Wendy Kopp grew up as a member of “the me generation,” during a period of time when she says young, highly educated Americans were “convinced that we all wanted to go to work on Wall Street.”
But that ideology didn’t resonate with Kopp, who graduated from Princeton University in 1989.
When firms were trying to recruit graduates who could commit two years to work at their firm, Kopp asked herself, “Why aren’t we being as aggressively recruited to commit just two years to teach in our country?”
She became heavily invested in answering that question.
“It’s a big, complex, systemic challenge, and we know that no one thing will solve this problem, that ultimately it will take many things, which means it will take a lot of leadership, at every level of the system, the whole ecosystem around kids,” Kopp told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in a recent interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series. Kopp was named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list.
