different meetings on the issue. I made a point of writing letters to the girls from
the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in London who had so profoundly moved
me, encouraging them to stay hopeful and keep working, despite their lack of
privilege. In 2011, I’d taken a group of thirty-seven girls from the school to visit
the University of Oxford, bringing not the high achievers but students whose
teachers thought they weren’t yet reaching their potential. The idea was to give
them a glimpse of what was possible, to show them what a reach could yield. In
2012, I’d hosted students from the school at the White House during the British
prime minister’s state visit. I felt it was important to reach out to kids multiple
times and in multiple ways in order for them to feel that it was all real.
My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and
high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at
school. It was this insight that drove my White House mentoring program, and it
lay at the center of a new education initiative my staff and I were now preparing
to launch, called Reach Higher. I wanted to encourage kids to strive to get to
college and, once there, to stick with it. I knew that in the coming years, a
college education would only become more essential for young people entering a
global job market. Reach Higher would seek to help them along the way,
providing more support for school counselors and easier access to federal financial
aid.
I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a
consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words
to a new generation. It was the message I gave my own daughters, who were
fortunate to have it reinforced daily by their school and their privileged
circumstances, and I was determined to express some version of it to every young
person I encountered. I wanted to be the opposite of the guidance counselor I’d
had in high school, who’d blithely told me I wasn’t Princeton material.
“All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic
old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students
who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we
had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux
Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden;
high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music,
and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope
line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of
you.