They Say / I Blog

Who pays the bill: Alia Wong on prestige universities around the world

Prestige universities across the globe share many of the features that account for their excellence—“celebrated faculty, groundbreaking research,” and comfortable, well-maintained facilities. There is a huge difference, however, in the source of funding for these institutions; those in the US are overwhelmingly private schools, while prestige universities in the rest of the world tend to be publicly funded. Alia Wong, education writer for the Atlantic, discusses some of these contrasts in this September 2018 essay.

Wong, “At private colleges, students pay for prestige”

Better blocking: Laura Desmond on the future of advertising

Do you love the ads that pepper your TV shows, online content, walks through your neighborhood, and almost everything else? We didn’t think so. But sometimes ads are clever, interesting, and engaging, right? How can you filter out the annoying ones and keep the entertaining ones? There’s no simple answer, but innovator and technology writer Laura Desmond explores the possibilities of advertising’s future in this May 2018 NewCo Shift essay.

Desmond, “The future of advertising is in the hands of ad blockers”