THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
⬤ THE EDUCATION ISSUE
9.13.20
56
year, her grades began to improve, and they
kept improving. She joined the robotics club,
which ignited in her a new passion for technol-
ogy and design. And she started having con-
versations with Joshua Khan and the bridge
coaches about college and the opportunities
it might bring her.
Raj Bala’s parents were separated. Her
mother, who grew up in Venezuela, drove for
Uber, and her father, who immigrated from
India, delivered packages. Neither of them had
been to college, but they were generally sup-
portive of Raj Bala’s growing interest in higher
education. Still, there were limits. Her mother
insisted that if Raj Bala did go to college, she
was not to leave New York City. No dorms. She
had to live at home.
Last December, Raj Bala won an award for
her technological achievements from the His-
panic Heritage Foundation. At a ceremony for
the winners at Pace University, she remembers
the keynote speaker addressing, in Spanish, the
parents in the audience who might be reluctant
to let their children go off to college. ‘‘Don’t
clip your child’s wings,’’ the woman told them.
‘‘You have to let your children fl y.’’
After the ceremony was over, Raj Bala’s
mother hugged her and congratulated her. But
then she added a reminder. ‘‘That lady doesn’t
know what she’s talking about,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m
not going to let you leave.’’
Raj Bala dutifully applied to several CUNY
colleges, but she also applied to two State Uni-
versity of New York colleges — SUNY Buff alo
and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, which is just
outside Utica — and a few private colleges,
including Smith in Massachusetts and Gettys-
burg in Pennsylvania. She wasn’t sure if she
was really ready to leave New York City. But
the conversations she had been having with
Joshua Khan and the bridge coaches convinced
her that it was at least worth a shot.This past spring, Richmond Hill’s vale-
dictorian, Abiba Dyuti, was admitted to Har-
vard University. It was a source of considerable
pride at the school, but she was very much an
anomaly. Only about 5 percent of each graduat-
ing class at Richmond Hill goes to any privatecollege, let alone to the Ivy League. For about
90 percent of Richmond Hill’s college-bound
grads, college means living at home and going
to CUNY, either a four-year school like York
College or Queens College or a two-year
school like the Borough of Manhattan Com-
munity College or LaGuardia. As Richmond
Hill’s college-going numbers have expanded
in recent years, almost all the growth has been
among students going to CUNY.
Schwarz is pleased that he and his colleagues
have been able to increase this pipeline. But he
is also well aware that the graduation rates at
CUNY schools are quite low. At York, only 38
percent of freshmen earn a degree within eight
years. At B.M.C.C., it’s 28 percent. (The highest
rate among CUNY schools, at Baruch College,
is 67 percent.) It’s a constant frustration for
Schwarz, who knows that many of the students
he labors for years to steer toward college will
depart without a degree.
Over the last decade, those low graduation
rates — which are echoed nationally among
community colleges and less selective public
colleges — have led to a sense of crisis among
many advocates, philanthropists and govern-
ment offi cials. To some, the answer is to invest
more in public systems like CUNY and SUNY,
to create at those schools the kind of support
systems that keep the dropout rate at wealthier
privates low. But for others, the answer is to
identify the best students who might languish
at low-performing public colleges and airlift
them out to colleges with more money and
better graduation rates, like a helicopter rescue
from a burning building.
The history behind the airlift approach goes
back about 15 years, when Ivy League colleges
with gigantic endowments began to make
public announcements that for low-income
students — even for middle-income stu-
dents — attending college would henceforth
be essentially free. That news helped inspire
a national push by philanthropists and non-
profi ts to direct more poor students to highly
selective colleges; if top colleges were going to
make it free for low-income students to attend,
the thinking went, those students shouldn’t
pass up the opportunity.At a handful of schools, this logic really
does hold up for low-income students; Rich-
mond Hill’s valedictorian is likely to pay less
for her freshman year at Harvard than some
of her classmates will pay for their fi rst year
at B.M.C.C. But the guaranteed free ride for
poor students exists only at the very wealthiest
institutions. Go down the selectivity ladder a
rung or two — to St. John’s, say — and suddenly
low-income students aren’t being given a free
ride at all. Instead, they’re being asked to take
out six-fi gure loans for a four-year B.A. And that
changes the calculation. A free Harvard degree
is defi nitely a better deal than a cheap Queens
College degree. But a cheap Queens College
degree is quite likely a better investment than
an expensive St. John’s degree.
This has led to a shift in the approach taken
by many nonprofi ts that off er college counsel-
ing, including CARA. Ten years ago, CARA’s
leaders saw getting more low-income students
to elite institutions as an important part of their
mission. ‘‘ ‘Private better than public’ was sort
of our message back then,’’ Janice Bloom told
me last month. ‘‘There was this math that we
all showed to people, that you’re going to make
a million more dollars over your lifetime if you
go to college.’’ But the intervening decade has
shaken that confi dence.
It’s not that the case for college has grown any
less urgent. There is still plenty of evidence that
without a postsecondary degree, economic secu-
rity and social stability are exceedingly diffi cult
to achieve for young people from low-income
families. But the cost of college is increasing, and
evidence is mounting that a B.A. alone often isn’t
enough to overcome the long-term inequities
of the American economic system. ‘‘We have
just heard too many stories — and the students
and the families have heard too many stories —
of students we’ve encouraged to go to college
who have fi nished and have had trouble fi nding
high-paying jobs that will allow them to pay back
their loans,’’ Bloom said. ‘‘And now they’re being
crushed by debt. That pretty chart we showed
them is not the reality that they’re living.’’
Part of the problem is that advocates like
Bloom were counting on a more enthusias-
tic embrace of low-income students by the
country’s most prestigious institutions — and
in recent years, those institutions did a lot to
encourage that optimism. In 2016, with consid-
erable fanfare, Michael Bloomberg, the former
mayor of New York City, started the American
Talent Initiative, a collaborative eff ort by 30 top
colleges and universities to enroll 50,000 more
low-income students in selective, high-grad-
uation-rate colleges by 2025. ‘‘This is a vital
fi rst step toward creating a more meritocratic
society,’’ Bloomberg said at the time. The group
has since grown to 131 institutions, all publicly
committed to admitting more students eligible
for a Pell grant, the federal aid program for
low- and moderate-income students.For someone whose family has never
been to college, it’s just an abstraction.
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.’’Robert Schwarz,
vice principal at Richmond Hill‘‘