Dennis Barnes’ name has been all over the news for the past week, but I got the pleasure of finding out that he prefers to go by his middle name: Maliq. Up until fairly recently, he considered himself an ordinary teen who liked to ride dirt bikes and socialize with friends, and who never received snail mail. But since he applied to college, everyone, including (and maybe especially) Barnes’ neighborhood mail carrier, knows “ordinary” just doesn’t fit the bill.
The 16-year-old senior at the International High School of New Orleans — he skipped a couple of grades — is making headlines as the first senior in U.S. history to get accepted to 170 colleges and universities and secure $9 million in scholarship awards.
“I have a lot of letters. Look, I’m about to show ’em to you,” Barnes says over Zoom, holding up a comically large stack of envelopes. “The only days where the mailbox doesn’t have anything in it is if it’s a holiday or a Sunday.”
While everyone in the community has their own definition of what Black excellence looks like, it’s safe to say this is pretty impressive. Barnes’ college acceptance story started out as something local and endorphin-boosting, but as it started to grow into a national story, I realized we hadn’t heard from the young man himself. We had to reach out and find out more about his journey.
Barnes ― who maintained a 4.98 GPA throughout high school while juggling dual enrollment in Southern University at New Orleans with other academic extracurriculars ― speaks of his accomplishments with the distinct nonchalance of a teenager. He started applying to colleges nationwide last August (he’d ultimately apply to 200 in total), confident that he’d do all right. Little did he know just how great a candidate he’d be.
“I was aware that there were scholars before me that attained high goals,” Barnes tells me. “I knew that this was something that this school did... but I didn’t think it would happen to me.”
It did, though. And he’s now a Guinness World Record holder — a little treat to accompany his academic success.
Behind most college-admission success stories, there tends to be a persistent school counselor providing boatloads of encouragement and guidance. For Barnes, who says he didn’t even realize his own potential, it was his college counselor, Denise James. “Ms. James guided me,” Barnes recalls. “She said, ‘Maliq, your mailbox is gonna be full. It’s gonna be flooded with letters. The mailman’s gonna be tired of it.’”
The college application process is an art that James tells me she’s learned to repeatedly finesse. In the two decades she’s spent in education, James has worked with several ambitious seniors who have received outstanding college acceptances and scholarship awards upward of $1 million. But, she says, there hasn’t been anyone quite like Barnes.
“I have had two other candidates that were able to accomplish their goal for X amount of millions. However, with [Barnes], it is a quite unique case,” she says. And for those wondering how Barnes handled the cost of applying in such high volume: James tells us that if the applications were not already free, she worked to get the application fee waived.
James, like Barnes’ own family members, noticed his ambition early. Barnes’ journey started when he was encouraged to take college classes early in his high school career. But it’s not just academic tenacity that makes someone like Barnes a strong candidate for college admission.
“He’s really a high achiever, confident in his word, self-motivated, respectful to everyone, and his eagerness to learn is definitely a great note,” James says. “That comes from the morals and values and his mom and dad, who really did a great job.”
James, who previously worked for private schools in New Orleans, witnessed how support and realistic goal-setting paved the way for the success of high school seniors with more resources. When she transitioned to the public school system, she adopted that same approach, which prioritizes securing scholarships. Her method involves spreadsheets with individualized plans that encourage students to hone in on academic achievement, talents and interests as an assured pathway to college.
Barnes, whose own spreadsheet is the image of abundance at the moment, knows how much work James did to help secure his goals.
“She put a lot of time into me as a student and me as a person,” he says. “I just want to acknowledge her for the great person, the great counselor she is.”
For those dying to know where he’ll end up, Barnes is expected to announce his choice for the fall in just a couple of weeks. Regardless of the school, his plan is to get a degree in computer science and then take his talents to law school, where he would ultimately like to play a part in the evolution of intellectual property law. Phew. The kids are all right.