When Abass Hassan Mohamed was born in Somalia in 1982, his father honored the event with a variation on a traditional Somali ritual. Instead of tying the umbilical cord to a goat or wad of money—in hopes that the child would prosper when he grew up—Hassan Mohamed Abdi tied it to a book and buried it near a school. "A book and a pen. I did that for all my children," says Abdi, a bearded man of regal bearing. He was convinced that his progeny, members of a scorned minority tribe, would need a strong education to make their way in the world.

Little did he know how far his son would go. Abass is now a junior at Princeton University. And he has become something of a legend in the refugee camp where he was raised, for having blazed a path out of a sanctuary that is also a kind of prison, where young people languish with little hope for a productive life.

Abass's odyssey began in Ifo—one of three refugee camps carved out of the Kenyan desert and collectively called Dadaab. He and his parents, grandmother and five siblings fled there from Somalia in 1992—a harrowing journey by foot, truck and bus. The camp is a depressing, dry and dusty place. Their new home was constructed of twigs covered with a plastic sheet. There were no beds, no toilets and no schools. Instead, a fellow refugee convened classes under a tree. "He didn't have chalk. So … he would write in the sand and we'd copy," says Abass.

His father had long revered education, crediting his modest success and even his marriage to a woman of higher clan status to his own schooling. Abass and his brothers were very much their father's sons. Once camp officials built a bare-bones elementary school, they were always at the head of the class. When Abass and his younger brother took the test for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education, they scored first and second highest of all those in Dadaab. A few years later Abass received the highest score in all of northeastern Kenya and the eighth highest in the nation on his high-school exams.

Of the roughly 170,000 refugees who call Dadaab home, a handful make it to Western schools each year, thanks largely to a program operated by World University Service of Canada. Since 1978, WUSC has sent close to 1,000 students from around the world—including Abass's brother Osman—to Canadian universities. Abass found another route out. A visiting professor from Princeton heard about his academic success and sent a Princeton application to Dadaab officials. CARE, which administers the camp and its schools, arranged for Abass's first-ever plane ride so he could take the SAT in Nairobi.

Months later, when his acceptance package arrived at CARE's offices, Abass was ecstatic: "I didn't want to cry—that would be unheard of for a Somali man—but I was extremely overjoyed." Two staffers in the Dadaab office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees prepped him, instructing him on American customs and manners. One of them even dipped into her purse to pay his plane fare to America (which he eventually repaid). Hearing he had no money for a visa, Somalis at the United Nations in Geneva sent $100 to help out.