Education Journo Requests

Connect with journalists covering education stories. From breaking news to in-depth features, find your perfect media opportunity. Updated June 27, 2026.

Sample Education Journo Requests

Current Undergraduate & Graduate Students - Role of University 2026

SOURCE CALLOUT: What’s the Role of the University in 2026? I'm working on a feature article for University Affairs exploring a question that I couldn't help think about when I was back in the classroom as a "student" and Massey fellow last year. Looking around my lecture halls, it was so clear to see that this is not the university experience I remembered. The answer to this question used to be pretty straightforward: universities created informed, educated citizens; prepared us for professional careers; were a hub for research and scholarship, stood tall as cultural and intellectual centres. But the consensus on that is changing more and more everyday. Whether you love it or hate it, AI has fundamentally changed the game. So have alternative credentials and boot camps that offer faster, cheaper, easier routes into the workforce. I've heard students question whether a four-year degree is even worth it anymore. Still, others argue that universities are more important than ever—no other place is designed for critical thinking, research skills and the ability to navigate complexity in these tumultuous times... right? I'm interested in getting at the tensions within this debate through speaking to: - Current undergraduate & graduate students - Recent grads [especially those who've entered a difficult/rapidly-changing labour market!] - Students who chose *not* to attend university - People who left university before completing a degree - People pursuing apprenticeships, trades, entrepreneurship, creator careers, startups, or other non-traditional pathways - Faculty members across disciplines - University administrators and other academic leaders - Former university presidents and provosts - Employers/hiring managers - Researchers studying higher education, labour markets, credentials, or AI - Professionals who believe their degree was essential and irreplaceable - Professionals who believe they could've achieved similar outcomes through other means Here's a little bit of what I want to explore: - What, if anything, can universities uniquely provide today? - Is the value of a university education economic, intellectual, social, civic, or something else? - How has AI changed your thinking about higher education? - Is the traditional four-year degree still the right model? - What do students *actually* want from university today? - What do employers expect from graduates? - Are universities preparing students for the realities of modern work? - If universities disappeared tomorrow, what would we lose as a society? I'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts, experiences and perspectives on this maesltrom. DM or email me [address in comments] Please include a short note about who you are, your connection to higher ed & why this question matters to you. I'd also appreciate any leads, suggestions and help amplifying this call out. Photo from my first day of class as a Massey fellow, where one of my courses was taught at Convocation Hall!

universityaffairs.ca logouniversityaffairs.ca

Former Intoxalock & Mindr Employees - Contract Concealment & Lockouts

The Employees Who Could Not Stay Silent https://preview.redd.it/oaony386zf9h1.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=485029686338f9c8c94d243f053ab6a665f2008d Twenty people. Eight years. Different states, different departments, different years. And they all described the same company. When I began this investigation I did not expect to find employees talking. Companies like this are careful. They have NDAs. They have HR departments. They have the financial resources to make problems disappear quietly. But here is the thing about a company that treats its own employees the same way it treats its customers: people talk. They leave. They write reviews on the same platforms they use to find their next job. And when they do — they tell the truth. What I found across Indeed, Glassdoor, and SimplyHired was not a handful of disgruntled ex-employees venting frustration. It was a coordinated pattern of insider testimony — twenty separate disclosures spanning eight years, across multiple states and departments, from people who had never met each other and had no reason to coordinate their stories. They all described the same company. Twenty people. Eight years. Different states, different departments, different years. Every single one described the same closed loop. That is not coincidence. That is a business model. The Smoking Gun — Disclosure #20 I want to start with the most recent and most significant disclosure. It comes from an Operations Personnel employee who posted on SimplyHired and describes — in precise operational detail — exactly how the contract concealment scheme works from the inside. “Sales people are NOT required to have signed contracts prior to the installation of the system and leave all the ‘education’ to the customer service team. In addition, NONE of the customers sign or even SEE a contract until they cannot get a work order for a recalibration or question a charge on their credit card. That’s a debacle because the customer service person has to inform them a contract needs to be signed prior to providing the work order. Usually the customer has been on hold for at least 30 minutes to an hour — I worked when hold times were upwards to 3 hours — and then we have to walk them through how to esign on the app while they are standing at a service center trying to get the recalibration.” Operations Personnel — SimplyHired — 2026 Read that again slowly. NONE of the customers sign or even see the contract until they are standing at a service center — after hours on hold — trying to get a work order. The device is already on their car. The device is already hard-wired into their ignition. And at that precise moment of maximum vulnerability — standing in a garage, phone in hand, after two hours on hold — they are told they must sign a contract on the DocuSign app before the company will release the work order they need to drive away. The work order is the hostage. The contract is the ransom note. This is not a glitch in the system. This is the system. They Said It Out Loud What follows are the voices of people who worked inside this company and could not stay quiet about what they saw. Every disclosure is real, documented, and on file with the federal agencies currently reviewing this case. On What They Were Trained to Do to Customers “You are explicitly trained to focus only on the low introductory promo cost and gloss over or omit the hidden recurring administration fees, roadside protection additions, and the massive penalty fees for breaking the contract lease.” Account Executive / Inside Sales — Des Moines, IA — Glassdoor — September 14, 2021 “It completely forces reps to say whatever it takes to prevent them from looking at the contract closely.” Inside Sales Representative — Remote — Glassdoor — July 19, 2024 “Real cut throat high pressure quotas. I thought I’d get to help people. Instead I feel like a scammer that’s hurting more people than helping.” Remote Sales Agent — Florida — Indeed — July 11, 2022 “This job will make you get off and feel bad everyday. The company literally makes their money from stealing from people. Not just the customer, but the employees too.” Sales Representative — Iowa — Indeed — October 24, 2023 “There’s no moral. If you speak up about how it will hurt the customer, it will affect your paycheck. Not a place to be if you have a heart for people.” Sales Representative — Remote — Indeed — May 4, 2026 The company literally makes their money from stealing from people. Not just the customer, but the employees too. On What Happens After the Device Is Installed “Working in customer service we basically had to serve as a clean up crew for the sales team who lie to the customers to make their sales.” Customer Service Representative — Des Moines, IA — Indeed — October 1, 2020 “Very stressful and management is non supportive. Your supervisor NEVER takes escalated calls nor will call the customer back when asked.” Customer Service Representative — Urbandale, IA — SimplyHired — October 21, 2021 “They start you off at $30 an hour for the first 3 months. After that you are knocked down to $11 an hour plus commission. The metrics are atrocious, it’s intentionally complex.” Bilingual Inside Sales Representative — Remote — Indeed — November 19, 2024 On the Hardware They Are Putting in Your Car “The devices have a known, massive parasitic power draw that kills vehicle batteries constantly, especially in cold weather. Instead of fixing the hardware, leadership instructs us to tell the customer it’s an issue with their alternator or car battery, triggering a lockout state that forces them to pay an extra lockout service fee to get a reset code.” Tier 2 Customer Support Representative — Des Moines, IA — Indeed — January 11, 2025 “The company is money hungry and violated every ethical standard I live by. The machines are over 20 years old being refurbished and the new machines they built were just as problematic and faulty.” Sales Consultant — Urbandale, IA — Indeed — May 15, 2026 The devices have a known, massive parasitic power draw. Instead of fixing the hardware, leadership instructs us to tell the customer it’s an issue with their alternator or car battery — triggering a lockout state that forces them to pay an extra fee. On Keeping You Trapped After Your Court Order Is Done “If you let a customer cancel their service easily — even if they have completed their court-ordered program time — your personal retention metrics take a massive hit, which drops your bonus. Management forces you to stall the removal process by claiming paperwork errors or state processing delays just to squeeze out one more month of lease billing.” Customer Retention Specialist — Urbandale, IA — Indeed — November 3, 2023 Let that one land for a moment. You have completed your court-ordered program. Legally, you are done. Intoxalock knows you are done. And their own retention team is trained to manufacture paperwork delays to keep billing you for another month. That is not customer retention. That is contempt of court. On What Happened When Mindr Took Over “Used to be a good place to work until Mindr took over. Since Mindr took over the micromanagement has slowly escalated to the point of no return.” Repair Technician — Urbandale, IA — Indeed — February 12, 2026 “The company is money hungry and violated every ethical standard I live by.” Sales Consultant — Urbandale, IA — Indeed — May 15, 2026 What These Voices Mean Together These are not people who coordinated. They worked in different departments — sales, customer service, Tier 2 support, operations, retention, repair. They worked in different states — Iowa, Florida, remote offices across the country. They wrote in different years — from 2018 through May 2026. They posted on different platforms — Indeed, Glassdoor, SimplyHired. And they all described the same company. Twenty witnesses. One pattern. Eight years of uninterrupted documented evidence from inside the walls of this company. Nobody asked these employees to speak. Nobody paid them to speak. They left a company that was doing something wrong and they said so. That is called a conscience. And twenty consciences describing the same thing is called evidence. A Message to Anyone Who Worked There If you are a current or former Intoxalock or Mindr employee reading this — what you saw was real. What you felt was right. And what you documented matters. The twenty disclosures in this post are already on file with multiple federal and New York State agencies. If you have additional information about the sales training, the call routing architecture, the contract delivery process, the work order withholding system, or the DMV paperwork delays — I want to hear from you. Drop a comment below. intoxalockedout (v., adj.) To be legally trapped — financially, physically, and procedurally — by a court-ordered product or service from which there is no exit, no recourse, and no one who will answer the phone. “She had worked there for two years. She knew what the script said. She knew what the fees did. She knew nobody was reading the reviews. The day she quit she left her own review on Glassdoor and told the whole truth. That is how you find out what intoxalockedout really means — from the people who built the lock.” For press inquiries: [email redacted] Nobody asked me to do this. Nobody paid me to do this. I just could not look away. — David Lazarus | Founder, INTOXALOCKEDOUT™ Legal Disclaimer David Lazarus is not an attorney and is not engaged in the practice of law. Nothing contained in this publication constitutes legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading, subscribing to, or communicating with IntoxalockedOut. The content published here represents the personal research, documented experiences, and consumer advocacy opinions of a private citizen conducting pro se advocacy. All factual claims are based on documentation, recordings, and publicly available information in the author’s possession. Readers with legal questions or disputes are encouraged to consult a licensed attorney in their jurisdiction. This publication is protected expression under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. © 2026 IntoxalockedOut™ — All Rights Reserved — intoxalockedout.substack.com

CEOs & Founders - Profiles Of Humble-Roots Success Stories

EXCLUSIVE: Polo has long been called the “Sport of Kings”—a world of manicured lawns, champagne, and generational wealth. So you’d be forgiven for thinking the CEO of a $2.7 billion global heritage polo brand comes from old money connections, with an Ivy League education and a corner office inherited rather than earned. But U.S. Polo Assn. (USPA Global) CEO J. MICHAEL PRINCE is none of those things. “I grew up in the middle part of the United States, southeastern Oklahoma—which is actually one of the poor parts of the country, there are four or five really poor parts of the United States, and that’s up there with them,” Prince told me. Today, Prince brushes shoulders with Prince William, the future King of England. 👑 For nearly the last decade, he’s been running U.S. Polo Assn. out its global headquarters in Palm Beach, overseeing the $2.7 billion brand spanning 190 countries, 1,200 retail stores, and 15 million social media followers. And it’s all thanks to taking up the “boring” job that millennials and boomers abandoned: accounting. 🔗 Read more about his rise to the top in my latest CEO profile for Fortune And if you’re new here 👋🏻 I run Fortune’s Success desk and interview CEOs, founders and public figures every week about their secrets to success — think Colin Kaepernick, Will.i.am, execs at Grindr, L’Oréal, Chanel and Verizon. If you know a CEO, founder or public figure with a story worth telling, I want to hear it. ✉️ [email redacted]

fortune.com logofortune.com

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