This TED Talk features education entrepreneur Kareem Abu Linaga, recorded live at TED 2017.

Getting a college education is a 20-year investment.

When you're growing up poor, you're not accustomed to thinking that far ahead.

Instead, you're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal

and how your family is going to pay rent that month.

Besides, my parents and my friends' parents seem to be doing just fine, driving taxis and working as janitors.

It wasn't until I was a teenager when I realized I didn't want to do those things.

By then, I was two-thirds of the way through my education, and it was almost too late to turn things around. When you grow up poor,

you want to be rich. I was no different. I'm the second oldest of seven, and was raised by a single

mother on government aid in Queens, New York. By virtue of growing up low income, my siblings and I

went to some of New York City's most struggling

public schools. I had over 60 absences when I was in seventh grade, because I didn't feel

like going to class. My high school had a 55% graduation rate, and even worse, only 20% of the

kids graduating were college ready.

When I actually did make it to college, I told my friend Brennan how our teachers would always ask us to raise our hands if we were going to college.

I was taken aback when Brennan said, Kareem, I've never been asked that question before.

It was always what college are you going to? Just the way that question is phrased made it unacceptable for him not to have

gone to college. Nowadays, I get asked a different question. How were you able to make it out? For years,

I said I was lucky, but it's not just luck. When my older brother

and I graduated from high school at the very same time, and he later dropped out of a two-year

college, I wanted to understand why he dropped out, and I kept studying. It wasn't until I got to

Cornell as a presidential research scholar

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