Author: Nola Jones

A group of professional athletes making the independent decision that their position merits greater attention has a subtle allure. Instead of using a league initiative or a press campaign, they organized their own three-day summit. That’s basically what Tight End University is, and seeing it develop over the course of five years into a true cultural phenomenon says something intriguing about the current state of the NFL. Three tight ends—Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle, and recently retired Carolina Panthers star Greg Olsen—co-founded Tight End University, or TEU, in 2021. Bringing tight…

Four schools used to stand somewhat apart in a section of southeast Melbourne, each with its own student body, history, and set of issues. More than 2,000 students from Year 7 through Year 12 are taught at Keysborough Secondary College, which now operates across two contemporary campuses where those schools once stood. On paper, this kind of transformation seems simple. In reality, it is hardly ever. In October 2008, the $43 million merger of Chandler, Heatherhill, Springvale, and Coomoora Secondary Colleges was formally completed. It wasn’t until late 2009 that work on the two retained campuses, now known as Acacia…

Ellen Fitzgerald awakens to two jobs on a 24,000-hectare cattle station located between Winton and Muttaburra. One includes branding, water points, fences, and the relentless pace of cattle country. The other is sitting down with her seven-year-old daughter Vivien and attempting to manage something that, on a good day, works like a school. When the teacher has to cancel the online lesson due to an unforeseen circumstance, she is left on her own with no backup materials. “I don’t have a framework for what to teach her,” she recently stated. Even though that sentence is brief, it has a lot…

The fact that a professor’s dismissal more than a century ago contributed to the establishment of one of the most enduring institutions in American higher education is somewhat ironic. Arthur O. Lovejoy resigned from Stanford University in protest in 1900 after economist Edward Alsworth Ross was fired for opposing the use of Chinese labor on the Southern Pacific Railroad by Jane Stanford, the railroad tycoon’s widow. Lovejoy remembered. Fifteen years later, he and philosopher John Dewey formally founded the American Association of University Professors in a meeting room at the Chemists’ Club in New York City. Fundamentally, it was an…

For many years, the conventional wisdom regarding osteoarthritis has been as follows: control your discomfort, prevent further damage, and eventually replace the joint completely when conditions worsen. Despite affecting about 32 million Americans and costing the healthcare system more than $130 billion a year, this treatment approach has changed surprisingly little over time. For this reason, it seems worthwhile to pay attention to what is currently emerging from Colorado. Researchers at Colorado State University, CU Anschutz Medical Campus, and the University of Colorado Boulder have created two experimental treatments that, in animal experiments, not only slowed but also reversed osteoarthritis.…

It began with smoke that no one could locate right away, as these things frequently do. On Tuesday, June 30, just before three in the morning, people living close to South 17th Street awoke to an unpleasant-smelling darkness. When Guadalupe Ramírez went outside, neighbors were already gathered on the sidewalk, looking up at the sky as the black plume rose. The fire had already decided its own course by the time Milwaukee Fire Department units reached 1817 West Lincoln Avenue. Since 1917, Milwaukee’s south side has been home to Lincoln Avenue School. That equates to 109 years of parents sitting…

Robert Lee is seventy-one years old. He still owes $51,000 on student loans that he took out almost thirty years ago for his children’s education rather than for himself. He resides in Auburn, Maine. He has paid off about $15,000 of the initial $66,000 after all these years of payments. It’s a very unsettling picture when you do the math. “I feel like Jimmy Stewart in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,'” Lee said to the Wall Street Journal. “I’m worth more dead than I am alive.” It’s not overly dramatic. Student loan debt has quietly emerged as one of the most…

The federal student loan system seemed like a maze with no obvious way out for many years. It was complicated in ways that harmed the very people it was meant to assist, such as multiple repayment plans, overlapping forgiveness programs, and changing income thresholds. After examining that system, the Trump administration made the decision to dismantle the majority of it. The changes are no longer theoretical as of July 1. They are present. The Biden-era SAVE program, or Saving on a Valuable Education, was one of the most generous income-driven repayment options ever developed. Approximately 7 million borrowers are affected…

The timing has an almost theatrical quality. A federal judge in Massachusetts intervened one day before the Trump administration’s new limitations on Public Service Loan Forgiveness were scheduled to go into effect, essentially saying, “Not so fast.” On June 30, U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun declared the Education Department’s updated PSLF program eligibility rules to be illegal, arbitrary, and in violation of First Amendment rights. In a related case brought by nonprofit organizations, Judge Amir H. Ali in Washington, D.C., issued a different decision that same day. The same outcome was reached by two distinct courts and two distinct…

Graduate education has never been inexpensive. Anyone who has signed loan documents for a professional degree or a master’s program is familiar with that specific feeling—the mixture of ambition and subdued fear that comes with taking out a five-figure loan just to keep the lights on while studying. The federal government basically said, “Borrow what you need,” for twenty years. July 1st marked the end of that era. The Graduate PLUS loan program is no longer available to new borrowers as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It was replaced by a more stringent, tiered system where…