by Alia Wong | Jul 7, 2020 | education, higher education, language & culture, politics, race
Rohini Mettu got a perfect score on the ACT standardized test. The 20-year-old University of Washington student worked hard for that outcome, spending countless hours in expensive test-prep classes and countless more studying on her own. But Mettu, a rising junior,...
by Alia Wong | Dec 9, 2019 | education, hawaii, k-12 education, language & culture, politics, public schools, race
Solomon Enos The orphan was surveying the sea from atop a lava-rock shrine when he saw them—omens that looked just as his uncle, a kahuna, had foretold. There was a flock of airborne stingrays amid a series of towers, all hovering over a forest floating...
by Alia Wong | Jun 18, 2019 | government, higher education, lifestyle, politics, race
Like most other colleges across the country, Newbury College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Brookline, Massachusetts, held classes through the end of this past spring semester and then bid farewell to cap-and-gown-wearing seniors. But unlike almost every...
by Alia Wong | Jan 22, 2019 | k-12 education, language & culture, money matters, politics, public schools, race
In Los Angeles, more than 30,000 teachers remain on strike; it took union and city officials more than a week to eke out a tentative agreement that, they announced Tuesday morning, will likely bring them back to their classrooms this week. Last Friday, teachers from a...
by Alia Wong | Nov 20, 2018 | higher education, language & culture, politics, race
OiYan Poon stumbled upon WeChat largely by accident. Poon is a professor at Colorado State University who studies the racial politics of higher education. For years she had consistently found that most Asian Americans supported affirmative action, but in 2014,...
by Alia Wong | Oct 14, 2018 | government, higher education, language & culture, lifestyle, politics, race, special interest
Samantha remembers her high-school days more as a trial version of college. She seems part amused, part ashamed as she recalls the hours she dedicated to reworking her résumé—or the hours on top of that spent plowing through SAT exercises in the home of her...
