The Student Recruitment Industrial Complex

Ozan Jaquette, a well-respected professor of higher education at UCLA known for his academic mentorship and groundbreaking research, takes great pleasure in calling himself a “slug.” As a high school student decades ago in Newton, Massachusetts, the young Jaquette was, by his own admission, a mediocre student. Smart, yes, but lacking confidence, with a tendency to hide himself behind jokes. Instead of academics, he poured his energy into sports. “I was just trying to get on the basketball team,” he recalls. 

Imagine his surprise when, come junior year, the brochures from colleges started pouring in. Dozens of schools—UMass Amherst, Boston University, George Washington University—were interested in this son of college professors who earned “straight Bs,” while avoiding honors and AP classes. Jaquette took his second chance and ran with it: He enrolled at GW, studied hard, and followed his fascination with the inner workings of colleges and universities through to a PhD. Years later, as a professor at the University of Arizona, he advised a young grad student whose experience with college recruitment would forever change how he saw his own. 

Karina Salazar grew up on the south side of Tucson, the daughter of Mexican immigrants in a low-income neighborhood. Unlike Jaquette, Salazar was a standout scholar. She took every AP and honors class available at Sunnyside High School, earning a GPA of above 4.0 with the aim of becoming the first in her family to attend college. “Everything I was supposed to do, I did it, and I did it right,” she told me. But unlike Jaquette, she received no brochures in the mail. The only recruiters to visit Sunnyside were from community colleges. The military was there, too, tabling during lunch hour and handing out swag from a giant trailer at football games. Salazar ended up at the University of Arizona, mostly because, she says, “it was in my backyard. I didn’t know other colleges and universities.”

As Jaquette and Salazar worked together, first as mentor-mentee and then as colleagues and research partners, they were struck by the disparity in their experiences. Why had Jaquette received so many extra chances to prove himself to colleges, while Salazar, a much better student, wasn’t on their radar at all? Part of the answer lies in the practices of enrollment management, the industry that helps colleges find the students they need to fill classes and pay tuition. When Jaquette calls himself a slug, it’s not just his self-deprecating humor. A slug, to enrollment managers, is something very desirable—a low- or mid-tier student with financial means who’s likely to accept an offer of admission and pay a large share of tuition. Universities, especially mid-ranked state and private schools without large endowments or Ivy League prestige, go looking for slugs to balance their budgets. They go looking for Ozan Jaquettes, not Karina Salazars.

For decades, the national discussion about equity in higher education has centered on the way colleges treat prospective students who apply. Do they choose among applicants based primarily on grades and test scores, for instance, or do they give preference to students who list fancy extracurriculars and legacy status on their admissions forms? Do they consider an applicant’s race, and if so, how? But schools don’t just wait passively for students to knock on their doors. They engage in expensive and time-consuming efforts to lure applicants, and in choosing whom to lure, they make decisions about equity and inclusion long before the admissions process even begins. As the experiences of Jaquette, Salazar, and millions of others illustrate, race and class play into who even gets to apply. 

The general public knows little about college enrollment managers and the vast web of private consultants who decide who gets recruited and who gets ignored. Yet the industry has been around since the 1970s and, despite having arisen in response to genuine financial pressures on schools, has played a large role in the inexorable rise of tuition around the country. Enrollment managers over the years have steadily increased the top-line tuition at their institutions to give themselves room to attract wealthy students with so-called merit aid. With inflated tuition sticker prices, colleges can afford to offer these scholarships that sound performance based but are really meant to flatter high-income students into matriculating while still paying top dollar. Meanwhile, schools offer insufficient aid to poor and middle-class students to cover the difference, which leaves them saddled with massive loans—collateral damage in the hunt for slugs.

So how do enrollment managers find these students and get them to apply? Here, Jaquette and Salazar have broken new ground. As research partners, they set out to explain just how it was that their paths to college came to be so unequal. After filing public records requests and painstakingly scraping university websites, they uncovered a bustling industry within the enrollment management industry—the Big Data realm of student lists. For the past few decades, a typical vice president of enrollment management at a major university has bought student names—somewhere between 50,000 and many hundreds of thousands of them annually—at roughly 50 cents a pop from the College Board, which administers the SAT, and from its competitor, ACT. These lists come with such detailed information as GPA, college intentions, and home addresses. That personal data, which parents and students give away when they sign up for standardized tests, allows colleges to customize their recruitment efforts for maximum returns. Need a student with middling grades and above-average SATs from a wealthy enclave like Newton, Massachusetts, who is interested in attending a school of your size in your region? Just apply a few filters in a computer program, or have your consultant do it for you, and you have thousands of names and addresses to which you can send glossy brochures. 

This technology is powerful, and theoretically could be used for noble purposes—to recruit, say, high-achieving students from low-income families in minority neighborhoods. (A few schools are doing so; more on this later.) But what Jaquette and Salazar found in surveying dozens of major schools is that list data is much more often a tool of exclusion, enforcing with even greater precision the hierarchies of race and class that limit access to college. 

Until very recently, colleges bought these long lists of prospective students directly from the testing companies, but developments in recent years—including the pandemic-era decline of standardized testing, and updates to privacy laws—have made it much harder to sell student information. As they lose access to list data, increasingly desperate schools have been turning to nontraditional sources and new technologies to form personalized connections with students. This new landscape has unlocked the potential for a fairer, more inclusive system of college recruitment, but also the threat of increased control by private consulting companies, which have begun to buy up alternative sources of student names. This moment of turmoil, education scholars argue, is the time for regulators to step in. 

The underlying incentives that spawned the enrollment management industry were established by the federal government, which has the power to set fair rules for the marketplace and ensure that federal aid is benefiting the students who need it. In the short term, that can mean regulating the sector and cracking down on its worst excesses. In the long term, truly fixing the problem will require changing the incentives that drive those excesses, which means fundamentally restructuring the way colleges are funded and their classrooms are filled. If the search for slugs has gone too far, it could be time to add a little salt. 

As soon as Karina Salazar arrived at the University of Arizona, in 2007, she became all too aware of the inequalities of college. Her 94 percent Hispanic high school, where four out of five students last year qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, had not prepared her to meet her new peers, who took European vacations in the summer while she worked full-time back home. “I didn’t realize I was low income until I went to college,” she told me. No one in her family had the experience to help her navigate the system, and so, Salazar remembers, she “stumbled around” in choosing a major, eventually settling on journalism. But even with those obstacles, she graduated in four years and then launched straight into a master’s program in education and public policy, also at UA.

Jaquette was Salazar’s instructor in a graduate-level statistics class. Afterward, Jaquette encouraged Salazar to pursue a PhD, and then became her adviser. Over the years they have formed a complementary dynamic—Jaquette the big, goofy personality, who answers business emails with chilled-out phrases like “ya mon”; Salazar the sharp, intellectually rigorous, morally clear Abbott to his Costello. Two or three years into Salazar’s doctoral program, as she was finishing up her course work and thinking about a dissertation topic, the colleagues remarked on how their stories were two sides of the same coin. Jaquette had already studied public universities’ propensity to seek wealthy out-of-state students in response to decreased state funding, which made him wonder if the disparity in his and Salazar’s recruitment might be a result of that trend. 

Together, they started thinking about how to measure where universities were recruiting. Admissions offices planning visits to high schools often post schedules on their websites, so after training themselves in data management (and eventually enlisting undergraduate researchers and a professional programmer), Salazar and Jaquette were able to pull from the web a list of thousands of visits by 150 colleges and universities in the 2017 school year. They published their findings in a New York Times op-ed. As they had suspected, recruiters largely focused their visits on out-of-state high schools in affluent white communities. One of the most wealth-seeking universities was Rutgers, whose main campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, visited high schools across the country that served areas with median family incomes of $117,600. The median income for neighborhoods those recruiters skipped over: $67,000. As a follow-up, Salazar conducted a spatial analysis of high school visits in Dallas and Los Angeles, and found a trend that she calls “recruitment redlining.” Mapping out the visits, Salazar found herself tracing lines around poor communities of color that had been ignored by nearly all universities—much as bankers, insurers, and the U.S. government once drew actual red lines on maps to deny financial services to residents in Black neighborhoods. 

Salazar and Jaquette are careful not to portray universities as scheming villains. The scramble to recruit rich out-of-state students stems from systemic state and federal disinvestment from public universities, long-term enrollment decline, and the rising underlying cost of higher education. Aside from the top few universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, most schools don’t have a functionally unlimited endowment and instead rely on tuition revenues, and so of course they look for students from rich areas. Those schools will bring on some Pell Grant recipients, but not too many, because that leads to sacrifices elsewhere. As Jaquette told me, “You rob banks because that’s where the money is.” 

Enrollment managers have been helping colleges respond to these pressures for decades. In 1973, a theoretical physicist at Boston College named Jack Maguire received an unusual request from the higher-ups: Pack up your slide rule, move to the admissions office, and use your way with numbers to get us more students. Founded during the Civil War to educate Irish Catholic immigrants, the university now was nearing insolvency due to dropouts and decreased applications. Maguire and another elevated quant, the former business professor Frank Campanella, coined the term enrollment management for their innovation of aligning the formerly separate systems of recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and retention behind a unified strategy to put scholarly derrieres in seats. The first two enrollment managers conducted surveys to figure out why too few students were applying and too many were transferring away. Among other strategies, they redirected financial aid away from upperclassmen and toward the freshman class, while dangling merit scholarships to wealthy students who didn’t need them but would be enticed by the offer. “Were we the first and only ones to do it? You could make a case for lots of folks,” Maguire told the journalist Neil Swidey this year. “But the fact is, I had the great advantage of being a mathematician—a scientist—and knowing nothing about admissions.” 

By 1980, application numbers had tripled. Maguire’s tactics were such a hit that he soon left to start his own private consulting firm, the first in what would become a multibillion-dollar industry. Meanwhile, other schools were copying BC, and its tactic of attracting high-income students with merit aid was spreading across the country. As the competition over rich kids heated up, colleges used federal aid dollars to offset the financial aid that they otherwise might have given to low- or middle-income students. (You’ve earned a federal Pell Grant? Good news—for your university, which will take that out of the aid it would have given you, and send that money elsewhere!) With tuition steadily rising, nonwealthy students have been forced to take on more and more loans to fill the void between aid and the total cost of college. This trend, which came to be known as financial aid “gapping,” accelerated as the pressure on higher education rose. The Reagan administration drastically reduced federal student aid, the cost of college steadily increased along with student debt, and long-term demographic change put a squeeze on the pool of applicants. Universities desperate to fill seats competed in the increasingly popular U.S. News rankings, which rewarded them for rejecting applicants, soliciting alumni donations, and raising their SAT averages. 

Swidey’s interview with Maguire, and many of these historical details, appeared this May in a book-length collection of journalism and academic research called Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management, which was curated by Stephen Burd, a senior education policy writer and editor at New America. As Burd notes in his own chapter, schools soon learned that they could make money and attract applicants by rising in the U.S. News list. The cross-pollination between enrollment management and college rankings made higher education ever more exclusive. In 2011, for instance, Clemson had stalled in its decade-long quest to reach the top 20 public universities. Administrators had already tried every trick in the book, Burd writes. They had stopped admitting students below the top third of their high school classes; asked for micro-donations to inflate their alumni giving rate; and given competitor universities poor ratings in the reputational survey that informs the U.S. News rankings. Still, despite maintaining an acceptance rate higher than what they needed to rise in the rankings, they were enrolling too few students to fill that fall’s freshman class. They turned to private consultants. 

On the advice of Huron Education, one of the biggest enrollment consulting firms, Clemson increased its spending on merit and other non-need-based aid to wealthy students by 160 percent. By 2019, the plan had borne fruit: The acceptance rate was down, the yield rate was up, and the SAT scores of the incoming class had risen by 80 points. (Nonwealthy students, meanwhile, were forced to make up for decreased aid with risky Parent PLUS Loans, Burd writes.) Clemson was far from the only school to do this, at the behest of a fleet of private consultants that had grown throughout the 1990s and 2000s to guide schools through these treacherous waters. One pioneering consultant was Bill Royall, a former Republican political operative who popularized the mass purchasing of names and the mailing of lavish brochures like the ones that lured Jaquette to GW. His firm, Royall & Company, grew steadily through those decades and, in 2015, was acquired by the parent company of the Education Advisory Board, now just EAB, which itself was bought by private equity as part of an ongoing wave of consolidation in the industry. Profit hungry as they were, these businesses grew so quickly because they pointed to a simple truth: Every incentive pushes institutions to cater their recruiting to wealthy students and leave the rest behind.

The next phase of research started with Jaquette, who had heard from friends in admissions offices and private consulting about the world of student lists. Though it was no secret that roughly 87 percent of universities buy, collectively, tens of millions of names annually from consultants or directly from the testing companies, he and Salazar realized that no one outside the industry had attempted to quantify the practice. Doing so would get them close to answering their initial question: Why did Jaquette get the glossy brochures?

Getting access to that data wasn’t easy. Just as the research partners had had to train themselves as data managers, now they became investigative journalists, filing laborious records requests to public universities. As before, funders such as the Joyce and Kresge Foundations pitched in for additional researchers to help scale up the project. Jaquette and Salazar obtained 414 orders for student data that 14 public universities in Arizona, California, Minnesota, Illinois, and Texas made to the College Board from 2016 to 2020, along with the more than 2.5 million names those schools received. 

The researchers found that colleges routinely filtered their requests by test scores, geographic location, and other data points that tend to exclude students of color. The most common set of filters for prospective undergraduates, used in 99 of 414 requests, sorted students by class rank, GPA, SAT, and zip code. The population of students nationwide who don’t take the SATs is disproportionately nonwhite and poor; moving up the score table, the population of test takers becomes disproportionately rich, and disproportionately white and Asian. Centering one’s outreach on affluent zip codes, as the 14 schools often did in their list orders, is also an efficient tool of exclusion by both race and class. Combine multiple such filters, and the chance of a low-income student of color sneaking through becomes very slim indeed. Jaquette and Salazar made a surprising finding in that vein: The more that schools pile on filters such as SAT, GPA, and zip code, the more they exclude Black and Hispanic people across the income spectrum. In other words, universities set out looking for wealthy students to fill their coffers, and end up sorting America’s high schoolers ever more precisely by race.

Once they started digging into the results and asking schools about their practices, Jaquette and Salazar found another surprise. They had started off thinking of recruiting as a process driven by colleges and universities, and came away with a new appreciation for the influence of private consultants. At some schools that bought more than 100,000 names a year, Jaquette said, “you couldn’t find any university employee who knew anything about the names that they were buying, and why did you use these filters and why not these others.” 

College admissions offices are notoriously tough places to work, where an experienced VP often oversees a posse of inexperienced and underpaid recent grads, who are eager to serve their alma mater but overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the work. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in April 2023, burnout and turnover in this critical profession, one responsible for filling the vast majority of seats in university classrooms across America, have reached crisis levels. Many university employees don’t have the time or the expertise to carefully curate student lists; they request names using the filters that a consultant thinks are best, or that were left over from their predecessor in the admissions office, or their predecessor’s predecessor. As Jaquette told me, “When you see them all doing something similar, you might assume it’s because they share common knowledge and goals, but are making individual decisions. But part of the reason we see consistent inequality in recruitment practices is because of these third-party products and enrollment management companies that are kind of telling universities what to do.”

Some university officials are capable of thinking for themselves, however. Matt Lopez, an outspoken critic of the exclusionary practices of enrollment management, took a job as deputy vice president of admission services at Arizona State University in 2016. In his new role, he pushed to bring the school’s recruiting strategy in line with its mission statement, which calls for ASU to measure itself “not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” One of his first moves was to switch the bulk of the university’s list purchases to the PSAT, which includes more underprivileged students than the SAT itself. He also changed the filters—less outreach to out-of-state students, and more to parts of Arizona with high concentrations of rural, low-income, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Black residents. At the same time, Lopez was conscious of the university’s bottom line and how much it could realistically offer to students. He stopped reaching out to some out-of-state areas where it seemed unlikely that students could make an ASU education work financially, in order to prioritize low-income students in Arizona who could benefit from state aid. Other industry experts I spoke with praised Lopez’s approach as a way to use student lists to expand college access, rather than limit it.

But the nationwide landscape was about to change. The pandemic forced school districts to cancel in-person SATs and ACTs, which, together with rising criticism about socioeconomic inequity in standardized testing, pushed many universities to remove the exams from their admissions requirements. Meanwhile, concerns about privacy over the past decade have led at least two dozen states, including New York, Illinois, and Florida, to pass stricter laws controlling the release of student information. Regulators and privacy advocates have lately started to push for those laws, many of which were modeled on California’s 2014 Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, or SOPIPA, to apply to the selling of list data. This summer, for instance, the College Board paid $750,000 to settle a suit from the New York attorney general over alleged violations of the state’s privacy law. As a result, colleges can only get test takers’ names in those states if the students opt in afterward by signing in to an online portal and agreeing to release their data. The number of available names has plummeted as a result.

“You can’t go to College Board and just buy a million names like you used to,” Lopez told me. That’s roughly the number that ASU was buying annually from the testing companies when he arrived. Now, the pool of available names has shrunk, and the prices, which once were around 47 cents a name, have gone up tenfold in some cases, Lopez said. Bobby Andrews, a former vice president of enrollment management at Duquesne, DePauw, and other universities, told me that these well-intentioned privacy restrictions are making it harder for colleges that want to seek out low- and middle-income students to do so. 

The large majority of students who take standardized tests in the classroom during weekdays are no longer showing up in databases, since most don’t know to opt in for data sharing, and also because in some states the companies aren’t allowed to solicit their signoff. The students whose information is available are those with the family resources and experience to sign themselves up for college outreach—and they tend to be rich and white. (Which perhaps would not be such a problem for some slug-hungry schools if the names were not so expensive and so few.) “In the end, you’re restricting the most populous group of underresourced students from being available to colleges who want to recruit them,” Andrews said. More recently, this spring’s rollout of the online SAT triggered internet privacy laws that restrict the selling of student data even further. 

The squeeze on student names is pushing universities from a woeful status quo into a potentially worse unknown. The duopoly of the College Board and ACT that controlled most list data were, at least, nonprofits, bound by transparency requirements and the general expectation that they would work toward some social good. Now, colleges are turning to for-profit companies for student names, and one, EAB, increasingly dominates the market. Long a leading enrollment management consultancy, EAB is on an acquisition spree, gobbling up companies that offer alternative sources of names. In 2022 it purchased the tech firm Concourse, whose online platform flips college application on its head by letting students create profiles that schools can peruse and send admissions offers to. This “reverse admissions” process is a promising innovation (see Jamaal Abdul-Alim’s article in our September/October 2023 issue, “When Colleges Apply to Students”). But the Concourse platform also captures detailed data on students, which EAB can turn around and sell to prospect-hungry colleges. EAB also recently bought the leading scholarship finding website Cappex, and created an exclusive partnership to distribute a major college recruiting platform called Intersect. Both of these deals give EAB control over sources of student data. 

If it achieves monopoly power over list data, the private equity–owned EAB will gain even more leverage to force schools to buy expensive software and consulting services that they don’t necessarily need. The transition of student lists from a lightly overseen not-for-profit space to a less unaccountable profit-driven one is speeding up. Private equity controls the second-largest enrollment management consulting company, RNL, and this April a private equity firm even bought ACT, which was forced to relinquish its nonprofit status.

Troubling as these trends may be, the federal government does have tools to curb predatory behavior in the industry. If EAB’s acquisitions are threatening competition, for instance, federal antitrust regulators like Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, might consider taking a hard look into those deals. 

Meanwhile, Jaquette and Salazar have advanced a creative answer to discrimination in student lists: Treat them like credit reports. Credit rating agencies such as Equifax are regulated as holders of personal data that helps businesses to determine whether or not to make loans to consumers. Those agencies are not allowed to, say, draw red lines around a Black neighborhood in Chicago and automatically assign a low credit score to anyone living there. A student list, meanwhile, is information that helps colleges to decide whom they should offer admission to—along with financial aid, which includes loans. So why not have the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau apply similar regulations to purveyors of student data, who, according to Jaquette and Salazar’s research, systematically exclude minorities in their products? 

In addition to policing the existing market, government can help colleges and students go around the middleman. It can invest more in college advising for lower-income high schools, so those students have the knowledge and resources to navigate the application process themselves rather than be wholly at the mercy of the student recruitment industrial complex. It can also offer “direct admission,” an increasingly popular system where all resident high school students above a certain academic performance standard receive automatic admission into one or more of that state’s public universities. Under direct admission, which 10 states had implemented as of 2023, much of the recruiting that colleges have been doing on their own is, in effect, done for them by the state. 

Even with direct admission, colleges still want the ability to proactively reach out to students—to make sure they get enough to fill their classrooms, and the right ones for the programs they offer. To give colleges access to students without going through private consultants, more states should consider creating a “public option” for list data. In recent years, Arizona began providing all its public universities with high school student data that the state government already captures as the overseer of K–12 schools. Though privacy regulations limit the public lists to just a name and an address, that has been enough for ASU’s Lopez to make his state’s pilot student list program a cornerstone of his recruitment strategy. 

None of these reforms, however, will solve the underlying problem that pushes colleges to behave the way they do: the financing of higher education itself. Many states drastically underinvest in their public universities, and the Pell Grant, the federal government’s main source of direct student support, covers only a fraction of average tuition compared to what it did decades ago. Combine those pressures with the decreasing supply of high school graduates after the large Millennial generation, and it all adds up to an unavoidable need to recruit students from wealthy families and shun those from poorer ones. 

As the Monthly’s own Kevin Carey argued in 2020, American higher ed needs a foundational rebuild, one that relieves the financial pressures that encourage bad behavior. Among other measures, Carey’s plan calls for a restructuring of the federal funding system: For every college, the government would provide a flat $10,000 stipend per student, along with universal tuition reimbursement on a sliding income scale. Give schools the assurance that they can afford to pay for each student’s education, and suddenly the hunt for wealthy kids is not so urgent. Acceptance of that aid would come with conditions. No more deceptive pricing; no more diversion of federal money into wealth-chasing merit scholarships; no more confusing financial aid letters that disguise what’s a grant and what’s a loan. 

The new regime would cause sweeping change in American higher education, perhaps even creating a leveling effect where less influential regional universities and state colleges see a boost in funding while flagship universities see a slight decrease, at least from federal sources. (The most prestigious and wealthy universities wouldn’t see much of a change; Carey’s proposed structure would allow colleges to opt in, which he believes non-elite schools have every incentive to do.) It might also require all of us to reexamine our assumptions about what college is. Is it a magical place where we live in pristine dorms and “find ourselves” during study abroad in Barcelona, or is it something more modest? Which should be more bountiful—the amenities, or the outcomes? If that sounds suspiciously … European, then consider that the American higher education system worked this way as recently as the 1960s and ’70s, when the still-standing federal funding laws were written. Since then, underlying financial realities changed, forcing schools to abuse every loophole in the name of survival; now, it’s a matter of catching up.

Around the time Salazar was finishing her PhD, in summer 2019, she came up with a bright idea. Dissertation defenses are staid affairs held in a conference room before a panel of academics and just a few onlookers. Her research into colleges’ recruitment (or lack thereof) in poor neighborhoods had unusual relevance to her institution and the community around it. And so, she recalls, “rather than just present this work to a committee and my immediate family in this dusty room, I decided to do it at my local high school.”

A few months later, in the same school library where she had filed college applications years before, Salazar presented her findings to Sunnyside High School’s principal, the district superintendent, and administrators from the University of Arizona. Afterward, the local officials shook hands with UA’s vice provost for Hispanic affairs and another high-ranking dean. A partnership was born. 

Today, the district that only received visits from the Army and Marines has a full-time recruiter from the University of Arizona. Salazar, who became a professor at UA after her PhD defense, sat on the hiring committee for that job and recently helped to hire another recruiter, this one focused on outreach to local Indigenous communities. The results have been striking. Between 2019 and 2023, the annual number of graduates enrolling at UA from Sunnyside’s district, which includes two other low-income high schools, rose from 91 to 180. 

Salazar and her collaborators are seeking to create similar partnerships in other Tucson-area school districts and eventually in other areas of the state, including rural ones that don’t get attention from large public universities. But they’re doing so at a deliberate pace, seeking funding while keeping in mind how much programs like these depend on a delicate balance of personal relationships and cultural understanding. This outreach isn’t quickly scalable, and certainly not a panacea. No one solution is.

Still, there’s satisfaction in coming full circle. Not often does an academic get to shape her career around a research subject that affects her own community, and then directly introduce solutions on the ground. Salazar’s applied approach reflects the priorities of her culture, she says—research for its own sake is a fine thing, but even better is to make a difference in the world. 

In a similar way, Salazar doesn’t see her success as her own. All of Sunnyside shares in it. And what that represents to her is something larger—the potential that so many people in that neighborhood and thousands of others would have, if only they received the same opportunities. As Salazar told me this summer, “I’m not the shining example of the community. I’m not an exception.”