Somaliland to Harvard: How this student beat the odds

He credits the dramatic change in his fortunes to Somaliland's Abaarso School, a very small boarding school he attended, which was founded in 2009 by an American hedge fund manager.

"I'm not the smartest kid in Somaliland but I've had [the] opportunity [to attend Abaarso]," said Adan, who received his Harvard acceptance letter, along with a full scholarship, this month and will begin his undergraduate studies in September.
The Abaarso boarding school has become something of a feeder school for elite universities. Adan, 20, is among a small number of underprivileged students who are increasingly getting accepted into the most prestigious American universities, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown.
Abaarso's founder, Jonathan Starr, is a former American hedge fund manager turned headmaster, who left his job in finance because he wanted to do something different.
A family connection led him to launch the school in Somaliland, a self-declared independent state in Somalia that is still recovering from decades of civil war and a severe drought. Read More