Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner)

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz (Portfolio/Penguin)

By Charlie Gofen

Jeff Hobbs shadows a group of boys in Los Angeles during their senior year of high school in his new book Show Them You’re Good, tagging along to classes, sporting events, family dinners, and even proms.

Two boys from Spanish-speaking homes who attend a school in a tough neighborhood of South LA make for the most interesting subjects.

Carlos is the academic star, the lone member of his graduating class at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School who will have his choice of Ivies, but he and his family are undocumented immigrants who live in a shack by Compton.

Meanwhile, his classmate Tio wants to be an engineer, but his alcoholic father demeans him and his aspirations, causing his academic performance to deteriorate and leaving a “stark and irreparable crater on his transcripts.”

Hobbs, author of the acclaimed The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, writes beautifully, and he captures moments that resonate, from the playful banter among friends to the consequential developments as the boys navigate the college admissions process.

The events take place during the 2016-17 school year, and, sadly, the students can’t escape the turbulence of the national political scene. Hobbs describes the mood as “subdued” at Carlos and Tio’s high school after Trump wins the Presidential election. Carlos displays a sign that reads “Undocumented and Proud,” but the overwhelming sentiment is one of anxiety and fear.

“At Animo Pat Brown,” Hobbs writes, “the students had endured almost a full semester of being asked to intellectualize, in some way, a Republican candidate whose entire platform was founded on a vehement idea that they were criminals who did not belong here.” (Even at Beverly Hills High School, a school in a much tonier neighborhood at which Hobbs also shadows several boys for the book, smug students celebrate Trump’s victory with a chant of “Build that wall!”)

Carlos spends his senior year waiting for approval not just of his Ivy League applications but also of his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) application, which he needs to apply for federal college financial aid and to hold a paid job. And if that’s not enough of a burden, in the final months of high school, he and his family are evicted from their home. Given their undocumented status, they have little legal recourse.

The threat of immigration enforcement hangs over Carlos and his parents. He wins accolades for his stellar academic performance but is too afraid to sit for a Los Angeles Times profile interview.

When he ends up getting accepted by several of the most selective colleges in the nation, one of his friends jokingly inquires, “Does a Harvard diploma come with citizenship?”

At the other end of the privilege spectrum – and moral continuum – are the affluent and entitled families of another new book, Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal, by Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz.

Korn and Levitz do a nice job telling the story of how a couple dozen families, aided by unscrupulous college consultant Rick Singer, cheated to help get their kids into top colleges. Many years before the admissions scandal came to light, Singer was already advising white families to list their kids as Hispanic, a transgression that was just the gateway drug to wholesale manufacturing of identities, most notably falsely presenting college applicants as recruited athletes.

These families already had a huge advantage in the college admissions game, starting with the wealth to afford private schools, tutors, test prep, and doctors to decree that their kid deserves “extended time” on standardized tests. And as the Unacceptable authors note, the families also benefit from legacy preference at certain colleges; networks of friends who help their kids land impressive summer internships; and, in some cases, the special admissions preference that comes from the ability to make a huge (legal) donation to a college.

They were also already the families who often had the temerity to pressure high schools to “fix” their child’s low grade in math and hire a pricey independent college consultant to help shape the student’s “narrative” and make sure her personal essays sparkled.

And yet they still broke the rules, paying experts to take standardized tests for their kids, providing false information to schools, and giving Singer large sums to bribe athletics coaches in return for guaranteed college admission.

When federal judge Indira Talwani dropped the hammer on some of the defendants, opting to give them jail time, she described the source of the public’s moral indignation, as Korn and Levitz recount:

“The outrage,” she said from the bench, “is a system that is already so distorted by money and privilege in the first place.”

And the outrage, the judge continued, looking directly at actress Felicity Huffmann, was “that you took the step of obtaining one more advantage to put your child ahead of theirs.”

Hobbs reveals in the epilogue to Show Them You’re Good that Carlos ends up thriving at Yale, writing columns for the Yale Daily News describing what it was like to have to stay at school for a two-week break because he couldn’t afford to travel home, and, in a piece titled “Yale’s Invisible Price Tags,” how he and other scholarship students struggled to cover the costs of items such as winter clothes and textbooks.

Critics called him ungrateful, but he held his ground. And then he returned home for the summer after his first year at Yale to work in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement, focusing on South LA communities.

It’s impossible not to root for Carlos, Tio, and the other boys Hobbs profiles, especially after contrasting their integrity and diligence with the deceit and corner-cutting of the families of Unacceptable. (To be fair, some of the students involved in the college scandal didn’t know their parents had conspired with Singer to submit false information, but others were aware of the fraudulent scheme.)

It’s worth reading Hobbs’ book to understand what students like Carlos are made of, and what they are able to contribute to their colleges and to the world.

The Trump administration attacks college admissions policies that take race and ethnicity into account, playing into the hands of folks who believe that Carlos stole a spot at Yale that their kid should have gotten, but Hobbs shows what Carlos and his peers have had to overcome. Just as one data point on public school students in LA, the average high school counselor caseload in the Los Angeles Unified School District is 378 students.

Hobbs’ book is also a fun read. It’s not all work and no play for his subjects. One of the boys offers a choice quote after Carlos gets sick on a big night:

“My memory of prom when I’m like fifty years old is going to be Carlos heaving his guts out in a nasty Carl’s Jr. bathroom. And that’s the best memory I could have possibly hoped for. I’ll tell my grandkids about it.”

In addition, Hobbs broadens the perspective by including several boys in his portrait rather than just focusing on the extraordinary academic arc of Carlos.

Tio eventually turns around his high school academic performance after getting some distance from his bitter father’s withering criticism. He masters three challenging AP courses in his final year at Animo Pat Brown and also is chosen as prom king.

But with more limited college options than Carlos, Tio ends up at the University of California at Riverside, in the College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences. Unhappy with this outcome, he transfers within Riverside to engineering, finally headed toward his dream.

And in one of the book’s final scenes, Tio shocks his father during a phone call from campus.

“I’m proud of you,” he tells his father, who is still unable to say the same thing back to him. “You raised a family. You have two kids in college. You got through a lot of hard things that a lot of other people don’t get through.”

It’s a note of grace from a kid who had a rough time during high school. I wouldn’t expect that too many of the students involved in the college admissions shenanigans in Unacceptable will be telling their parents anytime soon how proud of them they are.

Charlie Gofen is an investment counselor in Chicago who has taught high school and been a newspaper reporter.