Josh Moody
Josh Moody covers the financial and leadership pressures shaping colleges and universities, using money, management and governance as his primary lens on the higher education sector.
Money and Management in Higher Education
Moody’s core focus is the business side of higher education, tracking how institutional finances and leadership decisions affect campus operations and strategy. He reports on ratings agency actions, including the downgrade of the sector outlook by Moody’s Ratings in response to federal policy changes, and explains what those moves mean for colleges’ budgets and planning. He turns major sector analyses, such as reports on the overall state of higher education, into clear stories about risk, resilience and institutional decision-making. Across this work he treats money and management as the framework for understanding enrollment, closure and governance stories rather than separating them from the financial realities institutions face.
Enrollment Pressures and College Closures
Moody frequently documents how enrollment trends translate into institutional distress and closures. His coverage has tallied the shutdown of multiple four-year nonprofit institutions in a single year, drawing a line between sustained enrollment pressure and the viability of small colleges. He writes on “More US colleges close as enrolment pressures take hold,” showing how demographic shifts, competition and changing student demand move from abstract trends to decisions to merge, downsize or close. In these pieces he treats closures not as isolated events but as indicators of wider market stress in the higher education sector. The through-line is a close attention to how student numbers and revenue shape the futures of individual institutions.
Governance, Politics and Campus Programs
Moody’s beat includes the political and governance fights that surround boards, campus programs and university leadership. His reporting on Florida’s Battle of the Boards reflects an interest in how governing boards and state officials contest control over institutional direction and oversight. He has covered decisions such as Texas A&M scrapping an LGBTQ programme after criticism from a politician, treating the move as part of a broader pattern of political pressure on campus initiatives. In this strand of his work, governance structures, board actions and state-level politics are presented as strategic forces that directly shape what programs survive, which priorities rise, and how institutions navigate contentious policy environments.
New Models and Strategic Bets
Moody also reports on experiments and bets that colleges make in response to financial and competitive pressures. He has covered the push for a three-year bachelor’s degree, detailing how representatives from multiple institutions gather to discuss pilot programs that compress time-to-degree while attempting to preserve academic quality. Earlier pieces have examined how top college football programs pursue big-money games and how colleges consider engagement with areas such as cannabis, framing these as efforts to tap new revenue streams or strategic advantages in a crowded market. Across these stories he shows institutions testing unconventional models—whether in athletics, emerging industries or program design—as part of a search for financial stability and differentiation. This strand complements his coverage of closures and downgrades by highlighting the proactive side of institutional strategy.
4 more education journalists.
Abdul Latif Jameel
Abdul Latif Jameel publishes long-form, research-led pieces on how emerging technologies and scientific advances reshape education, industry, and society. He writes for the Abdul Latif Jameel masthead at the intersection of learning, innovation, and applied science, with a focus on technology, skills, and the future of learning. He explains complex fields such as quantum sensing in clear, accessible terms, breaking down frontier science and tying it to real-world applications. His coverage links breakthroughs in sensing, data, and automation to training, curriculum, and lifelong learning. He treats education as an applied system connected to industry, policy, infrastructure, and human development. He reports in an analytical, explanatory style, using research, pilots, and large-scale initiatives to examine how technologies are implemented, evaluated, and scaled in learning and training environments.
Adria Iraheta
Adria Iraheta is a community-focused reporter at Denver7, distinct for centering students, families and residents in every story about schools, neighborhoods and public services. She covers how decisions by school districts, local agencies and public institutions land in daily life, with a particular focus on Aurora and Arapahoe County. Her beat sits at the intersection of education, community issues, public services, safety, infrastructure, health and climate, from job cuts in a school district to a new transit safety app, DMV outages, street changes and record heat waves. With a decade of local television reporting experience, she reports on the ground in specific local scenes, using plain language, direct questions to officials and clear explanations to show how policies, programs and changes affect the people who live, study and work in Colorado communities.
Alan J. Borsuk
Alan J. Borsuk stands out for connecting what happens in schools to the policy and political decisions behind them. He writes in-depth K-12 education analysis for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and serves as a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. His work focuses on Milwaukee Public Schools, school choice, literacy, teacher pipelines, and school accountability. He uses long-range perspective, detailed reporting, and structured analysis to explain how reforms unfold, why they stall, and what they mean for students and leaders. He has also written on vouchers, Teach for America, discipline, and teacher evaluation, drawing on decades as a reporter and editor on education and public policy.
Alexandra Hardle
Alexandra Hardle brings a watchdog lens to K-12 schools, using concrete incidents to map how district power, oversight and accountability work in real life. She covers K-12 education for The Arizona Republic, focusing on school systems, governance and the lived impact of policy on students, families and educators. Her reporting shows how school governance can fail students and staff and what that reveals about district culture. She often covers flashpoints, such as the Nazi salute fallout in the Deer Valley district, as windows into deeper dysfunction, tracking how leadership responds, how trust breaks down and how conflicts unfold in public meetings. Her work sits at the intersection of accountability reporting and community stories, grounded in public records, formal rules and multiple stakeholder perspectives, with clear, direct language that explains how institutions make decisions and how ordinary people experience them.