Tony Loyd: What about you, Karim? What was the path that led you to do this work?

Karim Abouelnaga: Yeah. I always tell people that I kind of fell into it. But when I fell into it, I finally embraced it. I never thought that I’d be an education entrepreneur one day, working with schools that I attended. And I think that’s the most fulfilling part at schools that I attended: kids that I grew up with, the neighborhoods that I’m in.

And I kind of thought I was always going to be this investment banker who was going to work on wall street. And I say that because I grew up in a low-income household, I was raised by a single mother. And when you were growing up poor, like you want to be rich, that’s your mindset.

And so it’s, how do you become rich? And when you’re a kid, it’s a doctor because that’s what everyone knows, even outside of like mainstream. And then when you get into the more educated circles, you realize, okay, well, it’s doctor, investment banker, or lawyer or engineer. From there, you kind of figure out, okay, well, which of those paths makes the most sense?

Or which of those am I most interested in? And then I realized. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I just wanted to make a lot of money. I found myself going down the investment banker route. Then I stumbled upon the inequality and the disparities and realized that so many of the opportunities I was afforded were because other people went out of their way to start creating pathways and thinking about education and creating opportunities for kids growing up like me.

In so many ways, when I started it, it was a passion project. How do I give back in my neighborhood, but by the time I was getting ready to graduate from college, it’s weird. It’s like that moment where they say, it’s one of those fundamental, like transition points, are there moments in your life?

And it’s an inflection point. And I said, okay, well, I’m going to do this full time. It can’t just be a passion project anymore. So what is this? And I spent a lot of time, my senior year of college, just reflecting on what this was. And to me, it wasn’t just the tutoring or mentoring organization that some people called it.

It was my life’s work. At that moment, I felt like I was committing to my purpose. I did a lot of reflection on why this like problem. Why was it important to me? Why am I the right person to be doing this? And then adding some urgency to it. Like what’s going to differentiate me here. And when I finally put to paper the answers to a lot of those questions, I was like, Oh snap, this isn’t an accident like this isn’t a coincidence.

I have a sense of moral obligation to be doing this, whether or not I want to do this or not. Like, I think I’m supposed to be doing this. And at every step of the way, every turn of the path, I just continued to get more and more reassurance. And now I’m at a point in the more I know this is like, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.

Whether or not I like it. This is, this is it.

Tony Loyd: Yeah. So, let’s go back a little bit further then. You were saying that you’re serving the schools that you attended. But I read your book, and you tell the story about how you went from high school into college, and then you made this transition to Cornell. There was something right in that transition that revealed for you about opportunity gaps.

So talk to me about that.

Karim Abouelnaga: Yeah. by growing up in a low-income neighborhood, my parents are immigrants. So you don’t know any better sometimes. I went to low-income schools. Many of them are academically struggling. And even when you’re in an academically struggling school doesn’t mean that it’s all bad, but you don’t always necessarily find the resources.

I was disengaged in middle school; I had 60 absences in seventh grade. I always joke that in 2000 and 2001, when they passed the no child left behind bill, my siblings and I were running around saying like, Oh, they can’t hold us back anymore because it says no child left behind.  It had nothing to do with that, but it felt like we didn’t go to school, and somehow we still got promoted.

I went to my local high school at the time. There were 4,400 kids there, a 55% graduation rate. And I don’t want to say it was luck because I don’t think it was luck. I do believe there was a lot of divine intervention there. And there is something to be said about being in the right place at the right time.

And so, in that sense, I’m a bit of an outlier. But I had a series of nonprofits and mentors who ultimately stepped into my life—people who took an interest in me. And then I think it was the combination of that and my innate ability to ask for help. And I don’t know how that was developed or materialized, but I’ll tell you one quick story.

It was my senior year. I was a part of this program called rewarding achievement, where they paid kids to pass AP exams. And they pick kids at 31 struggling New York City public high schools. If you know anything about New York City, there are like 500 high schools, and two or 300 are probably struggling,  given the demographics and the poverty. And I happen to be at one of the 31 where kids were magically paid to pass the AP exams. I passed five AP exams because of this incentive program. And I collected my last check, and I have this sense of like guilt. Because I had friends at other schools that were equally struggling and they weren’t getting paid to pass the AP exams, and they weren’t getting the extra support in the executive director at the time gave me that check.

And I remember going up to him and saying, thank you so much. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know. Because when you’re poor, you don’t want a handout. You don’t want people just to give you things. Cause you feel like something is up with it. And you also don’t want to feel like you owe someone something either.

And he said, there’s nothing you can do for me. Just pay it forward. And at that moment, I felt like for the rest of my life, I was going to make good on that promise by paying it forward. I took that same thing to heart by asking for help. I get help. I receive it. It’s going to help build me up.

I’m going to get to a position where I can help more people, and that’s the ultimate goal, and that’s the way I always saw it. And because of that, I was less ashamed or less embarrassed or less afraid. To ask people for their time or place, I know as annoying or burdensome, like ask some times, but I did it because I knew I could help so many more people when I did.

Tony Loyd: Where did you start college?

Karim Abouelnaga: I started at Baruch. So I went to my local city college, and for high school, I applied to two schools. I applied to MIT because I saw it on Goodwill Hunting, and then Baruch was a local business school. And when I was growing up, you are going to be either a rapper, an entrepreneur, or you were going to play basketball.

And my basketball career was limited to a hobby. And I couldn’t rap. So I was going to become an entrepreneur and study business. And Baruch was the local business school. I scored a 1770 out of 2,400 on the SATs. That put me in the 95th percentile in my high school but the 70th percentile nationwide.

When I was going to school, they only looked at it compared to how you did with like everyone else in the nation. And so I didn’t have a competitive SAT score to get into MIT. And so when I got rejected, I was like, rightfully so. And I went to a local business school. They say the SAT’s supposed to be a predictor of how you’re going to do your first year of college.

After that, your first year is more indicative of how you’re going to do for the rest of your college career than the SATs. And I got a 4.0 my first semester at Baruch. And so it wasn’t, in my case, indicative at all. There was no correlation there. And I had an opportunity to transfer because I reached back out to that same executive director who gave me that check and said pay it forward.

And so I kind of went back to him, and I was like, Oh, I never have to pay this guy back. So I can continue to ask him for help.

Tony Loyd: It’s a good friend to have. You decided to transfer to Cornell, but between Baruch and Cornell, something brought the opportunity gap to your attention. What, what was that?

Karim Abouelnaga: Yeah. So I thought Cornell was expensive, and I would have to apply for a bunch of scholarships to get money to transfer. And I ran across a scholarship that was funded by the United Negro College Fund and Coca-Cola. They put out a challenge. They would give $10,000 to any student who can develop a solution for the achievement gap that involves corporate intervention. And at the time, I thought, well, I don’t know anything about the achievement gap, and no one in my family had ever worked at a corporation, but I want $10,000 to go to Cornell. And so I did what any student at that moment would’ve done.

I just started doing research. That is where I was blown away. Because of this term that I had never heard about in my entire life, and as a freshman in college at that point, I never heard anything about the achievement gap in my life. It was the way I grew up. The schools I was attending, my potential life outcomes, my siblings’ life outcomes, all my friends’ life outcomes – the statistics were all there, and that’s what they were talking about. The disparities in our test scores, like my SAT scores. It had nothing to do with my aptitude or ability.

And more to do with the resources that I had access to when I was going through it. And so I felt an immediate connection and sense of like frustration with the fact that these gaps in these disparities also weren’t new. These are problems that we’ve been talking about for decades. This is 2009 or 2010 when I’m going through this, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. And so I put together a proposal at the time, it didn’t go anywhere and ultimately didn’t win the competition, but I felt so connected to the problem. And like, I felt compelled to do something about it. And that’s ultimately what started my journey.

Tony Loyd: Achievement gap: you could almost plot academic achievement by poverty level and zip code.

Karim Abouelnaga: I take it a step further too, and say, then you can plot poverty to race. And so there’s, there are almost all three things there that are correlated or tied together.