Rhodes scholarships for two students from the Philly-area

To the annals of Rhodes scholars, a lofty list that already includes Nobel laureates, Olympians, and a U.S. president, add two residents of the Philadelphia region.

Evan Behrle of Oxford, Chester County, and Alexander Wang of Doylestown, Bucks County, were among 32 Americans awarded the prestigious scholarship Saturday. They will receive free tuition to earn graduate degrees at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

Behrle, a senior at the University of Virginia, said he planned to study urban poverty at Oxford. He said he had been interested in comparing countries' strategies for tackling poverty since high school, when he started to notice the disparity between his private-school peers and less-privileged children.

Though his mother lives in Chester County, he attended high school in Baltimore.

"Just a few miles away were people living altogether different lives than what I saw in my school and people living around my school. It just felt very unfair to me on a very basic level. These were kids who were like me, who had all of my same interests - it just felt really random and kind of stupid, to be blunt," said Behrle, 21. "It felt like we were so far from living up to our hopes and our dreams for what we could do in our society."

He said he hoped to eventually work in government or a nonprofit organization so he could help alleviate poverty.

In college, he has led an all-male organization dedicated to preventing sexual assault, and he chairs the honor committee, a student judiciary board with the weighty responsibility of expelling fellow students for lying, cheating, or stealing. And the Rhodes won't be his first free degree - he received a full ride to the University of Virginia through another selective program, the Jefferson Scholarship.

Wang, a senior at New York University-Abu Dhabi, told the Rhodes committee he planned to earn a master's degree in migration studies at Oxford. A member of the first class to graduate from New York University's campus in the United Arab Emirates, Wang has worked hard to improve conditions for Abu Dhabi's immigrant workers during his time in the city, the Rhodes organization said.

According to his profile released by the organization, he has also founded a social science journal and an organization that coordinates volunteer activities in Abu Dhabi. Oxford will be the latest in a long line of elite universities where he has studied: He has already participated in research and teaching at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.

Wang could not be reached for comment Sunday. According to a spokesperson for New York University, he was en route from his interview back to the United Arab Emirates.

Other Rhodes winners who are not from this area but who have ties to local area schools are Villanova University graduate student Jessica Wamala of Milford, N.H., who has volunteered to help Philadelphia's homeless and who plans to study Middle Eastern affairs; and two students from Princeton University.