Garry Mitchell

When Garry Mitchell was 11, he transferred from a school attended entirely by Black students like him to one where the students were mostly white. After two years of wrangling with administrators, Mitchell’s parents were finally able to get their son into an honors math class. There, the young man worked hard and did well but could never seem to get a perfect score on a test, an achievement celebrated by the teacher reading the student’s name out to the class.

Finally, Mitchell broke the barrier. He scored 100 on an exam and waited proudly to hear his name announced along with those of his classmates who’d done the same.

He never did.

“I just recall that being an instance of me putting forth more effort than my classmates and still not getting the same recognition that they got,” he says. “[Working twice as hard] is something that I've since then abided by in formal and informal ways.”

Mitchell, a PhD student in education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), says that his story is a small example of an old saying Black Americans know well: “You have to work twice as hard to go half as far.” In his 2023 Harvard Horizons project “Beyond Equality,” he looks at how this aphorism plays out in college preparatory school programs (CPSPs) and finds unexplored ethical questions about the social and personal costs borne by the kids who participate in them.

Mitchell says that the programs he studies actually institutionalize the mentality of “twice as good.” “It’s not enough to get Black and Brown students the modal educational opportunities,” he says. “The programs are based on the belief that the best track forward is to get them into elite schools, cement their career trajectories, and in that way balance out inequality in the long run.”

Even with the support of CPSPs, Black and Brown students often have to put in more time and effort to access elite schools than their white counterparts who can afford tutoring and other academic resources. When they do reach Andover, Exeter, Choate, and other top prep schools, students of color are again held to a different standard. A child who violates a school’s code of conduct, for instance, might be suspended for a time if their family is a major donor or has gone to the institution for generations. Students on financial aid—particularly Black and Brown students—who commit similar violations might be expelled.

“Several students and alumni in my study have talked about being called racist names or being provoked into fights,” Mitchell says. “They felt like they just had to take it because their chances of being expelled would be really high. So again, you have to be twice as good in a behavioral way in order to make sure you don’t lose the opportunities you’ve worked so hard for.”

Mitchell says his research shows that CPSPs do alter the life trajectories of most participants. They give students of color a leg up on the competition and send them farther than their peers—not only to elite prep schools but also top colleges and then successful careers. But the effects aren’t always durable. Moreover, Mitchell says there’s a high personal and social cost to relying on these vehicles of social mobility.

“One of the things I've noted in my research is that students who enter these journeys so early in their lives lose a lot,” Mitchell explains. “They forfeit their community connections and a sense of identity apart from who they are in majority white spaces. And that can be traumatic for them. The ethical costs of these programs are not always accounted for when we think about the net outcome.

Mitchell says that he wants his research to bring to light the complications of CPSPs. By initiating a conversation about them, he hopes he can make educators and policymakers aware of the uncomfortable ethical questions that are intertwined with efforts to address inequality by catapulting students of color, and marginalized people more broadly, into elite spaces. 

“The goal of my project is to explore the underside of programs that are taken at face value as unequivocally good,” he says. “In that way, as we think about these various pathways to uplift or social justice, we can consider what some of the unintended consequences might be.”