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 | Apr 10, 2019 | higher education, lifestyle, race, uncategorized
Every year at this time, headlines reveal once again what everyone already knows: America’s top institutions are selective—very. Harvard took a record-low 4.5 percent of the applicants to its 2023 class. Yale accepted 5.9 percent, the same as the...
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,...
