CHICAGO—Recognizing the aid the organization has provided to young people struggling to escape the pressure cooker of the nation’s most prestigious universities, officials from the educational nonprofit Teach For America are celebrating three decades of helping recent graduates pad out their law school applications, sources confirmed Friday. “Since our founding, we have striven to enlist our country’s most promising future leaders in hopes of bulking up their resumes and giving them a better shot at getting into good J.D. programs. Today, we honor that mission,” said spokesperson Liza Cooper, who emphasized that educational inequity in the United States is so stark that without the support of Teach For America, many of its participants would have no chance of acceptance at the Washington University School of Law, let alone NYU or Harvard. “I encourage all of us to look back on the thousands upon thousands of kids who’ve had the opportunity to broaden the experience sections on their CVs and remember: We did that. Now, those bright, eager, overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-class 22-year-olds are at law schools their lawyer parents could only dream of attending.” Cooper stressed that the program should also be seen as successful for those participants who never apply to law school but simply want to kill some time not doing much for a couple years without their dads riding their asses.

Advertisement