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I have been fortunate to serve at several well-respected institutions of higher education that have aspired to “educate the whole person,” one who will go on to lead a successful career and live a meaningful life. Yet, throughout my career, I have been surprised by the barriers often created by our institutional structures that seemingly work against this noble endeavor.

Rising star of the Twitterverse Tressie McMillan Cottom has a must-read post about her observations as a sociologist and former admissions staffer at a for-profit college. It’s about the interaction between the prestige hierarchy of higher education, economic class, and self-image.

The text that you're reading now did not come from my fingers hitting the keyboard, rather me speaking to my MacBook Air.

During childbirth, the most painful stage of labor is known as transition. As one website puts it, “this is a physically demanding and draining time and you may feel exhausted, frustrated, impatient, and overwhelmed.” Transition comes just before the baby is born, but it can go on for a while and in the moment it often feels more painful than productive.

In the grand scheme of grad life, teaching responsibilities loom large. Teaching is an important part of the professor’s career and yet learning to teach every student well is a process. In academic spaces, mentioning the word “inclusion” to grads and faculty has eye-turning effects. Some faculty and grads do not glance over to the people of difference in the room to check if in fact, they are still female, differently-abled, bilingual, working class, homosexual, non-White, Jewish, immigrant, bi-racial, or atheist; yet many do.

I get a little twitchy whenever I read about “undermatching” as a problem. Broadly, “undermatching” is the claim that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds often attend colleges that are “beneath” them academically, and that therefore they miss certain kinds of opportunities. If only the elites were more thoughtful about reaching the masses, the argument goes, they’d do a better job of creating a pure meritocracy, and the talented tenth (or twentieth, depending on taste) wouldn’t be shackled to institutions built for the unwashed masses.

Things aren't looking good for public higher education in two different countries. I'm not happy about it.

If you haven't had a chance to read about Noodle's acquisition of the Lore, please go check out Doug Lederman's piece from 3/15. Before we get to our questions for Noodle's founder and chairman John Katzman , I think we should first congratulate Joseph Cohen and his partners and colleagues at Lore. We need more people like the Lore founders to start edtech businesses.