Author: Nola Jones

It’s not always a glamorous campus. There isn’t an expansive quad with students relaxing in between classes at some famous university, nor is there ivy. However, when you enter practically any community college in California on a Tuesday morning, you can tell right away that the place is vibrant. People are at work. After years away, some are going back to school. Others are eighteen and trying to figure out what to do next. Some are already working and obtaining a certificate that may increase their pay. No four-year institution can quite match this combination. Over 2.2 million students are…

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was quietly uploading music to SoundCloud in between shifts while bagging groceries at an Econo supermarket in Puerto Rico before he was selling out stadiums or performing at Super Bowl halftime. It’s worth pondering that picture of a young man silently constructing something massive while working a checkout line. Compared to most biographies, it provides more information about his journey. Growing up, Bad Bunny lived in Vega Baja, a small town that he has said is definitely not a city. He enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s audiovisual communications program after graduating from…

By all measures, Felicia Childress’s classroom at Garrett Elementary in Gary, Indiana, was unremarkable. Worn desks, half-clean windows letting in midwestern light, and the typical sound of kids discovering their identities. Michael Jackson, a quiet and perceptive boy, was one of those kids. Years later, Childress recalled him with fondness as a child who showed up, paid attention, and possessed something more difficult to describe than talent. Looking back, it seems odd that one of the most well-known people of the 20th century once sat in a kindergarten classroom with everyone else. On August 29, 1958, Michael Joseph Jackson was…

There’s a version of Caitlin Clark’s story that gets told constantly — the deep three-pointers, the sold-out arenas, the WNBA draft night in 2024. What gets mentioned far less often is that while she was breaking NCAA scoring records at the University of Iowa, she was also earning a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing. That detail tends to get buried beneath the highlights. It probably shouldn’t. Clark grew up in West Des Moines, Iowa, attending Dowling Catholic High School — a school her own grandfather had deep ties to, having served as football coach and school administrator there. That…

Observing a group of first-year students kneel in the mud of an east Leicestershire field and extract coins that haven’t been touched since the Middle Ages is subtly amazing. There are no coins on display. Not copies. Real ones, small and corroded, bearing the burden of a life no one can recall. At Loddington, where the University of Leicester has returned for its second year of active excavation at what was once a thriving medieval settlement, that has been the reality this summer. The site is being worked by fifty students from the School of Heritage and Culture and University…

Driving through Clayton, a Melbourne suburb in the southeast that doesn’t really stand out, has a subtle yet striking quality. The type of neighborhood that most people pass through rather than actively seek out has flat streets and modest housing. Then, almost out of nowhere, a vast, verdant, and unexpectedly magnificent campus appears. Monash University is that. It doesn’t yell. However, for almost 70 years, it has been constructing something important. Monash opened its doors to just 357 students in 1961. It was founded in 1958 on about 100 hectares of former farmland, some of which was once part of…

Many people outside of Malaysia immediately asked, “What exactly is a Henry Gurney School?” after a Seremban magistrate sentenced an 18-year-old to three years at the Henry Gurney School in Melaka last week after his careless driving killed three teenagers at a Senawang intersection. A simple label cannot adequately capture the complexity and intrigue of the answer. For juvenile offenders aged 14 to 20, Henry Gurney Schools serve as correctional facilities. They were created in 1949 as a result of the Juvenile Courts Act of 1947. They were known as High Moral Schools prior to May 1950, which provides insight…

Between submitting your application and sitting down at the exam table, there’s a moment when the gravity of what you’re trying truly hits home. Every year, thousands of Filipinos who wish to join the Philippine National Police, wear the uniform, and carry the badge must go through this process. The first true test of whether that goal is supported by anything substantial is the NAPOLCOM exam. The government agency tasked with supervising the PNP under the 1987 Constitution and Republic Acts 6975 and 8551 is the National Police Commission, or NAPOLCOM. Police examinations are part of that mandate, and the…

A familiar kind of anxiety descends upon college campuses during exam season. Students search for any advantage they can find by stacking notes, visiting libraries, and refreshing course pages. That edge, an online archive of previous exam papers that goes back farther than most students would ever consider looking, has been sitting quietly in plain sight at Maynooth University for years. Through the university’s library portal, the Russell Library at Maynooth has long maintained access to historical papers. It’s not exactly buried, but it’s the type of resource that doesn’t make a big deal out of itself. You must be…

When a borrower looks at their loan balance and realizes it hasn’t changed much, it usually happens around the third or fourth year of repayment. Every payment has been subtly eaten by the interest. It’s not a serious emergency. It’s just a gradual realization that perhaps the original loan terms weren’t favorable to them. Refinancing frequently comes up at that point. Fundamentally, student loan refinancing involves replacing one or more existing loans with a new private loan, ideally with more manageable repayment terms or a lower interest rate. The idea is straightforward. More consideration is needed for the execution than…