Author: Nelson Rosario

RGU is on the southwest edge of Aberdeen. Its campus at Garthdee has a view of a city that has been shaped by oil as well as education. The buildings work and are modern in the way that institutions become modern after being rebuilt over and over again for decades. The place isn’t very fancy. In fact, that makes sense for a university that has always focused on what works rather than what impresses. The story starts not with a scholar but with a businessman. Robert Gordon made a lot of money trading in the Baltic and then moved back…

There’s something beautiful about a college that doesn’t make its name known. The College of the Holy Cross has been doing its work since 1843 on a hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, above the city and with a view of the Blackstone River. A lot of people outside of New England have never heard of it. Part of the reason for this is that it’s a small liberal arts college that doesn’t have a top ten football team or a Silicon Valley pipeline that people want to talk about. The alumni list, on the other hand, tells a very different story.…

People who have seen Off Campus, Amazon Prime Video’s newest romantic drama, have been reacting in a very specific way. People are finishing episodes and using search engines right away, but not to find out what happens next. They want to know exactly where Briar University is. That kind of question shows how well a show did its job. Briar University is not a real place, that’s all. It was never there. In Elle Kennedy’s best-selling book series, the school is in a made-up Massachusetts town that Kennedy created just for the story. When Amazon turned the book into a…

There is a certain kind of ambition that doesn’t make itself known. In the little things, like a choice made at the planning table or a community ready to try something most wouldn’t, it shows. Bridgwater College Academy, which is on the eastern edge of Bridgwater in Somerset, is a real-life example of that kind of goal. Five schools came together to form the academy in September 2012. They were East Bridgwater Community School, Sedgemoor Manor Junior School, and Sedgemoor Manor Infants School. That’s not a small change in the way things are run. It’s really hard work to merge…

One number that keeps coming up at Temple University these days is $200 million, and it’s hard to ignore. That’s about how much the Philadelphia school has been losing each year as enrollment has dropped and students who start at Temple stop showing up. That number is more than just a balance sheet for a university that takes pride in helping working-class families and first-generation college students. Ten years ago, almost all of Temple’s freshmen came back for their second year. There was no doubt that the students would show up, settle in, and stay. That number had dropped to…

While driving through Greensboro, North Carolina, there is something quietly amazing about seeing a 600-acre college campus that most people outside of the South have never heard of. While North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University doesn’t make a lot of noise or try to get people’s attention, it turns out engineers, scientists, and agricultural leaders at a rate that, well, should make a lot more people stop and take notice. North Carolina A&T began in 1891 as the Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race. It had four teachers and 37 students. It started because of the Second…

One of California’s newest medical schools is located in an area that doesn’t have enough medical care. This is a small but interesting irony. For cutting edge medical education, Colton is not the place to go. Colton is a city in San Bernardino County in the Inland Empire. The California University of Science and Medicine ended up there, though, for that very reason. Heart doctor Prem Reddy started the school, which is now called CUSM, in 2015. He also owns Prime Healthcare, a for-profit hospital network that runs 44 hospitals across the country. It wasn’t a random choice to build…

There is something not quite right about the way medicine is taught in Nashville at Belmont University. You can see it when you walk by the College of Medicine building on Wedgewood: students in white coats moving from one conversation to another. It may seem like a small thing, but it points to something the school has known from the start. Given how bad things were in the world at the time, the first announcement of the Thomas F. Frist, Jr. College of Medicine came in October 2020. This could have been a sign of bad timing or strong conviction.…

In the early parts of Barry Bonds’ life, there is a moment that tells you almost everything about who he would become. In 1982, the San Francisco Giants picked him up right out of high school. The 39th pick in the second round. They gave me $70,000. Bonds asked for $750,000. A teenager was $5,000 away from becoming a professional, and neither side was willing to give in. His godfather, Willie Mays, is said to have told the young Bonds to go to college instead. He did that. That little thing seems almost too neat or symbolic. But it did…

In many American cities, it costs more to send an older child to a state university than to drop off a baby at a day care center. This is a little unsettling. It doesn’t get as much attention as a financial crash. However, parents who work across the country know this all too well in kitchens, parking lots, and break rooms. It’s just that the math doesn’t work anymore. What’s going on with the numbers is hard to understand. According to estimates, not having enough child care options could cost the U.S. economy up to $329 billion over the next…