Author: Nola Jones

A quote from Angel Reese when she left LSU for the WNBA doesn’t get used nearly enough. “I’m leaving college with everything I ever wanted,” she replied. “A degree, a national championship, and this platform.” The degree came first for her. It’s not as important as it seems that little thing. Reese grew up in Randallstown, Maryland. It’s not the kind of place that usually ends up in books about sports mythology, but it does make people tough. Even though her basketball skills were clear from a young age, the way she and her family chose to spend their money…

Something very interesting about a scholarship program that has been around for more than 130 years stands out. A lot of business projects don’t even last ten years, let alone one hundred. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata started the J. N. Tata Endowment in 1892. Since then, it has helped more than 5,800 Indian students go to graduate or doctoral school abroad. You can’t just read that number and move on. There were generations of scientists, lawyers, doctors, and government workers who did that. Many of them went on to change institutions in ways that no single scholarship could. A J.N. Tata…

There’s something different about Savannah Guthrie when she talks to a politician or forces a government official to give her the truth. Not only is it confidence, but it’s also a certain level of accuracy. She hears, then follows up, and she doesn’t let an answer not given go by. You can’t help but wonder if that instinct has always been there or if she learned it somewhere along the way, like in a law library or a lecture hall. As a child, Guthrie lived with her family in Melbourne, Australia, for a few years. She then moved to Tucson,…

There’s no way Jake Paul has ever been one to follow the rules. Paul was born on January 17, 1997, in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in the suburb of Westlake in a family where ambition seemed to be built into everything. Most kids his age were busy with AP tests and college applications at that time, but he was already building an online fan base that would make most media companies jealous. He went to Westlake High School in Ohio for his formal education. For someone who would go on to become worth an estimated $200 million, it was…

Something quietly interesting about how Chappell Roan got here stands out. No training in a conservatory. There is no music degree on the wall anywhere. Just a girl from Willard, Missouri, who learned to play the piano when she was ten years old, started putting cover songs on YouTube a few years later, and won a Grammy in 2025. There’s no easy way to describe the path she took to get there, and that’s probably the point. Roan, whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, grew up in a small, religious town where she went to church every week and…

A common story about higher education in New York is the one about Columbia, NYU, Cornell, the prestige, and the desire to live in Manhattan. On the other hand, there is a story that affects more lives. It takes place on 64 campuses from Long Island to the North Country and graduates more than 96,000 students every year. The State University of New York is that, and most people outside of New York may not have giving it much thought. SUNY, as everyone knows it, wasn’t really started out of ambition. A bit of an embarrassment, New York was one…

Something quietly interesting about Gavin Newsom’s school life stands out. Not because it was easy, because it wasn’t. They didn’t do well because they were smart or showed promise early on. It was amazing how hard it was, and how much of what made him who he is politically did not come from law school or lecture halls, but from the stubborn ways of thinking that people with dyslexia often have to deal with. Newsom was born in San Francisco in 1967. He went to École Notre Dame des Victoires, a Catholic school that was bilingual in French and English,…

Jacob Elordi did not enter a drama school and graduate prepared and polished. Injury, moving, and the kind of unintentional self-discovery that usually occurs when a teen is stuck in the wrong city with nothing left to prove on a sports field shaped his educational path, which was more complicated than that. Elordi was born in Brisbane in 1997 and lived there for the first twelve years of his life before his family relocated to Melbourne. It was for one of his sisters who had been admitted to the Australian Ballet School, not for him. It’s easy to ignore that…

A group of women in their forties are learning to read at a community center in a small Punjabi town. No roll call, no uniforms, and no wall-mounted grades. There are only a few chairs set up in a loose circle and a facilitator who comes carrying a battered canvas bag filled with workbooks. Ninety minutes is the duration of the session. No one receives a certificate. However, something genuine is taking place there that these women were never able to receive through formal education for a variety of reasons. One form of non-formal education is that environment. It’s not…

One version of Josh Allen’s story—the arm, the size, the improbable ascent from obscurity to NFL MVP—is frequently shared. However, the educational component—the actual sitting in classrooms, changing schools, and earning a degree—tends to be overlooked. That’s unfortunate because it could be the story’s most illuminating thread. Growing up, Allen lived on a 3,000-acre cotton farm outside of Firebaugh, California, a small, unnoticed rural town west of Fresno. He went to Firebaugh High School, which was actually constructed on property that his grandfather had donated. He led the basketball team in scoring, pitched for the baseball team, and played quarterback.…