Roland Fryer

Before Deval Patrick '78, J.D. '82, was the popular and successful two-term governor of Massachusetts, before he was managing director of high-flying Bain Capital, and long before he was Harvard's most recent Commencement speaker, he was a poor black schoolchild in the battered housing projects of Chicago's South Side. The odds of his escaping a poverty-ridden lifestyle, despite innate intelligence and drive, were long. So how did he help mold his own narrative and triumph over baked-in societal inequality? Through education. "Education has been the path to better opportunity for generations of American strivers, no less for me," Patrick said in an email when asked how getting a solid education, in his case at Milton Academy and at Harvard, changed his life. "What great teachers gave me was not just the skills to take advantage of new opportunities, but the ability to imagine what those opportunities could be. For a kid from the South Side of Chicago, that's huge."