navy
after high school, as her older sister and older
brother had done. But after a rocky freshmanThe Richmond Hill High School graduate Raj Bala Chaudhary
with her parents, Amit and Mary Chaudhary, on move-in day
at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in August.Opening photograph: Bianca Argueta, a Richmond Hill
graduate, in Brooklyn. The pandemic, along with scheduling
difficulties and a lack of communication, helped shape her
decision to withdraw from community-college classes.