It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  34

  TWENTY-SEVEN SCHOOLS IN TWENTY-FIVE DAYS

  My fears for the future of Abaarso make me all the more determined to promote my current Abaarso students to American universities. My uncle Eli has agreed to help me. He is driving the rental car we are using for our swing through the Midwest, and I’m in the passenger seat, thinking as I watch the scenery go by. We are going to visit as many schools as we can in three weeks.

  I am like a traveling salesman, only my product is back in Somaliland, and it is the Abaarso students. For the last few years, I’ve championed them to anyone who will listen: Somalis, potential teachers, and donors. But my first class is now in its senior year, so the futures of those students are my complete focus. Abaarso being a great school isn’t enough. For them to reach their potential, they’ll need more education than Abaarso can provide.

  We head south on Interstate 35 in Minnesota, coming upon the Iowa border, where we’ll stay the night in a Comfort Inn near Ames. Today has been long. We left Minneapolis early, visiting Carleton College by late morning, and then St. Olaf College by late afternoon. While I am in the meetings, Eli relaxes and hangs around, which is one reason he does 75 percent of the driving. He also likes it.

  After dinner and some sleep, we grab a quick breakfast at the motel’s buffet. I get online and communicate with Harry and others back at Abaarso, making sure everything is okay.

  Looking at the day ahead, we’ll continue south on I-35, then drive east on Interstate 80 to Grinnell College. From there we turn around and head west to Des Moines, then south to Kansas City where we’ll stay the night. It will be the first of three consecutive five-hour driving days, not that the other days are light ones. These Midwest roads are flat and straight, which if nothing else makes for simple directions. As Eli says, to get to Kansas City from Grinnell we just drive to Des Moines and take a left.

  The town of Grinnell is not a beauty, nor is it a destination unless you are going to Grinnell College. But the campus is lovely, as I’d expect from a highly rated and wealthy private liberal arts college. Eli drops me off at admissions, which is not the normal converted residence usually found. Instead, it is a large two-story glass building that seems like it holds more than an admissions office.

  By this point, I can already make a coffee-table book titled Admissions Offices of America, with photos as well as rankings on view, friendliness, and snacks, with points off for those without easy parking.

  I have little time to sample Grinnell’s offering before the international admissions director, Jon Edwards, comes to get me. I’ve never met him before, but he is the reason for today’s long drive.

  Edwards is friendly and easy to talk to. He seems genuinely pleased that I’ve come all the way to Iowa to see him. Not that the school doesn’t get visits from college counselors and consultants, but Grinnell isn’t like an East Coast school that you can easily string together with five other colleges in a close time frame. Besides, I am not a college counselor. I am the founder of a school, and that is a novelty, if nothing else.

  Grinnell is a top-20-ranked liberal arts college, but not everyone knows of it. This is true of many small liberal arts colleges. Even Williams College and Amherst College, generally ranked number 1 and number 2 among private liberal arts colleges, lack the brand recognition of the big universities whose football teams play nationally on Saturday afternoons. But University of Iowa, an hour east, and Iowa State University, back in Ames where we slept, are not possible destinations for Abaarso students. It is not that they are more selective than Grinnell, because the opposite is true, and by a wide margin. Grinnell’s acceptance rate is under 30 percent, while those well-known state schools accept around 80 percent of applicants.

  The difference is money. Few universities fund international students, and even fewer provide full funding. The ones that do provide full funding almost always limit those spots, and they absolutely take funding needs into consideration when deciding whether or not to admit someone. Those colleges that are truly “need-blind” for international students can be counted on one hand, and they have names like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Those are the schools not worried about their own funding, but they are also the most elite in the world.

  The state universities are rightfully most concerned about funding students in their state. Visiting them would most likely be a 100 percent waste of everyone’s time, so my trip is focused on the high-potential colleges, places like Grinnell that are excellent schools, not as competitive for entry as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but still with the money to fund our full-need international students.

  Grinnell is actually one of the richest colleges in America, especially in proportion to its small student body. Its endowment is more than double Iowa State University’s, and 50 percent more than the University of Iowa’s, yet its student population is only 5 percent of those massive schools. They have a lot more money to spend on far fewer students. And to their credit, they don’t sit on their pot of gold. They are known to be very generous with financial aid.

  The primary purpose of my meeting here is not as much to get to know Grinnell as it is for Grinnell to get to know Abaarso. Still, it is important to listen to what the school has to say, because we need to make sure we are sending them the applicants who fit what they are looking for and who will excel here.

  I have now done dozens of these meetings and have matured from my early days when I thought that I was begging for a favor. While I am asking the colleges to commit massive sums of money, in Grinnell’s case $240,000 per student over four years, the relationship is more symbiotic than one might think. I have something special to offer. I have children from a place where these schools haven’t received applicants in decades. And to people like Jon Edwards, diversity is not about checking boxes, it is about the educational benefits that come from people of varying backgrounds living together. My students are mostly from a breakaway unrecognized country within the world’s number 1 failed state, Somalia. They are Muslims, they have grown up in a clan society, and some even grew up nomadic. These students aren’t boxes; they are perspectives that Grinnell wants in its classrooms.

  Grinnell has the ability and desire to fund and build a student body that represents world diversity. The issue on Mr. Edwards’s mind is whether our students can do the work at Grinnell—a fair question and one I am definitely used to, all the way back to my meeting with Dexter Morse at Worcester Academy. Fortunately, I haven’t come unarmed, and I break out my evidence—Mubarik’s performance at Worcester Academy. Sure, he is only one student and, no, he isn’t yet in college, but he has excelled, even in Advanced Placement classes. From there, I tell Mr. Edwards about other students now in the United States and what I know of their academic performance. My message: don’t worry, our kids can compete.

  At meeting’s end, I get a tour of the campus. It is a one-on-one with a nice young man who is a Grinnell student. I am glad for this opportunity, because it is a good way to learn about the school. While we take the traditional tour, I try not to let it distract our conversation, because the buildings are unimportant to me. Of course, they have state-of-the-art facilities; Grinnell College has a $1.7 billion endowment. I’m not worried about the dorm rooms being too small, since our students are currently jammed into our rooms; and I’m not worried about the quality of the food, which has to be an upgrade from our Abaarso cuisine. No, my two big questions about Grinnell are whether it will be too liberal for some of my students, and if there will be enough here for those looking to get an education geared toward careers in business or engineering. It is about finding the right fit.

  “So how was it?” Eli asks me as we drive away from campus and merge onto I-80 West.

  “It went well. I liked the international admissions director.”

  “You think they’ll take someone?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “Not this year?”

  “I just don’t know which school is going to be the first to give
us a chance,” I say.

  We are working in a world where the decision makers aren’t necessarily incentivized to take chances. From what I’m told, when a student fails, professors are known to say, “Obviously that kid wasn’t going to hack it here,” then point to whatever weaknesses exist in his or her application. They aren’t known to come in and congratulate admissions directors and officers on a job well done.

  “I don’t think they are overly worried about the SATs,” I add. “They get that it isn’t the end-all, be-all.”

  SATs are always a conversation in meetings. The problem is not the SAT itself, which legitimately does measure some current abilities, but rather how many schools interpret the scores. To many colleges, a 550 is better than a 500, a 600 better than a 550, and that’s the end of the story. In some respects this is, of course, true, but it must be remembered that the SAT score is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to predict who will succeed at a given college.

  As an example of the SAT’s limitations, let’s assume that an Abaarso student takes the SAT in his fourth year and gets a 530 reading score. That is the 58th percentile, meaning he has scored higher than 58 percent of “College-Bound Seniors,” which has already eliminated all those students who don’t even bother to take the SAT. Let’s compare him to a privately schooled student in New York City who also takes the SAT in his twelfth-grade year, but for him that is his thirteenth year of excellent private schooling. In second grade, this student had superior English to what the Abaarso student had in ninth grade. The New York kid gets a 600 reading score, which is the 79th percentile.

  Yes, at the time of the exam, the New Yorker’s vocabulary and reading are better than that Abaarso student’s. This the SAT correctly measures. But will he be a better student in college? If I’m an admissions officer comparing these two cases with the given information, it is a no-brainer to take the student new to English and new to proper education who somehow still beat 58 percent of college-bound seniors. Any student from that background who reaches over a 500 in such a short period of time has accomplished something miraculous and is growing by leaps and bounds every day. The available evidence shows a student who puts tremendous effort into his studies. By comparison, what percentile do you think the English-speaking New Yorker would have gotten if he had three years to prepare for the Japanese national exam? If he got to the 50th percentile, I’d be pretty darn impressed and think that the kid is a force to be reckoned with.

  The SAT makes no adjustment for background, rate of improvement, or a student’s work ethic, all of which are highly relevant to a student’s chance of success. My student with the 530 reading score is improving so quickly that he’d probably be over 600 if tested again a year later. The test is also tightly timed, and it is this time factor that costs our students so many points. They can’t read and answer all the questions in the twenty-five minutes allotted. In Nimo’s third year at Abaarso, I gave her an SAT reading section and told her not to worry about time. She took thirty-two minutes instead of twenty-five, and she got all but one reading question right. On the actual test, that seven minutes would be devastating to her score.

  I was once at a table of admissions officers that included a representative from a well-known New England liberal arts college. She boasted, “If you don’t get a 600 reading score, then you can’t make it at [my school].” What a load of nonsense. Emory is at least as reputable as her college, so I know full well what is needed to “make it” at her school. In college, each week students have about fifteen hours of classes, which averages about two hours per day. Even if they sleep eight hours per night, that leaves fourteen hours a day free, not exactly the tightly timed environment of the SAT. Nimo would have that extra seven minutes to do her reading. If she didn’t know a word, she could look it up. If she wasn’t sure on a writing issue, she could go to the writing center.

  Mostly, college is about focus, work ethic, and making the most out of available resources. It is about being tenacious, not stopping until the job is done right, and prioritizing studying over partying. An admissions director once told me that when his prominent university analyzed their dropout pool, they found it consisted disproportionately of high SAT scorers who were high school underperformers. In all probability, the dropouts were the kids who came from good backgrounds, had solid fundamentals, but weren’t disciplined.

  That prominent university is the only one I know of that does a thorough analysis comparing the various inputs, such as the SAT and students’ backgrounds, to students’ primary output, performance in college. It is the same analysis we do at Abaarso so that we can make our admissions decisions best match with actual performance. One would think every admissions officer would be constantly referencing her internal manual about what predicts success in her college. One would be wrong. That’s why instead some say idiotic things like “If you don’t get a 600 reading score, then you can’t make it at my school.”

  Eli and I pull into a Kansas City motel where we will stay the night. Tomorrow we will drive south to the small town of Nevada, Missouri, home to little-known Cottey College, a mostly two-year institution that’s women only. I’ve heard about Cottey from the admissions director at Smith College, who speaks very highly of it. I need as many leads as I can get.

  Our visit to Cottey isn’t the end of our day. From there, we drive across Missouri until we reach St. Louis. I am meeting with the admissions director at Washington University the following day, and there is no time to waste there, either, as we are going to spend that night in Kentucky.

  By our second week, Eli and I have seen Oberlin, Culver Military Academy, St. Mary’s College, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Carleton, St. Olaf, and Grinnell. In addition to Cottey and Washington University, we still have Kentucky’s Berea College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Kenyon College, Dennison University, Dickinson College, Gettysburg College, Mercersburg Academy, Franklin and Marshall College, Muhlenberg College, Lafayette College, and Lehigh University. We then drive back to Eli’s house in Connecticut, and from there I go to my mother’s in Worcester late in the evening on October 26. For me this trip had started even before I’d met up with Eli in Pittsburgh. It had begun in Connecticut on October 2, when I’d met with admissions people from Choate Rosemary Hall, Wesleyan University, Miss Porter’s School, Yale University, Taft, and Loomis Chafee School, before flying to D.C. and then driving with a friend to Pittsburgh. In total, I will have seen twenty-seven schools in twenty-five days and driven much farther than the length of the United States. And even that great distance does not come close to describing how many schools I have visited before and those I will see after those three weeks in October.

  I am planting lots of seeds, and at least one has to take. Our students and our school desperately need at least one of these colleges to let us show what we can do.

  35

  SAT TRIP

  Back in January 2010, I had requested that the College Board recognize Abaarso as an official testing center for the SAT. The College Board had once listed Somalia as having one official test center, but this site had been closed years ago because of a U.S. embargo on commerce and trade with Somalia. We needed to establish a test center in Somaliland because anything short of that would put our students at a tremendous disadvantage. Without Abaarso being a test center, the only alternative for our students would be a multiday bus trip to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, to sit for the exam there. Our first class of students would be ready to take the SAT in October 2012, so I wanted to have everything in place well before then.

  My first correspondence with the College Board went unanswered, so I e-mailed several more times, each time receiving a computer-generated response with no follow-up from anyone. This changed in March 2011 when a freelance journalist by the name of Patrick Adams asked the College Board about the situation. Remarkably, that same day, a response was forthcoming. The e-mail read:

  We wish to reach out to Mr. Jonathan Starr immediately to establish a center convenient fo
r his students. Students in Africa should never, ever need to cross a national border to take the SAT, nor travel 18 hours by bus.

  Heartened by this response, I immediately forwarded an application to establish a test site here at Abaarso. When two more months passed without a word, we wrote to check on its status.

  I cannot stress how important it is to move this process forward. Our students are the brightest and hardest working in Somaliland, and we are working to prepare them for the SAT. Allowing us to move forward in the application process to be ready in September 2012 is critical. Please let me know if there have been any developments on your end.

  But no further communications were forthcoming, and by early summer the College Board stopped responding to our requests for updates. In November, one of our teachers, Abel McDonnell, had completed his assignment with Abaarso and was back in the States. He had been working on the SAT test-center issue while in Somaliland and offered to facilitate the process by going to the organization’s New York office to meet with someone in person. Abel’s requests for a face-to-face went unanswered, but on November 23, we received an e-mail from a program associate at the College Board, inquiring as to whether our school, or, more generally, our area of Hargeisa, used or had access to any shipping services such as DHL or UPS. We were told that serving as an SAT test center would require international shipments, and the College Board was interested in determining our available shipping options. While this seemed promising, ultimately our application was rejected in March 2012 because of the “issue of security shipping SAT tests and materials directly to your school,” as “security issues are too challenging at this time.”

  Because of U.S. sanctions and embargoes on business and trade with Somalia, the only shipping company that did business here was DHL, and they wouldn’t ship from Somaliland to the United States. But I offered a solution that involved the College Board sending the materials to the U.S. embassy in Djibouti. I knew that the College Board didn’t have a problem with that since Djibouti was already a test center. The only issue was getting the tests from Djibouti, and I volunteered to fly there to pick them up.