This paper examines how a nonprofit organization prepares low-income Black and Latino/a students to attend elite boarding high schools. Using ethnographic data, I investigate how the program engineers the experience of academic and emotional struggle for students, how students experience these struggles, and what students learn from this process. I find that the program’s academically-induced emotional rollercoaster serves to strengthen students’ confidence in their academic skills and their ability to persist in the face of academic challenges—a valuable emotional asset for the students as they enter elite boarding schools. However, I argue, the feeling students emerge with of having earned their successes (and failures) may ultimately serve to reproduce the individualistic, meritocratic discourses that support the patterns of social inequality the program helps its students sidestep.

This article examines how a nonprofit organization prepares low-income students of diverse racial backgrounds to enter elite private high schools in the fall of the ninth grade. Combining ethnographic fieldwork completed during the program with follow-up interviews with ten students after their first semester at boarding school, this article addresses how students interact with and integrate into wealthy, predominantly White schools in an attempt to gain social mobility. Looking at how students interpret their surroundings, the article argues that students are trained to view themselves as “diversifiers” in order to successfully adapt to their new schools. In this role, students perceive themselves as especially serious and motivated students, and their elite peers as naïve, and find satisfaction in teaching others how to interact with people from different class and racial backgrounds. The paper concludes by considering the ramifications of the diversifier concept on efforts to diversify elite institutions and proposes further possible research sites where the concept may be applicable.