Author: Nelson Rosario

The picture of Justin Bieber’s grandparents approaching to pick up his high school diploma on his behalf has a subtle allure. Not much fanfare. No stadium audience. For a brief moment, I stood in for one of the world’s most watched young men in Stratford, Ontario. In June 2012, it was confirmed that Bieber had completed all the requirements needed to graduate as part of the 2012 class of St. Michael Catholic Secondary School — the same school in his hometown that he never really had the chance to attend in any traditional sense. He was 18. He was also…

Some institutions don’t make a big deal out of themselves. It doesn’t have a sprawling residential campus with manicured lawns or a brand-name alumni network that fills up business magazine covers. However, it discreetly serves more students than the population of most nations that attend college. That organization is called Indira Gandhi National Open University, or IGNOU, and it’s worthwhile to learn more about what it does. Founded in 1985, IGNOU was built on a straightforward but ambitious idea: that geography, income, and life circumstances shouldn’t determine whether someone gets a degree. Over 21 million students are served by it…

There are, confusingly, two men named Nick Reiner whose lives have been documented in very different kinds of rooms. One sits in courtrooms. The other is a classroom teacher. One grew up in a $13.5 million compound in Brentwood surrounded by roses planted by Henry Fonda. The other published poetry, pursued a quiet career in advocacy journalism, and graduated from Stanford and UC Irvine. Though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what, the contrast illustrates how the same name can be associated with quite different outcomes. The version of this story that most people are unaware of comes from Nicholas Reiner,…

A school that starts out with 200 pupils in a small part of Kennedy Town and, over the course of three decades, expands into an organization that attracts families from all over the world has a subtly remarkable quality. SISHK, or Singapore International School Hong Kong, didn’t make a big impression. It arrived in September 1991 with a curriculum, a directive from Singapore’s Ministry of Education, and what appeared to be a straightforward goal: to assist Singaporean families residing overseas. It’s important to consider what transpired after that. After outgrowing its original location by the mid-1990s, the school relocated to…

There’s a story in basketball circles that doesn’t get told often enough. At a recruiting event in South Carolina, a man becomes hungry, moves away to get something to eat, and unintentionally stumbles onto a court where a teenager named Temetrius Morant is playing a 3-on-3 game. James Kane, then an assistant at Murray State, couldn’t have known what he was watching. But he stayed. And that moment — that accidental pause — may have set the course of an entire NBA career. Ja Morant, born August 10, 1999, in Dalzell, South Carolina, was not supposed to be this good…

There’s something almost predictable, in hindsight, about how Pam Bondi ended up where she did. Born and raised in Temple Terrace, Florida — a modest suburb folded into the broader Tampa Bay sprawl — she grew up in a household where civic life wasn’t abstract. Her father, Joe Bondi, was an educator who eventually became mayor of Temple Terrace. Bondi’s instincts were likely shaped more by this combination than by any law school course—a teacher-turned-politician raising a daughter in a small Florida city. She went to C. Leon King High School in Tampa, a public school that doesn’t make many…

Elon Musk entered Stanford University’s graduate physics program in 1995 and left two days later. This fact about him is often overlooked in favor of rockets, electric vehicles, and social media chaos. Not because he didn’t succeed. Not because he was asked to leave. He just made the silent, seemingly certain decision that the internet was more important. That decision says something worth sitting with. Most people, after earning bachelor’s degrees in both physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, would have stayed in the system. The PhD path at Stanford isn’t something you stumble into. But Musk’s education,…

In the weeks leading up to a new school year, a parent may experience a certain type of quiet concern. It isn’t the big, dramatic kind of worry. It’s the kind that comes at night, when the children are asleep, and the parent is doing mental arithmetic on a salary that was never quite enough. Transport, shoes, notebooks, and uniforms. Every child desires that stiff, stitched badge of belonging, which every struggling household secretly fears. There are systems in place in Pakistan specifically to deal with this. The Workers Welfare Fund, operating through a web-based Management Information System and a…

When students realize they haven’t decided where they’re going to live, they experience a specific type of anxiety around February or March, which is typically around the time course offers start to arrive. Early decisions are rewarded in Edinburgh. Its streets are beautiful, its universities are well-regarded, and its accommodation market is, to put it mildly, competitive. It takes more than just grabbing whatever is available to find the ideal location close to Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh Napier, or the University of Edinburgh. Knowing what kind of student life you want and whether the building you’re signing a contract for will support…

The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow was meant to make an impression when it opened in April 2015. Scotland’s largest-ever NHS construction project, sitting on the old Southern General Hospital site in Govan, was built to bring together some of the city’s most important medical services under one enormous, interconnected roof. At £842 million and 1,677 beds, it was, by almost any measure, a significant achievement. Locals, with the dry wit that Glasgow does better than most cities, quickly nicknamed it the “Death Star” — part mockery, part affection — because of its star-shaped design, its sheer scale, and…