The Banks’ Loss Is the Classroom’s Gain

Amid the stock market turmoil, Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, the worries of America’s three major automobile producers, and a looming recession, few bastions of opportunity for job-seeking seniors remain unscathed. Yet one sometimes-overlooked recruiter is seeing booming applications and interest across campus.

That holdout is Teach for America, which is not only weathering the financial storm, but using the market turbulence as an opportunity for growth.

In the midst of the financial crisis, more seniors are putting their hopes for corporate employment on hold and reexamining their career options. Many of those seniors are finding their way to Teach for America.

Colette J. Hinckley ’09 started her job search as many upperclassmen do—with corporate positions—but soon realized her opportunities were narrowing.

“I knew that [corporations] were not recruiting as heavily as they have in the past and that there were fewer positions available. I began to think about other options,” she said.

Hinckley decided to put aside the prospect of a career in industry to spend two years teaching in the Bay Area.

Her choice reflects a broader movement away from jobs in financial services to roles in public service, and Teach for America is reaping the benefits.

The program, which plans to grow to 4,224 corps members in 2010 (from approximately 3,700), should have little trouble meeting its numbers.

RISING INTEREST

Since the market downturn began, Hinckley, who is an inactive Crimson design editor, said she has noticed growing enthusiasm for TFA on campus.

“A lot of people have come up to me in the Lowell Dining Hall asking me about it,” she said. “The responses were overwhelmingly positive.”

Kyle E. D. Wiggins ’09, one such interested senior, echoed those sentiments, and said he was looking at TFA because of the financial crisis and the “stressful” job market.

Meredith D. Boak, the TFA recruiter who covers Harvard, said that the financial crisis allowed the program “an opportunity to excite many more people.” She added that increased interest in the program is fitting in well with TFA’s expansion plans.

Furthermore, Boak said she thought that students who had been previously interested in a career in financial affairs might be excited to take the highly demanding role of teaching for TFA.

“People who are attracted to business or finance might be attracted to TFA because they are looking for a highly challenging job and want to have impact,” she said.

She emphasized, however, that simply because TFA will likely receive more applications, the selection process will not necessarily be less rigorous.

“The challenges that corps members face are immense,” she said. “TFA is selective for that reason.”

Joshua Z. Biber, a former corps member and graduate of Brown University, who is now the TFA recruiter for the greater Boston area, felt similarly.

“TFA is not to be anyone’s back-up plan,” he said. “It needs to be the thing that moves you through every day, that wakes you up in the morning...We’re looking for people dedicated to our mission.”

Biber also said he thought that increased interest in Teach for America might be due to people looking for “meaningful work” in a time of crisis.

THE HISTORY

Teach for America is a non-profit organization that, according to its mission statement, works to “eliminate educational inequality by enlisting our nations most promising future leaders in the effort.”

TFA trains and oversees a core of high-achieving recent college graduates to work as public school teachers in under-served rural and urban districts for a minimum of two years. Participants have the option of receiving funding for graduate degrees in education while they are teaching.

The organization was founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990, who conceived of the idea in the undergraduate thesis she wrote at Princeton in 1989.

“As I moved through Princeton, I grew increasingly aware of students’ unequal access to the kind of educational excellence I had previously taken for granted,” Kopp wrote in her book “One Day, All Children.”

Kopp’s plan to create a national corps of recent college graduate teachers was ambitious, but as she wrote her thesis she “became all the more determined to make this idea a reality.”

Nineteen years later, Kopp’s dream has not only been realized, but has gained recognition and respect. This year, BusinessWeek named TFA one of the best places to launch a career, Kopp was named one of 2008’s 100 most influential people by TIME Magazine, and Education Week wrote about two TFA alumni who advised the Obama campaign.

Last year Teach for America received a record number of 24,700 applications. Three thousand, seven hundred people were selected and joined the program. Thirty-three of them were from Harvard.

‘HAPPY AND STABLE’

Those seniors who have already committed to TFA say they are eager to begin their two-year tenures with the program.

Elizabeth A. Texeira ’09, who will be teaching in New Orleans, said she “literally [had] not stopped celebrating” since being accepted, despite encountering some resistance from family and hometown acquaintances.

“People said to me, ‘Why are you wasting a Harvard Degree?’” she said. “It’s not wasting a degree. It’s connecting to me a network of alums. It’s being part of the movement to end inequality in education.”

This sentiment was echoed by Hinckley, who said she is both excited and nervous about participating in the program.

“People have expressed a mixture of gratitude and admiration that I am pursuing this,” she said. “My parents were a harder sell, but they’ve come to terms with it. They’re just happy that I have something for two years in this kind of economy. They just want me to be happy and stable.”