College is calling

The stories in this issue of Focus were reported and written by Jamaal Abdul-Alim, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., where he has covered higher education policy since 2008. Abdul-Alim broke into the news business in the 1990s as a crime reporter for the old Milwaukee Sentinel while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. He was a staff writer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for a decade, served as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008, and was a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University in 2014. He is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.