ISAIAS FINALLY WALKED through the door shortly before the recruiting event ended.
He spoke briefly with a representative of the music recording program that interested him, then walked over to the financial aid table, introduced himself and explained his situation. “But the problem is right now I’m undocumented and I’m going through the Deferred Action process. And I want to know if I do want to apply, how would I apply? As an international student or out of state? If I do get Deferred Action, would that change anything? Would it be hard? How could I get scholarships?”
The president had only announced the Deferred Action program a few months before. Many university staffers rarely dealt with immigrant students, and in this case, they didn’t know the answers.
But soon Mr. Chapman, the recruiter, reappeared and introduced Isaias to a wiry white man in a suit, David Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt was the vice president of international affairs. Even though Isaias had lived in the United States since 2003, the university would handle him as a foreign student.
“If you apply, there are ways we can work with your situation,” Mr. Schmidt told Isaias. “What I would recommend is no matter what your situation, do not let that prohibit you from pursuing what you want to do.” He wrote out his e-mail address and gave it to Isaias.
“We’ll take it step by step, okay?”
They said goodbye, and Isaias got some grapes from the banquet table. Isaias told me he hadn’t asked his parents to come since he figured they’d likely ask just as many questions as he would. And if he was the one that really wanted to go to college, he should come and not bother them with it.
Isaias said he came late because something had lasted longer than he thought it would. He wouldn’t elaborate, saying only that it was private. Late or not, the conversation with Mr. Schmidt made him happy. “It’s very encouraging to hear that I could contact him directly and we’d be able to work through the case. I like that,” Isaias said, pausing to eat. “These are good grapes.”
As Isaias and most other Kingsbury students considered colleges close to home, Estevon Odria looked at schools farther away, drawing on advice from mentors with Memphis PREP, the nonprofit that had sent him to Phillips Exeter in the summer.
One of Estevon’s strongest supporters was the school librarian and writing teacher Marion Mathis. She’d developed a close relationship with Estevon when she taught him in eleventh grade and wrote glowing recommendation letters for him. In one letter, she called Estevon “a quiet yet fun-loving genius” and “the student I have waited to teach for twenty years.”
Tufts University in Massachusetts and Bates College in Maine flew Estevon to visit their campuses and attend recruiting programs for minority students. He wasn’t impressed with Bates. “It was very cold,” he said in chemistry class one day. “And they had too many lobsters.”
A third school flew him to campus that fall for a diversity weekend: Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Estevon wanted to go there more than anywhere else. He had learned about the school from a mentor at Memphis PREP. U.S. News and World Report ranked the university twenty-third nationally, only slightly below the most elite schools. Estevon saw Carnegie Mellon as competitive, but he thought he might get in. “People tell me to go to like Harvard or Yale, an Ivy League school, but I don’t want to do that.” Those were basically liberal arts colleges, and he wanted to study technology.
Estevon completed an application to the Carnegie Mellon engineering school and did it “early decision,” meaning that if he was accepted, he would go. The engineering college accepted only one in five applicants. He couldn’t count on getting in.
At Kingsbury, Estevon’s ACT test score of 31 was so exceptional that school officials had boasted about it on the marquee outside. At Carnegie Mellon, a 31 was the median, which meant half of admitted students scored higher. In the university’s engineering college, fully a quarter of admitted students had scored a perfect 800 on the math section of the other national test, the SAT.
Estevon didn’t have a scanner or printer at home, so Ms. Mathis let him use the equipment at her house not far from the high school. He completed applications to New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering; Georgia Tech; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Vanderbilt University in Nashville; the University of Texas at Austin; University of California–Berkeley; University of California–Los Angeles; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.1
This process generated much paperwork for the adults around Estevon. He needed recommendation letters and family financial records, and he asked for them again and again. “My son stays on it. He’s determined,” his mother, Nadine, said months later. “He’s gonna call you until you get it sent over, e-mailed. ‘Did you do it? Did you do it? Are you gonna do it?’”
Estevon completed his Carnegie Mellon application ahead of the early decision deadline. But he knew just how strong the other applicants were. And he told his grandparents he doubted he’d get in.
* * *
Mariana Hernandez visited a college campus that November and had a chance to observe a biology class. The professor said something that surprised her. “We forgot to pray,” she said. “Let’s pray real quick.”
The professor sang the word “Alleluia,” stretching the word into multiple syllables, then sang “Give a high five to the one next to ya!” The students began exchanging high fives, two hands at once. She repeated the words and ended with a prayer. “Father bless us, give us a good day. Amen.” Soon the professor was teaching a lesson about how DNA is transcribed into RNA inside a cell.
Mariana and dozens of other high school students were attending an all-day recruiting event at Christian Brothers University, a small Catholic campus in Memphis. The city schools were off for Veterans Day, but the university remained open, which gave Mariana a chance to visit while classes were in session. Two other Kingsbury students had come with her—her boyfriend, Adam Truong, and their friend Tommy Nguyen.
The lighthearted song might suggest a lack of seriousness, but the university had a reputation for delivering a solid education. Its six-year graduation rate was 60 percent, better than many other schools in the area.
The college was founded by the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a religious order that believed in educating young people, particularly the poor. In Memphis, that meant enrolling African-Americans and others who might be first in their family to go to college. The school had enrolled its first black student in 1960, and minorities and international students now made up roughly 44 percent of its total enrollment of 1,600. Even though it was a Catholic college, it enrolled students of many faiths, and some Muslim girls with hijab head coverings moved through the campus of modest brick buildings and covered walkways. Mariana thought the prayer and singing were odd—she felt as if she were in church.
But overall, the class gave Mariana a positive impression. “The lady was nice. It was a small classroom. Knew what they were talking about.” Mariana and the others knew Christian Brothers students, including Tommy’s girlfriend, and they’d spent time on the campus. Mariana had participated in a Streets Ministries summer program that exposed her to college life, and she was taking advanced courses. Compared to many Kingsbury students, she and the others knew a lot about college and were well positioned to go. When another college recruiter visited Kingsbury High that same month, a girl asked a question that showed she had little conception of college life: “They have a bathroom in the dorm, right?”
Later that afternoon, Mariana, Adam and Tommy met with an admissions counselor and reviewed their files. The three of them did this as a group, without their parents.
Tommy’s mom usually worked from 8:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at a nail salon, and his dad worked at a warehouse in a night maintenance job and slept during the day. Mariana said, “My dad’s very liberal. He’s like ‘You don’t need my help. I’m not going to college. You are. You do it.’”
Adam’s mother worked in a nail salon, too. He later said she wanted him to go to college, but she didn’t keep up with the details. She didn’t understand nuances such as the difference between prestigious private schools and lesser-known public schools, and if Adam asked her to sign a document as part of the college application process, she wrote her signature without understanding what she’d agreed to. It had been this way much of his life: from an early age, Adam and his older sister had acted as interpreters and guides for their parents, immigrants from Vietnam who didn’t speak English. The children paid bills and dealt with the mortgage, utilities and the phone company. The responsibility made Adam and his sister grow up fast. So did their family’s troubles.
Adam told me he was born in Beaumont, Texas, a small city by the Gulf of Mexico. His father spent months at a time working on commercial shrimp boats. Adam said shrimpers sometimes dealt with the boredom of the long trips by using drugs, and that his dad used cocaine and crack. Adam said that once when his father wanted to apply for a factory job, he made Adam pee in a bag so he’d have clean urine for a drug test.
Both Adam and his sister Ashley remember that their parents began to argue, and that the arguments became increasingly frightening—Ashley remembers one fight in which her parents trashed the living room, throwing pictures on the floor, glass breaking. Adam developed the habit of using video games to escape this environment—but the fights were so intense he couldn’t ignore them. “We witnessed a lot of things during the time.”
Adam’s grandmother on his mom’s side visited from Vietnam. After one very bad fight between Adam’s parents, she convinced her daughter to leave the marriage. Adam’s mother appeared at her children’s school in the middle of the day, packed the children’s things and told them they were moving to Tennessee, where distant relatives lived.
“It all happened so fast,” Adam said. “We didn’t know how to take it. Me and my sister cried and that’s about it. We didn’t know how it was going to be leaving my dad and stuff.” He would remember the date—October 26, 2006. He was 11 years old. He and his sister quickly found themselves in a new city, Memphis.
Adam said his father was so shocked by the departure of his wife and children that he changed his life and stopped using drugs. He later reestablished his relationship with his children and sent them money. They began going on trips to see him.
The family’s difficulties continued in Memphis. Adam said his mother used to gamble, and sometimes the kids didn’t have enough money to buy pencils. In 2015, Adam told me his mother had stopped gambling.
I don’t speak Vietnamese, but I wanted to talk with Adam’s parents through an interpreter and hear their side. Adam asked them about this possibility and told me shortly before I completed this book that they’d both declined to be interviewed. Adam said his father worked all the time in a gas station and was dealing with two recent deaths in the family and that his mother was busy, too.
Adam acknowledged that his parents had helped him and his sister in an important way: they had pushed their children to work hard and make good grades in their elementary school years, and the children maintained that habit through middle school and high school.
The children also saw the long and hard hours their parents worked. To Adam, his dad and other relatives seemed unhappy. He didn’t want to end up like them.
* * *
December 2012:
Five months before graduation
A few weeks after Mariana and the others visited Christian Brothers, Isaias climbed on board a big tour bus that stood parked in front of Kingsbury High in the predawn darkness.
A moment later, the bus pulled out into the sleeping streets. Shortly before 10:00 a.m., the bus arrived in a Murfreesboro district of big box stores and a shopping mall. The driver steered the bus into Middle Tennessee State University’s campus, a sprawling collection of big modern buildings. The kids climbed out and walked into the student union, a spacious new building with the feel of an airport.
Admissions staffers brought the group to the parliamentary room, where the student council held its sessions. It was a high-ceilinged space with tiered rows of seats and microphones, and the students immediately started hitting buttons and speaking into them. The MTSU counselors reviewed the admissions requirements again, then took the group on a campus tour.
Magaly had stayed back in Memphis—as an eleventh grader, she only took part in a few of the college search activities that so often occupied Isaias and his twelfth-grade classmates. It seemed strange to see Isaias without Magaly. They had been spending so much time together lately that I had almost begun to think of them as a unit.
After the tour, the Kingsbury students ate lunch and killed time in the campus bookstore. Isaias’ friend Daniel Nix tried on an MTSU baseball cap, putting it on sideways. “Hey, now you look like white trash!” Isaias joked.
Soon it was time to return to Memphis. The visit had consisted of an admissions talk, the campus tour, and lunch. The students hadn’t done any of the things that more actively involved parents might have arranged for their children. Isaias hadn’t sat down one-on-one with a recruiter, visited the recording studios, spoken with students or watched any classes.
On the bus ride home, Isaias shared his thoughts on the visit. “It’s nice. It’s very pretty. It looks—I don’t know. Very interesting. Very appealing.”
The bus rolled on to Memphis.
The semester was speeding to an end. A couple of days later, Isaias and Magaly directed other kids in a school play with a script they’d written. They had tried to mimic an old silent film with titles explaining the action. But the projector by the stage didn’t work properly, and the scene became a confusing pantomime that had something to do with a girl opening her presents on Christmas morning. As Isaias later put it, “We just looked like idiots running around with the screen down and nothing on it.”
In Philip Tuminaro’s seventh-period English class for seniors, guidance counselor Brooke Loeffler arrived for a special talk on college applications.
“I’m kind of afraid to ask this question, but how many people have requested a transcript?”
Six hands went up. A bad result. “This group is really behind on college applications, so let me go over what you need to do,” she said. She told them about the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid that they’d start filling out in January. And she said they’d better start studying.
“You have 210 seniors in your class right now.” Could the seniors guess how many of them had been flagged by teachers as possibly failing?
The students started calling out numbers.
“Ninety!”
“Two hundred!”
“I know I’m one of them,” a girl muttered.
“Ninety-eight,” Ms. Loeffler said. “Half of your class at this point may not graduate because they are not coming to school or doing their work.”
She offered to talk with them individually, either later or right then. Several students lined up to talk with her in the classroom.
Other students chattered so loudly that they drowned out the afternoon announcements.
At a faculty meeting, Mr. Fuller and other staffers gave the teachers instructions for semester grades: if the student hasn’t done all the required work, put an “I” for “incomplete” in some cases. And whatever you do, don’t put any grade below a 60. On a scale of one to 100, a 60 was a failing grade, but it still implied that the student had done more than half the required work. “We’re going to give them the maximum opportunity to pass these classes,” Mr. Fuller said.
* * *
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Estevon logged on to his computer and read that he’d been accepted to Carnegie Mellon. He couldn’t believe it. “Because my test scores were horrible for that school.”
Estevon was probably overstating it, but the scores that made him a standout at Kingsbury were only middling for Carnegie Mellon. He shared the good news with Marion Mathis, the teacher and librarian. “I’m relieved,” Ms. Mathis said. “He’s driven me crazy!” She laughed, and Estevon laughed, too. I was talking with them in the living room of her house, a place decorated with gargoyle statues and golden-framed portraits that showed dogs and orangutans dressed in human clothing. This house had become Estevon’s base of operations as he completed countless applications for colleges and outside grants.
“He’s relentless,” Ms. Mathis said. “I do admire that about him. If he needs help with something, he is so persistent. He never gives up. And that’s how he made it there.”
Ms. Mathis wasn’t the only person helping Estevon. Among the others was Bitsy Kasselberg, a counselor with the organization Memphis PREP. She met Estevon at the public library several times to help him finalize his application for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, which required multiple essays. This program for minority students was funded by a grant of more than $1 billion from the charitable foundation led by Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda.
At the time of the grant in 1999, the billionaire had to defend himself against criticism that the new program excluded white students. He told The New York Times that some minority groups were woefully underrepresented in the high-tech industry and on many university campuses. “Nobody can deny that there is a huge gap, particularly in these key areas, for minority students, and the financial barriers are a substantial element in that,” he said.2
Estevon wouldn’t know for months if he’d get the scholarship.
Carnegie Mellon still hadn’t given Estevon a formal financial aid offer. But he’d received an estimate, and he was confident he could afford to go. He thought of his father and the significance of the Christmas Eve date. “Because 24 was the day, the anniversary of his death. I think it’s just a coincidence, but it’s interesting.”
* * *
On Christmas Eve, the members of the Ramos family drank ensalada de Nochebuena, a traditional punch made with ingredients including sugarcane, beets, the tuber called jicama, oranges and peanuts. Magaly and her mother visited the Ramos family’s house and Magaly gave Isaias a nice digital watch, some pajamas and a book called Stick that showed great moments in history, art and film, illustrated with stick figures. Isaias bought Magaly fuzzy pajamas and a blanket.
In his room over winter break, Isaias shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards as he told me how he and Magaly tried to go out the year before, but it hadn’t worked, how they’d come back to school this year and he’d felt kind of scared to restart the relationship, but now they were together. “I think there was no other way it could have happened,” he said. “It had to happen.” The cards snapped against his fingers. In the next semester of high school, fate would continue to deliver surprises, just like those hidden within the deck of cards.