When her mother got up to leave, Raj Bala
stood in her way.
‘‘Mom, I want you to give me your blessing,’’
she said. ‘‘But I’m going to go anyways.’’
Her mother seemed startled. ‘‘Really?’’ she said.
‘‘You’re going to go?’’ Her eyes began to water.
‘‘Yes,’’ Raj Bala said. ‘‘And it will feel better to
me if we’re on good terms.’’
Her mother stared at her. ‘‘You don’t have my
blessing,’’ she said.
It was a hard night, and there were a few hard
ones that followed. But as spring turned to summer,
her mother’s resistance began to soften.
Then in June, there was a new twist: Raj Bala
heard from Smith that she was off the wait-list and
admitted to the class of 2024. This complicated mat-
ters. Smith is much more selective than SUNY Poly,
and it is more prestigious as well. Its graduation rate
is 88 percent, compared with 53 percent at SUNY
Poly. And Smith is part of the American Talent Ini-
tiative, though only 20 percent of its student body
is eligible for a Pell grant. According to the airlift
strategy, Smith was Raj Bala’s best option. But for
her, there was really only one data point that mat-
tered: How much would it cost? Smith did off er Raj
Bala considerable fi nancial aid, but it was still asking
her to pay $12,000 a year. At a moment when her
family was rationing eggs, that seemed to Raj Bala
an unimaginable sum. She stuck with SUNY Poly.
By mid-August, Raj Bala’s mother had come
to terms with the fact that she was leaving. She
took her out shopping for hand sanitizer and bed-
sheets, and as they drove to the store, she reached
over and held Raj Bala’s hand. ‘‘You’re my pride
and joy,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re so young, but you’ve
accomplished so many things.’’
As fall approached, Joshua Khan and the bridge
coaches were texting and calling their students
more frequently, making sure they were prop-
erly registered for classes and that everyone’s
fi nancial aid was in order. Their eff orts seem to
have paid off. By early September, 70 percent of
Richmond Hill’s graduating class was enrolled in
college — down just a bit from the previous year.
Bianca Argueta, for now, is not among them.
In late August, when she noticed her McDonald’s
co-workers shifting their schedules to accommo-
date college classes, that fact hit home for her.
‘‘That could be me,’’ she found herself thinking.
She fi gured that she would still start at LaGuar-
dia in January, but she just wasn’t sure. She felt
frustrated by her own indecision, frustrated by
CUNY’s bureaucracy and frustrated that all her
choices seemed like bad ones. Like so many of
her classmates and co-workers — not to men-
tion the thousands of CUNY students logging in
this week to overcrowded, underfunded Zoom
classes — she wanted a college education. But
she wasn’t convinced that the system wanted her
to get one.
At SUNY Poly, move-in day was tightly
orchestrated to try to reduce the risk of viralspread. Raj Bala had to arrive at campus right
at 8 a.m., which meant she needed to leave
Queens at about 3 in the morning. Much of her
family came with her, in two cars: her parents,
her grandmother, two cousins, a brother. Her
mother insisted that her 8-year-old nephew come
along, too, so that he’d see what could happen if
you studied hard. They drove through the night,
stopping once for food, and arrived in Utica a
little after dawn. Through the windows of the
car, the campus looked beautiful, verdant and
crisp, with mountains in the background and
fog rising off the lake. Raj Bala, who had left the
city only a few times in her life, had never seen
anything like it.
Her family members were allowed to come up
two at a time, in masks, to see her dorm room.
Her mother brought a Spanish-language Bible and
some portraits of saints, and she arranged them
on the windowsill. Raj Bala didn’t bring a lot with
her. The school had told students to pack light, in
case there was a coronavirus outbreak on campus
and everyone had to go back home in a hurry.
After everything was unpacked, Raj Bala
walked back down to the cars to say goodbye to
her family. Her grandmother cried and told her
to focus on her studies. Her mother said she’d
be back in a week to visit. Raj Bala watched them
drive away, then walked in her mask back to the
dorm and swiped her new key card. The door
buzzed open, and she was home.