It All Comes Down to This Moment
In an era when monied parents are being sent to jail for buying seats at prestigious universities for their already-privileged kids, New York City’s sometimes-controversial Specialized High Schools offer one hard-to-refute virtue.
The only way past the front door is via a competitive examination, meaning that every kid gets a seat the old-fashioned way: by earning it.
One such aspirant is shown above, studying up to the last possible second, before being ushered in to take that exam, at Stuyvesant High School, an institution that has served as an incubator of achievement and engine of upward mobility for New York City kids for more than a century, producing four Nobel laureates (two in Physiology/Medicine and one each in Economics and Chemistry) since 1904.
