Given opportunity, even most unlikely students succeed

By Nicholas Kristof

Saturday, Sept. 19, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Of the millions of young men and women settling into college dorms this month, one of the most unlikely is Abdisamad Adan, a 21-year-old beginning his freshman year at Harvard. Some of his 18 siblings are illiterate and never even went to first grade, and he was raised without electricity or indoor plumbing by an illiterate grandmother in a country that doesn’t officially exist.

Yet, he excelled as he studied by candlelight, and he’s probably the only person in Harvard Yard who knows how to milk a camel.

Adan is the first undergraduate the Harvard admissions office remembers from Somalia or its parts, at least in the past 30 years of institutional memory. He is from Somaliland, a breakaway republic that isn’t recognized by any other country (and so doesn’t have a U.S. Embassy to grant him a visa, but that’s another story).

Yet, Adan brims with talent and intelligence. He’s a reminder of the fundamental aphorism of our age: Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.

If not for a fluke, Adan acknowledges, he might have joined friends to become part of the tide of migrants making a precarious journey by sea to Europe. How he came instead to Harvard is a tribute to his hard work and intellect, but also to luck, and to a U.S. hedge fund tycoon who, bored by finance, moved to Somaliland and set up a school for brilliant kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance.

The financier, Jonathan Starr, had an aunt who married a man from Somaliland, and he was charmed by stories about its deserts and nomads. So in 2008, after running his own hedge fund and burning out, Starr took a trip to Somaliland.

His friends thought he was nuts for what happened next: Starr founded an English-language boarding school for the brightest boys and girls from across Somaliland. Called the Abaarso School of Science and Technology, it uses U.S. teachers (paid a pittance) who are willing to work in a country that the State Department recommends avoiding for security reasons. The school is surrounded by a high wall and has armed guards to foil Shabab rebels, and it has an American sensibility: There is a girls’ basketball team, which is so unusual in Somaliland that the team members have almost no one to play against.

This campus is where Adan blossomed.

He says his parents divorced before he was born, so his grandmother raised him. He spent an average of two hours a day fetching water and had no one pushing him at home, but he still performed superbly at a local primary school. In national eighth-grade exams, he scored second in the country.

The problem was that while primary school tuition had been $1 a month, a good high school would be at least $40 a month. His grandmother couldn’t afford that, and in any case she didn’t really see why he needed high school. No one in his family had ever graduated from high school.

But then Adan was accepted at Abaarso, which is flexible about tuition: If a promising student can’t pay, Starr looks the other way. So Adan began ninth grade at Abaarso, struggling at first because classes were in English, which he didn’t speak. And Adan’s grandmother was displeased that he was spending his time in the classroom rather than helping the family.

“She was definitely not happy in the beginning,” Adan remembered. “She asked me, ‘Are you starting to hate us? Are you falling in love with Americans?’”

He quickly learned English, however, and after three years won a scholarship to study at the Masters School, a college prep school in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. The year in Dobbs Ferry was an adventure — it took a while for Adan to figure out vending machines — but he thrived and decided to apply to Harvard.

His admission to Harvard was treated as a national cause for celebration. Somaliland’s president invited him for a meeting, and Adan became a local hero. His grandmother hadn’t heard of Harvard but came to be proud of her grandson and appreciate that education had its uses.

On arrival at Harvard, Adan found himself with a single room that was about as big as the room he had previously shared with up to five other students. He didn’t have sheets, but another student lent him some. His major problem was how to activate his new debit card: “I need a phone to activate it,” he explained, “and I don’t have a phone.”

Then there was his orientation at Harvard. “They were teaching us things that people don’t talk about back at home. Sexual harassment. Condoms. Consent,” he recalled, and then raised his eyebrows. “It was all very interesting.”

Adan plans to return to Somaliland and work with young people, and then perhaps pursue a career in politics; he hints that he’d like to be president some day.

What’s indisputable is that access to a good school transformed Adan’s life. Six of his brothers and sisters are getting no education at all, and some of those migrants you’ve been seeing on television drowning in their desperate struggle to get to Europe are from Somaliland.

One reason Somalia and its former parts have struggled for decades is lack of education, particularly for girls: Illiteracy correlates to huge families, extremism, violence and civil warfare. World leaders will be gathering this month at the United Nations to review the status of development goals, including one that by now all children would be able to complete primary school, and to approve new ones. There has indeed been enormous progress in global education, yet even today some 59 million children around the globe aren’t enrolled even in elementary school (and tens of millions more are enrolled but learn nothing).

That’s the context in which Starr’s school — and Adan’s success — should offer inspiration. And it’s not just Adan. The Abaarso School has an astonishing 26 other alumni at U.S. universities, including MIT, George Washington University, Grinnell, Oberlin, Holy Cross and Amherst.

There aren’t many high schools in the world with 45 students in a grade that are so successful in getting alumni into top colleges, let alone one where students speak English as a foreign language and often grew up in poverty. The Abaarso student at MIT, Mubarik Mohamoud, a junior studying electrical engineering, grew up as a nomadic herder raising camels, goats and sheep in an area with no schools; he began his education at a madrasa.

“Being smart is universal,” Mohamoud said. “It’s just that resources are not dispersed.”

Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.