Schrag: What We Can Learn From the Graduating Class of ‘08

Not surprisingly in this era, most of their award-winning projects dealt with energy, the environment or human health, some growing out of personal or family experience with illness. Nor is it surprising that all of the finalists seem to come from environments – parents, schools, teachers and cultures – that encourage curiosity and prize serious, scholarly work.

Nineteen states and 35 schools were represented by the finalists, with the greatest number coming from New York. Sadly, as has often been the case in the past, California was not among them.

It would be easy to blame California schools or teachers for that, but it's likely that more of the onus belongs on our cultural climate – or maybe just on our climate period – and on a state that, despite its rhetoric about its academic standards, has never prized intellectual distinction as much as it prizes good health, physical beauty and leisure in our abundant sunshine.

More sad still is the story from Fresno earlier this month about 17-year-old Arthur Mkoyan, whose 4-point-plus grade-point average made him the valedictorian at Bullard High School, but who, after 15 years in this country, faces deportation to his native Armenia.

Mkoyan was brought here by his parents, who were caught on the wrong side of the Armenian independence movement as the Soviet Union was breaking up. But their pleas for asylum were rejected and this spring their time runs out. Young Mkoyan doesn't know Armenia, speaks very little of the language and has no desire to live there.

Mkoyan is one of the emblems – there are thousands of others – of a self-defeating immigration policy that prefers to deport talented young people at a time when the nation faces a desperate need of skilled workers to replace the millions of baby boomers who are about to retire.

Although Mkoyan, who was accepted to the University of California, Davis, wasn't an academic superstar like the 40 Intel finalists, he had a bright future, both for himself and for the country where he's grown up and been educated. But the stupidity of current immigration law put him into a cruel, senseless situation not of his own making.

Passage of the federal Dream Act last year, which would have put thousands of young men and women on the path to legal status, would probably have allowed him to stay here. But the act was blocked in Congress by immigration absolutists who'd rather punish children for the sins of their parents than cash in on the talent and ambition they represent.

The act, said its opponents, would have taken opportunities from Americans. But any look at the projections for the need for skilled workers in the coming decades and the shortage of able people to fill them will tell you that's baloney, too.
Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.