A South African Launchpad for Advanced High-Schoolers from across the Continent
I learned of Johannesburg’s African Leadership Academy back in 2017 when I was arranging my visit to the African Leadership University in Mauritius (since renamed the African Leadership College) as part of my original instructional odyssey. Both ALA and ALU were founded by Fred Swaniker, a Ghanian graduate of Stanford’s business school. ALA came first, in 2008, and is considered an unqualified success. It brings high-potential 16-19 year olds from across the African continent for two years of subsidized boarding school, often leading to admission with financial aid at a selective college in the USA or Europe. I’ve always thought the ALA students could be a suitable audience for my data science short-course, which is aimed at college students but often has some advanced high-schoolers in the mix. (From Johannesburg I’m headed to ALU’s campus in Kigali, Rwanda; that visit will be covered in a next blog.)
ALA has an idyllic campus in the outskirts of Johannesburg and it’s an upbeat place. As advertised, the students hail from throughout the continent (though surprisingly few from South Africa), and being 100% residential they’ve bonded deeply and are clearly having a formative experience. They’re highly motivated to make the most of their two years at ALA, and the ones I got to know were delightful. But I was also left wondering if the place might garner just a bit too much attention.
ALA has many inspiring success stories among its graduates, but only 120 students are admitted each year (out of thousands of applicants) so the impact is somewhat limited. Nevertheless, President Obama held a congress of future African leaders on the campus in 2018, and Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe attended for a semester. (The school hosts about 15 international visiting students at any given time, primarily high school juniors from the USA. The program is part of ALA’s outreach efforts, but also part of its funding model — it certainly can’t hurt to have an in with Bill Gates!) The teacher-student ratio is six-to-one, there’s an extensive staff including some whose sole function is lifelong support for ALA alums, and there’s a steady stream of visitors and volunteers (myself included).
The students appeared relaxed overall, with little talk of college admissions even though all of the second-years in my course were beginning that journey. But when a trio of them opened up to me on the final day over lunch, they confessed that their college application process felt a bit like The Hunger Games — top colleges tend to accept at most a few students from ALA. I started to wonder if, like at Stanford which is also highly selective and under a spotlight (and where the term was invented), there might be some “duck syndrome” going on: appearing calm on the surface while paddling wildly underneath. On the other hand, the college aspirations of the three students I was talking with were very different from each other, ranging from alternative liberal arts to major research university; I couldn’t tell if they were representative of the student body.
As for the course itself, about 40 participants made it to the end of the intensive three days of data science — around 30 second-year students and the rest a variety of teachers and staff. Even though most of the students had taken a year-long computer science class, many of them found the material quite challenging. My sense is that the school’s educational philosophy focuses on basic fundamentals along with leadership and other soft skills, and even nuts & bolts subjects like computer science are approached in that fashion. Perhaps that’s a positive in the long run; I’m not sure.
For example, during my initial data-science overview the students asked terrific questions, and they were eager to talk philosophy over lunch (“will AI destroy humanity?”). But when the high-level introduction was finished and we got down to work, some of the participants lost steam — students and teachers alike. That’s not to say it wasn’t a worthwhile experience, for them or for me. A handful of the participants mastered nearly all of the material, and quite a few others clearly got a fair amount out of the short-course overall. There was a stalwart group in the front who were eager and focused — I remain confident that I touch at least some lives in every stop.
Johannesburg isn’t known for tourism and I didn’t have much spare time, but I made the most of what I had: I visited the Apartheid Museum, took a short bike tour of Soweto, and participated in a community Saturday Parkrun.
Next: The African Leadership University in Kigali, Rwanda; stay tuned!
