Zohran Mamdani wins New York mayoral race: What can students expect now?

When New York elected Zohran Mamdani , it elected someone who has lived inside the very pressures that shape the city’s students. A graduate of New York City public schools and The Bronx High School of Science, Mamdani came through one of the city’s most competitive academic pipelines — the kind that often channels high-achievers into engineering, finance or tech. But instead of following the well-mapped STEM-professional arc that many South Asian students are nudged toward, he made a different choice. At Bowdoin college, he studied Africana Studies, gravitating towards history, race, community politics and the structural forces that shape how people live in a city. Those academic interests did not remain theoretical: They hardened into a practice of neighbourhood-level organising, tena