Meet Michael Ocon of College Access Plan

I was born and raised in Pasadena. I was educated there, I’ve built my career there, and even though I no longer live there, it’s always going to be the place I consider my home. So when fellow Pasadena native Michael Ocon said to me on our recent phone call, “In many ways Pasadena is a tale of two cities,” I knew what he meant immediately. 

For all of its grandeur, Pasadena is not without its own darkness and deep historical disparity. This disparity presents itself very clearly in the city’s rift in educational opportunities. Ocon and I both know the story well, though we grew up on opposite sides of it. 

Ocon gave his official title as Concerned Citizen and Board Member of College Access Plan. He grew up in Pasadena and attended PUSD schools, including PHS. At the ripe age of 27, he now holds degrees from Stanford (undergrad) and USC (graduate.) He attributes his success largely to College Access Plan, which is why he remains a passionate member of the non-profit. 

While he benefited from the PUSD system, there was a dearth of resources that helped students figure out a path after high school ended. Whereas the private school system considers itself a failure if its students are not competitively shoveled toward four year universities, the public school system in Pasadena simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to enforce the same kind of guidance. As Ocon put it, he “self-selected toward a university pipeline.” Despite having no strategy, he had a baseline intelligence and an intense curiosity. 

He happened upon a CAP table on campus his junior year and signed up for their three month SAT prep course. He took the test, did well enough, and thought that was the end of the line. CAP encouraged him to continue studying and take the test again; he did, and he decimated the scores most private school students get. He decimated the score some private school parents pay for. 

He stuck with CAP and engaged their office hours and guidance counseling where they walked him through the college application process and trained him in such a way that they could tease out the best possible candidate side of him. They helped him craft a narrative to present to college admissions offices, and that process landed him nearly a full ride to Stanford. But getting there was hardly the end of the story. Imagine being thrust into an environment where you have no idea how to keep up with your new peers, particularly in a vast and foreign sea of wealth and privilege. 

Thankfully, CAP continued to maintain a relationship with Ocon throughout undergrad and graduate school, and this mutually beneficial pairing has fostered a lifelong desire for Ocon to effect positive change in the public educational system. In addition to CAP, he currently serves on the board of education at Monrovia Unified, and at 27 he’s one of the youngest members in the state. None of this, he affirms, would have been possible without CAP. 

How could someone as intelligent and driven as Michael Ocon slip through the cracks of the system? Well, really easily. PUSD keeps an eye on students who are in the top 10% in terms of their GPA and those students get nurtured. Their system can’t really support anything beyond that, and as we all know, a GPA doesn’t tell the full story. Ocon didn’t come from an easy background. He’s brown, queer, and comes from a low income household that sustained a barrage of familial and health problems as he was growing up. His circumstances knocked him out of the top 10% and, on paper, he just didn’t make the cut. 

The existence of CAP, he says, is both incredibly important and a complete indictment of how broken the system is. His work moving forward is social justice—acknowledging and attempting to fix this kind of educational system isn’t just about advising individual students, it’s about the necessity of envisioning and creating a better system for all of them. 

For more information about College Access Plan, to donate or volunteer, visit https://collegeaccessplan.org/.