— Remarks as prepared —
Thank you, members of the Class Day committee and student government, President Eisgruber, Dean Deas.
Parents and friends and supporters of our graduates, here’s to us. We made it! If your situation is anything like mine, there were times when this was far from a given. I’m thinking back to a moment during our son and your classmate Haddon’s freshman year of high school. He wasn’t doing so well and was trying to reassure us that it was all going to be okay. I’ll never forget his attempt. He told us: “I’m on the right track. I just need to turn it around.” But here we are.
Most importantly, congratulations to the incredible Class of 2026! You have made it through so much … from 6 a.m. wake-up calls from the good people working on the art museum behind you, which is beautiful by the way, to the nights in Firestone that made you wonder what possessed you to choose a university that’s serious about academics, to the days some of you spent on this lawn where we sit today, participating in the most consequential campus protests in the last decades.
As I look out, I am so happy for you. Because finally, you are free.
You’re free from running the race that it took to get here and to get through here. For many of you, it started in middle school, or even earlier. It was the race for the right grades, test scores, and extracurriculars. You likely thought the finish line was those Princeton admissions letters, but the track just kept going. I heard that 300 of you applied to be part of Tiger Capital Management, for example, which meant that 292 of you didn’t meet the bar, whatever that may have been. Or perhaps you went for Fuzzy Dice, which seems to take great pride in having the very lowest acceptance rate. There was all the stress of finding the summer internships. And then there was bicker.
But today, you are free from running this race. As you commence life outside these gates, you have from Princeton an education that enables you to chart your own course. Thanks to Princeton, you are mostly unburdened by student loans, and you are trusted as a graduate of one of the world’s most respected institutions of higher education.
Over this graduation weekend, you’re going to be asked, over and over, what you’re doing after college. It may start to seem that there is another track after all. But there is no application portal opening tonight. There will be no committee ranking you. And you don’t have to do what other people think is cool. You can decide.
I sense that some of you are stressed. Columnists tell us you’re the rejected generation, which did everything right but has the lowest ever acceptance rates into college and employment. Bestselling authors tell us you’re the anxious generation thanks to phones and social media. You are the lonely generation with fewer dates and less in-person engagement. And I know from some of you that you are the less-than-fully-employed generation.
But on this day, I hope you will celebrate in your freedom.
Some of you may be skeptical that you’re really free.
For those of you who have family responsibilities to meet, it may be hard to recognize your freedom, especially for those of you who are first-generation graduates, or from cultures where these expectations might be tied up with personal identity or may be non-negotiable. But if this is your case, I hope you can look for ways to meet these expectations that are personally fulfilling and on your own terms.
Some of you have already signed up to your first job, which is a real commitment. But remember that you’re young. With any luck, the next two years are not the rest of your life, and neither are the two years after that.
You may have big expectations for yourselves that make you feel locked into a certain path. If so, I hope you’ll ask yourselves where the pressure you’re feeling is coming from and whether it really reflects your own internal compass.
Who do you really want to be? What do you really want to do?
As you consider these questions, I hope you’ll keep two things in mind.
First, what you do shapes who you become.
My senior year, as I researched my thesis for SPIA, I became possessed by the idea that our country needed a national service corps that would recruit our most outstanding graduates — people of all different academic majors and career interests — to commit two years to teach in our urban and rural public schools. I thought that this would matter to a lot of children and young people who need every additional committed teacher. And, I thought it would change our country’s priorities if our most promising leaders spent their first two years out of college teaching in low-income communities — facing the realities of our country — rather than working in skyscrapers far removed from them.
I didn’t have any money to pursue this, or even to live on. But I sent my thesis around with a big sense of possibility and found a seed grant. The day I graduated, I moved to New York City, into an apartment with some other recent grads, and set out to see what I could do.
Over time, this effort inspired 70,000 diverse, committed people to make these two-year commitments within our country, and another 50,000 to do so around the world across the Teach For All network. A few weeks ago, I heard from an alumnus of Enseña por Colombia who had taught math in a town in the Urabá region that has suffered from a complex cycle of violence. He shared how he had come to see that even his students’ parents, who belonged to paramilitary armed structures and were involved in criminal activities, shared his dream of a better future for their children. His was one of probably thousands of stories I’ve heard over time about the perspective shifts that proximity creates.
In fact, independent studies from across our network show how significant these shifts are: these two-year commitments lead people to believe more in the potential of their students and the assets in their communities; increase their sense of possibility in their own ability to make a difference; alter their viewpoints about the nature of the problem and the solutions; and change their priorities. More than 70% of the alumni of these teaching commitments are so motivated by what they learn that they continue to work, full time, for the rest of their lives, to address the issues they saw play out in their classrooms — whether as educators or entrepreneurs or policymakers.
I think about my own journey from these gates. I’d like to think that, if I had taken a different path that didn’t bring me into such close proximity with the challenges facing marginalized communities, I might have nonetheless found ways to contribute as meaningfully. But it doesn’t seem very likely.
It’s only because I had spent years visiting so many schools in our country’s urban and rural communities, for example, that I could recognize, on a school visit in Mumbai, that the challenges facing students across our world’s most marginalized communities are so similar. I was deep into growing Teach For America about 20 years ago when I met an incredible social entrepreneur who was running transformational after-school programs in India. She invited me to visit her to explore the idea of Teach For India. The first thing we did was visit a school in a community dense with makeshift houses. We visited classrooms and then went to the school office where the principal cleaned off the table with a spray bottle of Lysol, set out a box of doughnut holes, and then went to lengths to explain why, given the circumstances of the students, there was only so much she could do. It was surreal — by that point I had experienced this same scene, complete with the Lysol and the doughnut holes, all over our country.
I had imagined before that the differences between our countries would be overwhelming, but instead I was overwhelmed by the similarities. It was this recognition — that what students need in their teachers and from our society is so similar from place to place — that inspired the development of Teach For All, which is now a network of organizations from Teach For India to Teach For Nigeria to Enseña por Mexico, in more than 60 countries and growing. If I hadn’t spent all those years in classrooms and schools from the South Bronx to the Mississippi Delta, it’s really hard to imagine that today, we would all be learning together and working together globally towards enabling all children to have the education, support and opportunity to shape a better future.
What you do shapes what you care about. It shapes your understanding of the world. As you go forth, I hope you’ll stay present to the impact of your surroundings, your relationships, your day-to-day work on the person you become. Make choices that expand your worldview rather than limit it.
The second thing I hope you’ll keep in mind is that your choices about how you spend your time and energy matter to society. They have consequences for yourselves and your families, and those are important to consider. But they also matter to all of us, more than you might realize.
What do you believe changes systems? What do you think will solve the inequities in our country, or improve the welfare of people in the world’s most marginalized communities, or reduce global conflict or environmental degradation? Is your theory that more effective political leaders will solve the problems? Or more money?
What I’ve learned through the decades of our work — and from the world’s most respected changemakers across different sectors — is that we really can solve the most entrenched challenges. The question is simply whether there is enough leadership to do so.
Since I began doing this work, states would justify their educational results with the refrain, “at least we’re not Mississippi,” which always ranked at or near the bottom. Today, fourth graders are more likely to read on grade level if they’re growing up in Mississippi than in New York City. In 11 years, Mississippi went from 49th to 9th in fourth grade reading scores. Or look just a few miles from here, at Newark, New Jersey. Newark has long ranked as one of the most challenged urban areas in our country. Today, it has the largest percentage of schools of any major urban area in the country where students “beat the odds” by substantially outperforming statistical predictions based on race and income.
This progress is life-changing for the kids in Mississippi and Newark. How did it happen? From knowing some of the hundreds of Teach For America alumni who taught in these places and never left, and from hearing their stories, I know it’s because of a herculean amount of work on the part of a lot of people, including many far beyond them. It took heroic teachers going to great lengths to show everyone what’s possible. It took school leaders who redesigned schools to sustain and grow those results on a larger scale. It took district leaders who supported many more schools to make extraordinary progress, advocates and policymakers who worked to increase investment and standards and accountability, non-profit leaders and health care professionals and social workers improving conditions outside of schools.
It takes people to change systems — it takes political leaders, but it takes more than them. It takes all the people in government, and the people throughout public systems; it takes innovators pioneering new solutions, and advocates pushing on the system. For the many issues driven by economic forces, like climate, it takes changemakers throughout our corporations pushing for transformation. Changing systems takes enough people throughout any given ecosystem — all on the same mission and learning together and collaborating.
To change things, we need people close to the issues, learning about them, figuring out the path to solving them, and doing the heavy lifting to make it happen. There is no shortcut to this.
I don’t need to tell you that our country and our world are not well. We’re at a point where many people in our own country don’t feel safe and secure in their own homes and schools; where growing conflict all over the world has brought unimaginable loss and devastation; where environmental degradation is destroying livelihoods; where inequality is growing while billions of people struggle to meet basic needs; and where growing polarization leaves us immobilized in the face of so much that threatens our humanity.
We need the most committed, creative, capable leaders in the arena, tackling these problems. So your choices do matter.
I’m not asking you to sacrifice for the common good. I’m sharing that you have the opportunity to do something that really matters — that helps put the world on a better trajectory.
There’s an enduring notion among civic-minded people that the best way to maximize impact is to gain skills, make money, and then turn to making a difference in the world. The trouble is, what we do shapes the kind of difference we can make. Remember, what we do shapes our beliefs and our values.
If you want to maximize your impact against our world’s challenges, don’t think that you can skip the step of working close to them. It is this proximity that will give you the worldview, the insight, the know how, and the credibility to take them on, from wherever you sit — whether that’s in the private sector or the public sector or the social sector, whether you’re working in science or media or academia. It’s important to find a way to gain this proximity early — while you can, before family and life responsibilities mount, and soon enough to make a meaningful impact against these issues that are exceedingly complex, but ultimately solvable.
Class of 2026 — When people ask you over these next days what you’re going to do next year, please remember, you don’t have to set off on another track. Today, you are free to decide where to put your time and energy.
I cannot wait to see who you choose to become, and what you do for our collective welfare. Good luck you all!
