It was recently reported that Kate Middleton and Prince William had agreed to send their eldest son, Prince George, to his dad's alma mater, Eton College. Now, a former royal butler has claimed that Princess Diana had reservations about sending Prince Harry to Eton, even though his brother, Prince William, already attended the prestigious school. Seemingly, the former Princess of Wales was incredibly protective of the Duke of Sussex for several reasons.

Princess Diana's former royal butler, Paul Burrell, spoke about Prince Harry's Eton attendance on behalf of Casino.org, for Express.co.uk. "Even when it came to school, [Diana] worried that Harry would constantly be compared to his brother and judged by William's standards," Burrell told the outlet. "When they went to Eton, Diana didn't want Harry to attend Eton; she knew that he would be compared to William, who had gone before him."

As for why Diana was especially apprehensive about Harry attending Eton, Burrell explained, "William is much brighter, and he excelled; Harry wasn't and didn't. And so, she knew it would be a difficult path for Harry."

In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry claimed that Prince William didn't welcome him to Eton College. Instead, the Prince of Wales allegedly told his brother (via the BBC), "You don't know me Harold. And I don't know you."

Furthermore, William reportedly told Harry "that during his first two years there, Eton had been a sanctuary," the Duke of Sussex wrote. "That was without the burden of a little brother who would bother him with questions or stick his nose in his social circle."

In Spare, Prince Harry also detailed the heartbreaking moment he told Prince William that he wouldn't interfere with his life at Eton. "I will forget I know you," the Duke of Sussex told his brother.

It would appear as though Princess Diana's instincts about her youngest son attending Eton were correct, after all.

It was recently reported that Princess Kate and Prince William had agreed to send Prince George to Eton College for high school. However, an official announcement hasn't been forthcoming from Kensington Palace, and some royal experts have suggested the decision might not be as firm as originally thought.

"George's fate is almost certainly already decided, but Kensington Palace shows no sign of wanting to make an announcement about it imminently," The i Paper reported. "Some parents who know the Waleses are adamant that George is going to Eton, where his father Prince William and uncle Prince Harry were educated." However, plenty of people apparently disagree with this assessment, too.

"I just have that feeling that it won't be Eton," Joe Little, the managing editor of Majesty magazine, told the outlet. "I wonder whether it will be too elitist or too fuddy-duddy for a future king in the 21st century. My money is on Marlborough."

Of course, Marlborough College is Kate Middleton's alma mater, and has always been a potential contender in the royal school debate.

However, some commentators believe that Prince George will definitely be attending his dad's alma mater. Melanie Sanderson, who is the managing editor of The Good Schools Guide, told The i Paper, "One of the things that the Royal Family have got to really take into consideration is the security arrangements, and one of the reasons that I think he will go to Eton...is they are well versed there in educating senior royals."

Reporting on the lack of confirmation regarding the decision, GB News mused, "Kensington Palace has delayed its announcement of where Prince George will attend secondary school due to the upheaval it could cause."

For now, at least, royal fans will just have to remain patient until an official announcement is made.

Queen Elizabeth II was renowned for her wicked sense of humor, her ability to deliver sharp retorts, and her willingness to play pranks on just about anyone. As a result, it's entirely unsurprising that one former royal employee has claimed that the late Queen was the "smartest" member of the Royal Family. However, since Elizabeth's death on September 8, 2022, another royal relative may have taken the cleverness crown, a former royal butler has suggested.

"The smartest in my mind would have been Queen Elizabeth II, and the reason I say that is not just intelligence; she was witty, ruled a country for over 70 years, and knew about sports," former royal butler Grant Harrold told online learning platform Study Dog, via the Express. "Right behind her, I would say The King because he speaks several languages, but he is also very intelligent with numbers, and his command of the English language is extraordinary."

Harrold continued, "[King Charles is] super intelligent, so if you're talking about the royals now, he'd be top of that pile without any question. But I would also put Princess Anne up there; she is a knowledgeable lady."

During the same interview, Harrold discussed the future of the monarchy, and what education Prince William and Kate Middleton's three children—Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis—might receive.

"I don't think it would [be frowned upon] these days [if they didn't attend college]," Harrold told the outlet. "We may find that George, Charlotte, and Louis might not all go to university. They may go straight to somewhere like [Royal Military Academy] Sandhurst."

The former butler continued, "In particular, George, as it is seen as vital for future kings to have had some sort of military training, so you can guarantee that George, whether he likes it or not, will have to go through that military training."

In November 2021, Louisiana made history as the first state to mandate a new rule in its cosmetology schools: Students must know how to cut textured hair in order to receive their license. Chairman of the Louisiana Board of Cosmetology (BOC), Edwin Neill, who also serves as the current president of Aveda Arts & Sciences Institute, led the charge for the ruling in an effort to close the education gap and create a more welcoming salon environment for customers.

"There are still sometimes disparities in the salon experience between people with textured hair and those with naturally straight hair,” Neill shared in a 2021 statement, reported by ABC News. “We want to ensure that licensed cosmetologists in Louisiana are able to do all types of hair."

However, at the time, the new state mandate focused solely on cutting techniques for textured hair. The Professional Beauty Association (PBA) wanted to push the cosmetology curricula and licensing requirements further—both in Louisiana and other states across the country. In response, members of the PBA joined forces with hair industry professionals from major beauty corporations like L’Oréal, Aveda, and Estée Lauder to form the Texture Education Collective (TEC) in 2023.

“We were inspired by the strides they made [in Louisiana],” Erica Roberson-Peters, Vice President of DEI Business Development for Professional Products at L’Oréal and TEC member, shares with Marie Claire. “I think when we initiated the TEC to be formed to further advocate for the legislation, we felt all disciplines should be taught in cosmetology school—cutting, color, care, styling—it should be inclusive of all textures, all hair types.”

Since the formation of the TEC, New York, Minnesota, Connecticut, and most recently California have joined Louisiana and created their own legislation requiring cosmetology licensees in their respective states to be formally trained in textured haircare.

So, what goes into the curriculum, how will the legislation affect the industry at large, and what’s next for the future of textured hair education?

Expanding Textured Hair Education

In September 2024, California became the latest state to implement the new law. It's also home to the largest number of cosmetology schools in the country.

“The impacts we can make here, particularly among the future talent and professionals in the industry, are significant,” shares California Assemblywoman Dr. Akilah Weber, who championed the legislation in the state. “For the community of Americans this directly affects, imagine not having to wonder which salon you can go to for your haircare needs, not needing to factor in research, or travel time.”

As for the curriculum, Shawn Stearns, Associate Vice President of School, Education, and Training for American Brands at L'Oréal—who, along with Roberson-Peters, helps create guidelines for what should be taught—shares that while each state determines its own courses, the TEC helps to examine specific gaps in education to help instructors know exactly what they need to focus on and who is equipped to teach.

“If [the schools] know a certain topic or subject is going to be tested and evaluated, they will, by default, spend more time on it,” Sterns shares. “We've put into place programs where schools can sign up, and have access to this training. Not just for their students, but also for their instructors.”

It's a welcome venture not just for students, but teachers as well: An estimated 75 percent of practicing stylists hope to seek additional training to learn how to style textured hair, according to the TEC.

The Impact on Consumers and Stylists

“I feel very anxious when I’m in the hands of someone I sense can’t handle my hair,” shares one beauty editor, who asks to remain anonymous. “I have very thick, natural hair that is multi-textured, from 3C to 4C. It gets tangled very, very easily. It's a lot for me to wash and do on my own, so I prefer letting someone else handle it.”

While the editor feels comfortable with their regular stylist, they often feel trepidation about press events that offer on-site hairstyling as a means of testing the product or treatment. To remedy their apprehensions, the editor asks the publicity team in advance if there will be stylists available who can properly care for their hair. Unfortunately, the editor says, they don’t always get a straight, or honest, answer.

“I’ve gone to several press events where I was told that they had a stylist on hand who was very skilled with my hair type, and that was not the case,” the beauty editor says. “Either the stylist was great at washing and detangling my hair but was not great at styling it, or vice versa. If you say you can do textured hair, I expect you not to be lazy and put in the work—it is your job.”

Leaving a salon feeling dissatisfied is a sentiment those with textured hair know all too well. Often, stylists haven't been appropriately trained, and the consequences can be devastating.

“Inadequate hair care can lead to immediate distress—think frizz, heat damage, breakage, and an uneven cut,” shares hairstylist and psychologist Afiya Mbilishaka, Ph.D. “Consistent poor haircare can cause damage that takes months, even years, to repair. It can lead to hair thinning and loss, and for many, it can mean avoiding social situations. It's not just about the appearance of the hair—it's about how you feel about yourself when you look in the mirror.”

It's just one reason why mandating textured hair education in cosmetology schools is critical: Every client deserves to leave the salon feeling confident and at ease.

Celebrity hairstylist Vernon François has made a lasting impression on the industry by creating stunning hairstyles for celebrities like Lupita Nyong’o with highly textured hair—which has historically been deemed “unmanageable” or “difficult." François believes that extensive, long-term education must be the solution for stylists who are unequipped or lack training.

“These [education] gaps foster lasting anxiety around handling textured hair, leaving many hairstylists unsure of where to even begin,” François shares. “Hair is one of the most transformative elements we have access to in this life. And hairstyling goes far beyond the physical act. It has a profound influence on how we see ourselves, show up for ourselves, and believe others should perceive us.”

Stearns agrees, adding that a bad experience can also be “horrifying” for an untrained stylist.

“From a professional standpoint, there's that feeling of ‘I'm deficient, I'm lacking in my skill set, and I'm lacking in my ability,’” he shares, adding that a professional never wants to tell a client that he or she doesn’t know how to handle their hair and that they’ll have to go elsewhere. “That's what we want to eradicate.”

Beyond the salon experience, training stylists to work across all hair types is economically beneficial. The TEC estimates that 65 percent of the world’s consumer population—around one billion people—have textured hair. Couple that statistic with the fact that the textured hair consumer goods industry is projected to be valued at $15.6 million by 2031, according to market research group Allied Market Research. Expanding training isn't just beneficial for the stylist and the client—it's good for business.

Next Steps

Mandating that textured hair education be a requirement of cosmetology licensing goes hand-in-hand with movements like the CROWN Act—which has created legislative protections to end hair discrimination—by helping to normalize all hair types and eliminating the fear some stylists may feel when working with textured hair.

“Education, policy change, and culture-shifting are just a few ways to tackle what has been a longstanding and problematic practice of hair discrimination,” says CROWN Act social impact strategist Adjoa B. Asamoah, Ed.D. “Beauty inclusivity is key, and together [with cosmetology schools] we can move the needle.”

So what will it take to make textured hair education mandatory in cosmetology schools nationwide? For one thing: Political backing. Most states must have legislative support before they’re able to craft a new curriculum.

“Until it becomes a standard mandate for testing and a mandate for stylists to get their license, we know that some of these texture education programs won't be fully adopted,” says L’Oréal’s Head of Public Affairs Kelly Molinari.

The TEC is already looking ahead. “New Jersey is still pending,” Molinari says. “I also think Washington state will be one we will definitely take on [in the future], and we’ll see where we go from there.”

As for the stylists who are already licensed and practicing? While they’re required to renew their license every two to three years, depending on their state, there’s no mandate that requires them to further their education. However, Sterns shares that there are plenty of TEC programs available for stylists to improve their skills.

For hairstylists, lifelong learning is essential, François insists. “The real challenge is addressing the depth and complexity of textured hair," he says. "This isn’t something that can be adequately learned in a five-week course or a single week of daily training. It’s a commitment to continuous growth.”

Since early summer—when the Prince and Princess of Wales and their eldest child, Prince George, were seen touring William’s alma mater, Eton College—it has been all but assumed that George would enroll there when he is able (September 2026, when he is 13 years old).

But now, there’s a shakeup in the fold: Kate was seen at her alma mater, Marlborough College. Could George be up for consideration there, as well? (While Eton is all-boys, Marlborough is co-ed, and, in addition to Kate, her younger siblings Pippa and James also attended, as did Princess Eugenie. Marlborough stands a fighting chance for this reason—if George attended there, both of his siblings, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, could eventually join him there. All three currently attend co-ed Lambrook School together.) 

“Catherine was here [at Marlborough] the other day,” a source told Richard Eden of The Daily Mail. “It’s been the talk of the school.”

The Wales kids attending Marlborough would be a break from royal tradition, just as William (and later Prince Harry) attending Eton was once a shakeup to the norm. William was the first senior royal to attend Eton, enrolling in 1995 at age 13; his father, King Charles, and grandfather, Prince Philip, attended Gordonstoun in Scotland. Eton wasn’t totally unfamiliar, though—the brother and father of William’s mother, Princess Diana, both went there.

While at Eton, William would pop over to the nearby Windsor Castle for Sunday lunches with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth. “The prince takes his style from his royal grandmother, who intervened as the marriage of William’s parents dissolved in 1995,” said royal historian Robert Lacey, per People. “The 13-year-old was in a fragile place—alone and just starting boarding at the elite Eton College across the river from Windsor. Concerned for her grandson’s emotional state, the Queen invited William up to join her when Eton boys went home for the weekend.”

Marie Claire has previously reported that Kate is not a fan of sending George to Eton to board—just one of many ways that Kate is demonstrating a new way to parent a future monarch. “Coming from a different background, she appreciates the importance of having family time,” a source close to the royal household told People. “She wasn’t brought up in that aristocratic setting where you see the children for a short time each day.” 

William and Kate are currently off duty spending time with their kids, who are on half-term break from school. They’ll resume royal duties on October 30, the same day the kids go back to school. “Those children look pretty happy with life,” a Palace source told People. “A lot of it is the stabilizing normality Kate brings—and that’s how she grew up. William absolutely loves it.”

There are literally so many famous people in the cast of the upcoming Barbie movie that I keep remembering/finding out that some of my faves play Barbies and Kens, etc.

Two such people are Emma Mackey (a Barbie) and Ncuti Gatwa (a Ken), both of whom are also stars of Netflix' Sex Education series, and therefore are great friends—as they demonstrated at the European premiere of Barbie on Wednesday in London.

The two were pictured together a ton throughout the night, but they didn't just pose broodingly for the cameras: They also gazed into each other's eyes while apparently laughing hysterically. Basically, it seems they are besties, and it's heartwarming as all heck.

Of course, it's the Barbie promo tour we're talking about here, so both Mackey and Gatwa looked absolutely stunning on the night.

The Emily star opted for a more low-key vibe in a satin ivory gown with a low plunge and rhinestone-embellished sandals, both by Saint Laurent. If you have a cool $5k lying around, you can actually recreate Mackey's exact look, as both pieces are still widely available to buy.

Meanwhile, the Doctor Who star went full cowboy Ken in an outfit I would one million percent wear to a festival. He paired a structural white top with a front cutout and a full-length cape with high-waisted silver, sparkly shorts, plus a white "Austin" cowboy hat by Maison Michel and chunky black dress shoes.

As for Mackey and Gatwa's relationship, the latter addressed it cheekily via Instagram Stories, when he shared a photo of the two of them with the caption, "She a ten so she pull in a Ken"

He also reshared a sweet video of him and director Greta Gerwig "fangirling each other" with the caption, "Let it be known to the world. I am in love with Greta Gerwig"

So. Much. Love.

As global warming accelerates, it's becoming ever more evident that the fashion industry—with its billions of garments produced annually and hundreds of millions employed—must make sustainability a core part of the strategy. A seemingly daunting task, yes, but a new norm is possible. "To further sustainability in fashion, we must remain optimistic," encourages Kering's Chief Sustainability Officer, Marie-Claire Daveu. She oversees Kering's sustainability roadmap with a target to reduce their environmental footprint by 40 percent by 2025, achieved through a combination of innovation and impact reduction. "While our progress reflects the very encouraging achievements Kering has made, there is still significant work to do to reach our near-term sustainability ambitions."

While large companies have the resources to achieve goals at a grander scale, creating a sustainable blueprint for the future can take many shapes and forms for independent fashion entrepreneurs. For Hassan Pierre, cofounder of pioneer e-tailer Maison De Mode, giving sustainable designers exposure in the luxury space with his elevated online platform was an innovative way to educate consumers and get them talking about sustainability. "Education can be as simple as creating thoughtful spaces in which [consumers] can make informed decisions about their purchases," he says. "If we could put [responsible fashion designers] together under one umbrella, we could get people talking and move this entire [sustainability] conversation forward," says Pierre.

Having such visibility (front-facing and throughout the supply chain) is imperative to achieving sustainability in the design world, especially in an ecosystem more interconnected than ever—one in which an estimated 21 billion pounds of textiles produced annually end up in the trash. Addressing supply chain and inventory issues via product digitization or digital ID is how entrepreneur and EON founder Natasha Franck sees fashion moving towards a more circular lifecycle. "End-to-end business processes (from where and how products are made to how they're recycled) require data and intelligence," explains Franck. "Right now, we don't even have so much as a bar code for the circular economy," she says. With new technology, like digital ID, "sustainability and profitability can work together," keeping production responsible and more profitable through a product's lifecycle.

But to implement this on a large scale throughout the industry, legislation has to change. In March of last year, the European Commission introduced a policy proposal requiring retailers to reveal information on products' environmental impacts and life cycles to disrupt the destruction of unused goods. It's just one example, but these efforts can't exist in a vacuum. "[Pushing the conversation forward] is about reconnecting the dots and building equity across the entire ecosystem," says Abrima Erwiah, cofounder of Studio 189 and director of the Gromek Institute at Parsons. Erwiah works with women, children, and their respective communities throughout Africa through her organization Fashion Rising. "For real change to happen—for sustainability to happen—we have to give people [the tools and resources] to do things themselves," she says. That means investing in the people behind the products, especially as the adverse ripple effects of irresponsible manufacturing are felt predominately by marginalized communities. "People matter," she says.

There's much work to do on the individual and corporate levels, as Daveu notes, but there's still optimism about a changing status quo. "There are exciting new initiatives, from consumers to the media to the supply chain. Everyone's doing their part within change," explains Franck. Everyone is biting off a piece of the wheel to drive the conversation forward," she says. With heightened collaboration, the implementation of new innovations, and the prioritization of social responsibility, the future of fashion looks a lot brighter.

One morning, when I was only a few years old, I went missing from home. My parents looked high and low for me. Eventually, I was found sitting in a classroom at a nearby nursery school, ready to learn. The same thing happened the next day. My father asked the teacher what could be done, since I was too young to be enrolled in the school but I threw a tantrum if I was taken out of the class. The teacher replied that it was illegal for my father to pay to educate an underage child, but agreed that I could stay for free. So, every morning I attended the school, and I was eventually enrolled, a year earlier than I should have been.

I obviously had a hunger for learning, and I’m very fortunate my parents championed my education, particularly as a girl, and worked hard to ensure they had the money for school fees, even in some lean years. My mother stressed that there was no future for me if I didn’t study and acquire expertise and skills to be able to earn my own income. To her, and to me, financial independence for women, whether they’re married or not, is essential.

My father was equally insistent. His father had done his best to put him and his siblings through school, and he wanted the same for us. Like my mother, he saw how a lack of education limited the prospects for children, especially girls. He wished to empower my two sisters and me to grow up to be strong women who knew their rights and could assert them to attain a better position in society. Like me, he received his degree from MUBS.

My parents’ passion for education has extended not only to their five children, but to three of our cousins, whose school fees they contribute to, and whose education and prospects they care about as much as ours. As for my siblings: my sister Clare is at university studying to be a veterinarian while Joan finished high school in 2019 and earned Government sponsorship for university. Paul Christian has passed into the last two years of secondary school, and Trevor is in his sixth year of primary school.

Educating girls is not a high-tech or new idea, and has been a pillar of global development policies for decades. In fact, you’ll likely have heard many leaders, women and men, testify to how important it is for girls to be in classrooms on an equal basis with boys. Uganda has mostly reached parity between girls and boys in primary school education. That’s an achievement, of course, but many thousands of girls and boys still aren’t in classrooms, and many girls, like my mother in her generation and some others in my extended family now, leave school before they complete their secondary education. That means relatively few Ugandan girls will attend university. When I was a student at MUBS, I saw plenty of young women in my classes. Even though there were many women at the university, there are many more who aren’t.

Of course, I care about boys’ education as well, and with two brothers, I have to. But across sub-Saharan Africa, at least 33 million girls who could be in primary and lower secondary school aren’t (equivalent to elementary and middle school and the first two years of high school). More than 50 million girls in the region are missing out on receiving an upper secondary school education (equivalent to the last two years of high school in the US or the sixth form in the UK). Around the world, more than 130 million girls aren’t in school and should be. If they had the chance, how many of these young women could be teachers, lawyers, doctors, NGO staffers, members of parliament, or climate scientists?

I think of it like this: girls and women are more than half the world’s population. If we are to successfully address the climate crisis, we need women in the rooms where decisions are being made that affect the climate (and almost all decisions now do). Educating girls brings them into those rooms, and expands the number and approaches of possible decision-makers and solutions.

At the moment, neither the access nor the positive outcomes that would result are happening fast enough. This reality is partly a result of girls’ disempowerment. I’m certain there are tens of millions of girls—and there are countless across Africa—who’d love to study through high school and even university. But many others are doubtful about their prospects and their own capabilities: My mom didn’t make it even this far in school, they tell themselves, so what makes me think I can make it to that level, or even further? You’re a rural girl, the voice whispers, you probably won’t go anywhere in life, even with some education. Why keep going?

If you don’t marry, have a child, and settle for a life of motherhood on a farm, scrabbling for food and fuel for your family, what options await you? You could move from your village to Kampala and work as a maid in the home of a wealthier family.

Perhaps that’s the life of the young woman who’s walking by as we’re holding our placards at a strike. What are they doing? she might ask herself, with a mixture of curiosity and puzzlement. But there’s no time to think more; she’s likely in a hurry, seeking the fastest ways of securing the household items her employer has requested. So, she gets into a matatu (public mini-bus) and heads back to prepare dinner, or wash the floors, or clean the family’s clothes. Honestly, I can’t see her paying much attention to us at all.

Could someone like her, let alone a young woman in a village, become a climate activist? How would she have the time? Practically, she’d probably only have a flip phone, not the smart-phone so many of us now carry. That would make accessing the Internet difficult and expensive, so she’d be disconnected from what’s happening in the wider world. By the time she’d turned twenty, she’d probably be looking for another job. Her employer, worrying that her husband might now look at the young woman with sexual interest, would dismiss her. This is something that happens all the time. Then she would be struggling to find a new source of income and some stability.

Perhaps it’s not the worst fate, but is it really all we want for those girls? To me, these are “survival” lives. Would these young women have chosen these futures if other paths had been open to them, like finishing secondary school, maybe completing a university degree, then getting a job and attaining financial independence, or even becoming engaged in activism?

It’s a depressing reality that the Covid pandemic has made situations such as I’ve described even worse, and in the same parts of the planet where the climate crisis is a daily emergency. Covid and the consequences of climate change have intensified pressures on household incomes across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. School fees, especially for girls, have become a luxury that has to be cut from the family budget, as it was for Hilda Nakabuye. Millions of girls, as well as many boys, may never return to schools once they’ve fully reopened, and the hard-fought gains in girls’ education made in recent decades may be diluted. We may never know for sure how many children and adolescents have been affected, nor be able to add up all the costs of the pandemic to them, to society, and to the climate.

Excerpted from A BIGGER PICTURE: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis by Vanessa Nakate. Copyright © 2021 by Vanessa Nakate. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

If you're like us, you've already binged all eight episodes of season 3 of Netflix's Sex Education. The comedy hit returned September 17 with its best season yet, as the students of Moordale rebelled against their new authoritarian head teacher, played by Girls actor Jemima Kirke. Fans of the show devoured the new season, which came back after a 19-month-break, and are already clamoring for more episodes (and that cliffhanger ending doesn't help!).

Luckily, Netflix hasn't left us with a long wait for a renewal. The streamer announced that Sex Education will return for a season 4 at their fan event Tudum 2021. The announcement came only a week after season 3's premiere, in one of the fastest renewals for a Netflix original series in a while. While the teen comedy took a bit longer to return to expected, the streaming giant just confirmed that the show will return for its final season this fall. As we celebrate and start speculating on what could come next for Otis and the gang, here's what we know about season 4 so far.

When will 'Sex Education' season 4 come out?

Netflix announced today that the British teen comedy will return just in time for the school year, releasing on September 21, 2023. They revealed the release date along with an emotional letter to fans written by series creator, lead writer, and executive producer Laurie Nunn, where she explains that season 4 is the "right time to graduate" while reminiscing on the show's beginnings.

"We are incredibly proud of 'Sex Education' and feel indebted to our brilliant writers, cast and crew who put so much heart into making every episode. They have worked tirelessly to bring you the final series, and we can’t wait to share it with you," Nunn wrote.

In a Tudum interview, Nunn revealed that the decision to end the show with season 4 came up while the creative team was writing the new episodes, saying, "during that process, it just started to feel very clear that the stories were coming to an end, the characters were being left in a place that I felt really good about it. I felt happy for them, and I felt like I’ve said everything that I want to say with these characters at this time."

Netflix previously revealed the show's return in a "Moordale News" alert posted in September 2021. The clip paired the secondary school's logo with a bulletin-style statement: "BREAKING NEWS: SEX EDUCATION TO RETURN FOR SEASON 4."

Is there a trailer for 'Sex Education' season 4?

The full trailer dropped today, which means it's almost time to say goodbye to the former students from Moordale. Or rather, the new students of Cavendish Sixth Form College, which will seemingly live up to the hype of being even more sex-positive than Moordale. In between the clips of several characters either exploring new hookups or getting more in touch with themselves (shoutout, Aimee), Otis and and Maeve are trying to make long distance work as she's studying in the U.S. (with tutor Dan Levy). In the series' latest irreverent needle drop, the Meat Loaf classic "I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)" soundtracks Otis as he attempts to take great nudes.

Netflix previously dropped the first teaser for the new season last July, along with a logline confirming that all of our faves will be dealing with some fish-out-of-water worries at their respective new schools:

"Following the closure of Moordale Secondary, Otis and Eric now face a new frontier—their first day at Cavendish Sixth Form College. Otis is nervous about setting up his new clinic, whilst Eric is praying they won’t be losers again. But Cavendish is a culture shock for all the Moordale students—they thought they were progressive but this new college is another level. There’s daily yoga in the communal garden, a strong sustainability vibe and a group of kids who are popular for being… kind?! Viv is totally thrown by the college’s student-led, non-competitive approach, while Jackson is still struggling to get over Cal. Aimee tries something new by taking an Art A-Level and Adam grapples with whether mainstream education is for him. Over in the US, Maeve is living her dream at prestigious Wallace University, being taught by cult author Thomas Molloy. Otis is pining after her, whilst adjusting to not being an only child at home, or the only therapist on campus…"

Who will be in the cast of 'Sex Education' season 4?

Sex Education's sprawling, talented cast will be missing a few familiar faces for the new season, as several members have graduated from the show a bit early. The confirmed cast members who are returning include: Asa Butterfield (Otis Milburn), Gillian Anderson (Jean Milburn), Ncuti Gatwa (Eric), Emma Mackey (Maeve), Aimee-Lou Wood (Aimee), Connor Swindells (Adam), Kedar Williams-Stirling (Jackson), Mimi Keene (Ruby), George Robinson (Isaac), Chinenye Ezeudu (Viv), Dua Saleh (Cal), Alistair Petrie (Michael Groff), Samantha Spiro (Maureen Groff), Jim Howick (Colin Hendricks), Rakhee Thakrar (Emily Sands).

Several fan-favorites have already revealed over the past two years that they wouldn't be returning for the new season, including Tanya Reynolds (Lily), Patricia Allison (Ola), and Simone Ashley (Olivia), who's been a bit busy with a little show called Bridgerton. While Gatwa and Mackey have both landed major roles since season 3, (Gatwa will soon debut as the new lead of Doctor Who, while both actors will appear in Barbie later this month), they both will appear in the new season.

Of course, the series has also brought on a new class of supporting actors for Moordale's last hoorah. Schitt's Creek star Dan Levy will play Thomas Molly, Maeve's acclaimed writing teacher at her new school, while Somewhere Boy's Lisa McGrillis will play a new Milburn relative, as Jean’s younger sister, Joanna. Doctor Who's Thaddea Graham will play O, a new rival sex therapist to Otis, while newcomers Anthony Lexa, Felix Mufti, and Alexandra James will play the popular clique at Cavendish, The Coven.

Other new cast members in undisclosed roles include Queen & Slim star Jodie Turner Smith, Kamikaze's Marie Reuther, comedian Eshaan Akbar, and newcomers Reda Elazouar, Bella Maclean, and Imani Yahshua.

What happened in 'Sex Education' season 3?

Spoilers for Sex Education season 3. The season 3 finale left all of the characters' fates up in the air, now that Moordale Secondary has closed its doors due to a lack of funding. The show's core couples are in flux too. Maeve and Otis finally confessed their feelings to each other, but soon after Maeve left for a study-abroad opportunity in America. Eric broke up with Adam after realizing that he wanted to explore his self-identity without his newly-out boyfriend. After a season trying making it work with Jakob, Jean discovered that he's not the father of her baby. All of these threads leave some very interesting ground for the show to explore in its new season.

What have the cast and crew said about season 4?

Butterfield told Cosmopolitan UK before the premiere that he's not sure what's next for the show, but he's definitely down for a fourth season. "I’d love to do a fourth season, because we have so much fun on this show. At the same time we’ve been doing it for three years now, and I’d be happy saying goodbye to these characters… We’ll have to see."

He also opened up about the possibilities for what's next, letting his imagination run wild. "[I want a] Christmas movie! Sex Education-themed. We don’t know [whether there will be more.] It’s out of our hands at this point. I wish I could tell you more, I genuinely don’t know."

He added, "A spin-off would be good but it has to be well-thought out and really unique and not just for the sake of doing a spin-off."

Butterfield and Ncuti Gatwa also shared their hopes for future seasons with ELLE, with Butterfield hoping that the show will expand Otis and Maeve's relationship.

"I would like to see them...look at the bigger picture. To explore themselves and to be more focused either on their relationship with themselves or their platonic relationships with their friends and family," he said.

He also wished for more scenes between him and his real-life friend Gatwa. "Otis and Eric, they're most themselves when they're with each other. I wish there were more scenes with us."

Gatwa added, "We ask for that every season. [Showrunner Laurie Nunn] is like, 'What do you want?' 'More scenes with Otis.'"

Mackey also shared her hopes for Maeve in a possible fourth season with ELLE, saying that she hopes the teen with come out of her shell a bit more in America.

"I'm excited for her to make some new friends, to open up a bit more and be exposed to a different culture, to a different kind of world. Because she's only ever lived in her little tiny bubbles. How is she out of that bubble?"

She continued, "It'd be really nice to see her actually living out a dream for herself. What does that do to a person, and how does that change you? What kind of happiness does that give you? And all the anxieties that come with being away from home. If we get to it, it will be a lovely thing to witness."

Casting director Lauren Evans told Metro.co.uk back in May that she is hoping for many more seasons "as long as people want it, as long as the stories are there to tell." She also mentioned that creator Laurie Nunn has previously said that she doesn't think viewers will continue watching the show past the end of school.

"Like Laurie said before, Laurie doesn’t want to keep going and put these people through college and university and you know into middle age," Evans said, adding a hopeful, "But we'll see."

Every season of Sex Education is a treat, with the Netflix teen comedy expanding its all-star cast with new additions to the world of Moordale Secondary. In Season 3, which premiered this week after a year-plus wait, new student Cal became the first trans/nonbinary character to play a starring role.

As Cal, Sudanese-American actor Dua Saleh brought a nuanced depiction of life as a nonbinary person, as they faced discrimination from the school's new head teacher. While Sex Education is their debut TV role, Saleh is also an accomplished songwriter and recording artist whose discography is definitely worth a listen. Here's everything we know about this young phenom.

They were born in Sudan and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The 26-year-old was born in Kassala, Sudan. Their family left the country when they were five, seeking political asylum amid the Second Sudanese Civil War. After moving around different refugee camps in Eritrea and several U.S. cities, they settled in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, per the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They later graduated from Augsburg University, where they studied sociology and theater.

They grew up writing poetry.

When they arrived in the U.S., Saleh started reading African-American YA literature and writing poetry. They later got into spoken-word poetry in their sophomore year of college, performing at Button Poetry in Minneapolis with the hope of making money at competitions. Their spoken-word performance "Pins and Needles" even went viral in 2017.

Eventually they started writing songs to help get through a depressive episode, saying "something [in their body] compelled them to start singing and start writing songs." They told Them, "I started trying to perform the songs at open mics just to see how people would respond, and they responded very well, so I started making songs on my phone. I think one person saw me perform a song at a poetry slam and booked me for an event. I was like, 'Hm, maybe I can make some money off of this,” which is terrible to think about it in that way.'"

They're an indie musician and songwriter.

Saleh's been writing and recording songs since TK, with their music being described as pop, R&B, TK TK. Their debut EP Nur (2019) explored gender and racial issues along with their personal experiences, and it was produced by Psymun, who has also worked with Young Thug and Lil Baby. They also have a 2020 EP, Rosetta, named after the Black queer rock musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe, in which they wrote about their queerness and their Muslim cultural background. They even recorded the song "smut" partly in Arabic, their first language, per Them.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, they revealed that they even wrote their newest song, "signs," during lockdown while filming Sex Education in Wales. "Having that time to myself, not being surrounded by any distractions or friends or family members helped me create different worlds," they said.

They were invited to audition for Cal, and gave input on the character.

Though Saleh had previously done underground theater in Minneapolis, including a 2018 production of the play Waafrika 123, they told Autostraddle that they weren't acting much when Sex Education came along. The show actually contacted them specifically for the role, after which they auditioned alone and with Kedar Williams-Stirling, who plays Jackson.

"It was really random because I wasn’t doing acting at the time. I was working on some music stuff and they reached out to my manager and asked me to audition. They liked my self-tape and then they actually got an acting coach to help guide me through the next two auditions."

They added that the show took their input on Cal as a character, and they were able to help on the script, along with a nonbinary consultant.

"And then when I got cast they were like oh you’re trans can you help us with this. The writing team had a nonbinary consultant but they wanted me to be comfortable so they asked me questions. How do you feel about this? Do you have any issues? Any questions? That helped a lot with the script. And they also had a nonbinary consultant on set especially when me and Robyn (Holdaway) who plays Layla were there. They especially helped with the binding scenes."

They love science fiction, anime, and manga.

Saleh's a huge fan of science fiction books and television, and they've said in multiple interviews that reading magna and watching anime is their escape. They told Them, "It provides a sense of escapism that live-action content doesn’t provide. I can find myself in certain characters, in both their strengths and flaws. In sci-fi manga [and anime], humans can morph into beings outside of the common scope of reality. The main characters often tap into a tremendous amount of untapped energy. There’s a transmutational process that goes beyond any human capabilities. It’s intriguing for a trans person like myself, especially being nonbinary."

They're outspoken on social issues.

Saleh is a former youth organizer who has participated in demonstrations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, including several rallies protesting the murder of George Floyd in 2020. They also discuss social issues through their music. After Floyd's death, they released a song on police brutality called "Body Cast" and used it to raise funds for the organization Women For Political Change, which works with "young women and trans and non-binary individuals throughout Minnesota."

The Netflix hit Sex Education has finally returned for a third season after an almost 18 month-long wait. Among the students of sex-crazed Moordale Secondary is brainiac Maeve, who uses sarcasm to hide a heart of gold and has been a fan favorite since the first episode. This season, French-English actress Emma Mackey has brought a new depth to Maeve, as the character opens herself up to help from others and finally moves forward with her feelings for Otis.

Mackey's star has steadily risen as Sex Education has gotten bigger, and the actress has some huge roles coming up, including a star-studded Agatha Christie adaptation and her first starring film role. Though she's notoriously private and a bit social media-averse, here's what we know about the rising star.

She studied English Language and Literature at Leeds University.

The 25-year-old actress was born in Le Mans in northwestern France. She grew up and graduated high school in western France before moving to England for university. She also seems to be a brainiac like Maeve; she studied English, French, and law at Leeds University, graduating in 2016.

She almost turned down Sex Education.

Sex Education was Mackey's first recurring TV role and big break, but she revealed in an ELLE interview that she almost didn't take the role.

"I wasn't sure if I was even going to do it. I'd never done [a TV series] before, so it was quite a momentous thing to take on. Luckily, it's been handled really beautifully and has been edited and cast really well. It sets the bar very high. Other jobs now, I'm kind of like, "Why isn't this like Sex Ed?'" she told the outlet.

When asked what made her take the role, she said that after reading the scripts, she became protective of Maeve as a character.

"It was a gift of a part; I couldn't really turn that down. I think any doubts I had were more about my nerves, my own sort of prudishness that I might've had at the time, being new and not knowing what was right for me."

She loves gardening and cooking.

Though Mackey keeps her personal life quite private, she opened up about her hobbies to the Sydney Morning Herald. Recently she's adopted her mom's love of gardening, and she's also a vegan who loves to cook pan-Asian meals.

"I also love Middle Eastern food, big time. I love it so much I use za’atar on everything if I can. I’m like, let’s go! I’m not very good at presenting, though. That’s one thing I want to get better at, I kind of want to go to chef school," she told the outlet.

She has several huge roles coming up.

Mackey has been busy outside of Sex Education. Her most recent film just released in France, a French-language romance called Eiffel where she plays a fictional muse for Paris' Eiffel Tower. She recently wrapped filming on her first leading role, playing the Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte in the upcoming film Emily. She's also set to appear in Death on the Nile, the sequel to 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, with director Kenneth Branagh.

She also wants a life outside of acting.

Though she loves acting, Mackey has also said that she wants to be a writer, or try directing one day. She attributes this to her restless brain, saying, "I've never been good at doing just one thing."

She told ELLE, "I'm very happy in my job, and I love my job when I'm in it. I very much feel like when I'm on set, I'm in my element, and it brings me a lot of joy. So I'm not going to stop acting right now. It’s just, only doing one thing—I can’t do that. It’s not possible for me. I like the idea of being a jack of all trades. And why not? Why not direct?"

Spoilers ahead for Sex Education Season 3. This season of Sex Education was a fight for self-preservation, for each of our favorite characters in small ways, and for the sex-positive ethos of Moordale Secondary as a whole. As in real life, the results weren't totally good or totally bad, leaving nearly all of the show's relationships in limbo as both the kids and adults work to find themselves. It also left fans to wonder whether there will be a fourth season, where we'll finally see Otis and Maeve ride off into the sunset (or Otis and Ruby maybe?).

While we wait, here's every detail about the Season 3 finale and where we stand going into a potential Season 4.

Eric breaks things off with Adam.

Things were looking shaky for Eric and Adam, who weren't entirely talking after Eric confessed that he kissed someone in Nigeria. Eric also opened up to Otis about the kiss, saying, "It made me feel free." Once they meet up, Adam tells Eric that he wants to make it work, saying he can get over "a stupid kiss."

However, Eric tells him it wasn't just a stupid kiss. He explains that though it was just a kiss, it was something, and that he wouldn't take it back, even though he did feel bad for hurting Adam. He also says that the Nigeria kiss felt easy, adding, "I just feel like I'm ready to fly, and you're just learning to walk. And I've worked really hard to find myself, and I'm beginning to lose who I am."

With that, Eric breaks up with Adam, later putting on his wedding outfit with a full face of makeup in the name of self-care. By the end of the episode, Adam is also taking strides in self-discovery. He competes in his first dog show, cheered on by mom Maureen and Miss Sands, and receives a special mention for Madam's impressive debut. He also finally tells his mom that Eric was his boyfriend.

Jakob is not the father of Jean's baby.

At the start of the episode, Jean is in surgery after her hemorrhage, with Otis, Eric, Ola, and Jakob staying at the hospital. Though it's still too early to tell whether Jean will be better, the blended family does get to meet the baby girl. Jakob and Otis also have a deep talk about what would happen if Jean doesn't recover, with Jakob telling Otis that he's not going anywhere either way.

Jean ends up getting out of surgery safely. Once she comes down from the meds, she makes up with both Otis and Ola. She and Otis also finally have a real conversation about their therapy experience and how much they need each other. Otis even spills the beans on Maeve at the end of the sweet mother-son moment.

Of course, that's before the big bomb drops. Just after Otis leaves, Jean opens the paternity results for Joy. We don't see the actual results, but based on the quiet, "Oh shit," Jean utters, Jakob is not the father of her child. As for who it could be (Otis' dad? random hook up?), the expletive is the last we see of Jean.

Maeve's headed off to the U.S., putting her and Otis on hold.

Maeve stayed over at Anna's place after returning her sister Ellie to her foster mother. Over a morning cup of tea, Anna asks Maeve to move in, and Maeve says yes, having bonded with Anna over Ellie's disappearance. The teen also makes up with Issac, who catches her as she moves out of her trailer, and with her mother, who sneaks onto school grounds to give her the money for the study abroad trip, and also gives her blessing to stay with Anna.

The only thing still standing in the way of the America trip is her relationship with Otis. The show's OTP is separated for the whole episode, but they sweetly stay in touch through text, and Maeve wants to stay in Moordale and pursue the relationship. Luckily, Aimee is there at the eleventh hour to tell her that she's being ridiculous, and she would never let her friend skip an opportunity for a boy.

In the episode's last scene, Maeve tells Otis that she's leaving. "We’ll have to see where we’re at when I’m back," she tells him, and he responds that he's proud of her. When Otis asks it it's a goodbye, Maeve says, "It's a see you soon." Then she's off on a bus, leaving Moordale.

Moordale Secondary closes from lack of funding.

The fight for Moordale's individuality ended in a shutdown. When the kids return to school after their open day rebellion, Head Teacher Hope has ghosted and all her signs and straight-line decals are being removed. The celebration is short-lived, though, as random bureaucrat Mark gathers all the seniors and tells them that the school's last investors have pulled out and that they are selling Moordale Secondary to developers due to a lack of funds.

The kids all have to find new schools to complete their last year, which is a bummer, but they don't leave on a sad note. When it looks like Jackson, Cal, and Viv are headed down that route, OG teacher Miss Sands tells them, "Speaking up for what you believe in is never a waste of time." So the best storylines of the season ends (minus a quick debrief between Hope and Otis) with a glimmer of hope.

Some quick notes on everyone else: Aimee finally breaks up with Steve after a sweet talk with Adam's mom Maureen. Lily re-embraces her alien side and she and Ola make up. Jackson and Cal decide to stay friends, and we get more screen time with Jackson's mom (played by new Emmy-winner Hannah Waddingham!). Cal shows their gender-nonbinary friend how to safely bind their chest. Viv's extremely-hot boyfriend Eugene comes to town, and we see why she would be down for some Bridgerton cosplay. And Maureen and former head teacher Michael don't end up back together.

As for a possible (dare I say necessary) fourth season, creator Laurie Nunn told Glamour that she already has details for several storylines in mind, including Joy's paternity and whether Hope will return. "I've started thinking about series four, but obviously we won't know whether that will be a reality until series three lands and people respond to it. I always write with the hope that I'll get more opportunity to keep writing these characters because I love writing them so much, and I feel like they've got so many more stories in them."

Netflix's teen comedy Sex Education is truly an ensemble show. Following a group of students at Moordale Secondary, the show zooms in on new kids from season to season and even episode to episode, while also giving longtime characters the spotlight. In Season 3, which dropped September 19, Moordale's fashion-obsessed queen bee Ruby gets more screen time as she pursues a casual relationship with the now-retired unofficial sex therapist Otis.

British actress Mimi Keene, who has played the mean girl since Season 1, shone in the new spotlight, giving Ruby a depth that surprised viewers and had even longtime Maeve-Otis shippers changing their minds. She's proven herself as one of the most underrated talents on Sex Education's stacked cast, and as an artist to watch.

She starred in her first professional role at age 11.

The 23-year-old actress was born and raised in Hertfordshire, in southern England. She started her acting training early, studying at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London from 2009 to 2014.

Keene got her start as a stage actress, and made her professional debut playing Janey in the play Kin at The Royal Court Theatre in 2010. She then made her TV debut on an episode of the British teen show Sadie J in 2013.

Her first large role was on the legendary soap opera EastEnders.

Her first recurring TV role was Cindy, a troubled teen on the longtime BBC soap opera EastEnders. She acted on the soap from 2013-2015, appearing in 122 episodes. During her time on the famous soap, she was nominated for the British Soap Opera Award for Best Young Performance and the Inside Soap Award for Best Young Actor.

She has two adorable dogs and a cat.

The actress is an animal lover, with two of her small dogs making regular appearances on her Instagram. One of the pups, a light brown dog named Baby, even got to make her television debut. Keene revealed to Glamour that Baby plays herself in Sex Education Season 3.

"She's been coming with me every season. I bring all my dogs with me. I've brought my cat with me before. It's a whole thing. I'm always the person with the animals. I've been trying to land her a role for the past three years, and she's just landed it this season." She added: "She's got some very cute scenes, and Ruby does speak to her, much like you'd speak to another person. Very serious. That's how you'd speak to them. And I do that in my life," she continued.

She's close friends with her co-stars Ncuti Gatwa and Chaneil Kular.

The Sex Education cast is a tight-knit group, and Keene has become close to several of her co-stars over the past three years. She said in her Glamour interview that she's particularly close with Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Eric, and Chaneil Kular, who plays The Untouchables member Anwar. She says that Gatwa makes her laugh the most, and that he and Kular tie for the costars whom she can tell anything.

She wishes she could have dressed like Ruby in high school.

Keene told Glamour that she shares a love of dressing up and wearing heels in "very inappropriate places" with her character. "That's probably one of the most fun parts of playing her, and this season is no different. She has some incredible outfits. Who wears heels to school? No one. My headmaster would not have allowed it, but if I could have, I would have. And also, we both talk to our dog, which is mine in real life," she said.

Her favorite quirk of Ruby's is her long nails.

When asked about playing the queen bee, Keene told Teen Vogue that her favorite quirk of Ruby's is her regular hair flicks and tapping her nails. "I don't have them in my real life, but she always has some very long talons, which constantly snap," she said.

She continued, "We'll be filming and the director Ben Taylor will say to me, 'Hair flick, Ruby hair flick,' or 'Ruby nails, nails again. Nails on this, nails on that. Nails with the hair.' So that's quite a fun thing to do, because it's just one of her little special things that's just for Ruby."

Summer is drawing to a close, and it's time for a new year of wild adventures at Moordale Secondary. The Netflix hit Sex Education is returning this month to follow Otis (Asa Butterfield), Maeve (Emma Mackey), Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and the gang at their final year of school. Season 3 of Sex Education will premiere on Netflix on September 17, 2021, kicking off with a time jump for our favorite characters.

When will Sex Education season 3 come out?

All eight episodes of the third season of Sex Education will hit Netflix on September 17. Though the show's production schedule was thrown off by the pandemic, the cast kept us updated on their official Instagram during lockdown. Filming began in the UK last September.

Is there a Sex Education season 3 trailer?

On July 19, Netflix dropped an "official advert," a fictional ad for Moordale. All of our faves (minus Eric) appear in the clip, praising their school alongside its new head teacher, Hope Haddon, played by Girls actress Jemima Kirke. Though the ad tries to sell Moordale as a dream school, there are hints of discord, with head boy Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling) reading from a script and Maeve looking uncomfortable the whole clip.

The official trailer for the show, released September 7, shows the full scope of Head Teacher Haddon's redesign for the school. The students wear gray uniforms, walk in single-file lines, and receive abstinence-based sex education, with a teacher yelling, "Sex will ruin your life." It looks like it will fall to Otis and Maeve to bring the school back to its sex-positive, even though this are still tense with the show's will-they-won't-they couple.

Where did Sex Education season 2 leave off?

The show ended with a ton of updates for the kids at Moordale. A chlamydia outbreak gave the school a big PR problem, and led to the ousting of head teacher Groff. Former bully Adam publicly confessed his love for Eric. Jean forgave Otis for being an illicit sex therapist, and then discovered she was pregnant by her ex Jakob. Maeve called social services on her drug-addicted mother. After breaking up with Ola and having a one-night stand with queen bee Ruby, Otis tried to confess his love to Maeve, only to be thwarted by Maeve's new friend Issac.

What will happen in Sex Education season 3?

Season 3 will start with a time jump, skipping over the summer and beginning with the new school year. The students have been busy over the summer with Otis having casual sex and Eric starting a relationship with Adam. Maeve is hanging out with Issac, who still hasn't told her about deleting Otis' confession voicemail, and she and Otis have not kept in touch. And Jean is very, very pregnant, and still hasn't told Jakob.

The kids are also arriving at a very different Moordale, where reporters posted outside the newly-nicknamed "sex school." There's a new head teacher, a high-achieving former student named Hope Haddon, who wants to restore the school to its former glory. Unfortunately, that means erasing every hint of sex, individuality, and fun at the school, with official photos showing the kids wearing new school uniforms.

The cast and crew haven't spilled many details about the new season ahead of the premiere, but apparently filming was as effortless was earlier seasons despite the pandemic. Asa Butterfield told ELLE, “I think one of the reasons [the show has] done so well is because everyone just enjoys themselves. As actors, having the freedom to play with the words and experiment and be a bit goofy—these are the magic moments, which you wouldn't be able to write into a script. And I think that really elevates the show.”

Who's in the cast of Sex Education season 3?

All members of the wide-ranging cast are set to return for season 3, with the show keeping up its tradition of smoothly juggling multiple storylines. The season's major new addition is Girls actress Jemima Kirke as Hope Haddon, the new head teacher who turns out to be a bit authoritarian in her reign over the school.

Recording artist Dua Saleh will also join the show as Cal, a nonbinary student who befriends Jackson, in her first credited television role. Other new additions include Harry Potter alum Jason Issacs as Mr. Groff's more successful older brother, and Resident Evil actress Indra Ové as Elsie's new foster mother.

Settle in, because Lady Whistledown has some tea for Bridgerton fans: Simone Ashley will be the newest belle around town. The actress is joining the cast as season 2's leading lady, playing Kate Sharma. Netflix and Shondaland confirmed the casting news on February 15, teasing that Ashley would be the eldest Bridgerton son's new love interest. "Kate is a smart, headstrong young woman who suffers no fools—Anthony Bridgerton very much included," the Netflix tweet reads.

The official Bridgerton account, as Lady Whistledown, echoed the news, cheekily penning, "Quite the juicy bit of gossip, dear readers... This author is certainly looking forward to many a column covering Miss Kate Sharma."

And author Julia Quinn, who wrote the books the series is based on, also took to social media to celebrate the casting news. "I couldn’t dream of a more perfect Kate. I mean, just LOOK at her expression in that first photo!" Quinn captioned an Instagram post.

In preparation for the second season of Netflix's most-watched original series of all time, here's everything we know about Simone Ashley.

Her resumé includes a few television titles.

Ashley is no stranger to Netflix, having previously played Olivia Hanan in the streaming platform's hit teen comedy, Sex Education. The 25-year-old has also played Elise Fox in the thriller ITV mini-series The Sister. She's also had small parts in Doctors and the British series Broadchurch, but Kate Sharma is undeniably her biggest role yet.

Her character is changed slightly from the books.

In Quinn's books, the character introduced in The Viscount Who Loved Me is named "Kate Sheffield." In the Netflix show, Ashley will be playing "Kate Sharma." While it's unclear how much of Ashley's character will be based on the book, the official description of The Viscount Who Loved Me calls Kate is "the most meddlesome woman ever to grace a London ballroom." It adds that she is scheming to keep the "reprehensible rake" Anthony away from her sister when she starts to feel her heart falling for the rake himself. Uh oh.

Her relationship with Anthony will be a focus for season 2.

Season 1 saw Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) grappling with his familial responsibilities and enduring heartbreak over opera singer Siena. Show creator Chris Van Dusen teased their relationship on the Today Show in January, saying, “Anthony is going to have a love interest next season, and I think it’s going to be as sweeping and moving and as beautiful as viewers of the first season have come to expect from the show.” He continued: “We left him at the end of the first season at a bit of a crossroads, so I’m looking forward to jumping in and discovering how he fares on the marriage market.”

Her Instagram is full of personal tidbits about her life.

From the looks of her social media, the actress is an animal lover, a foodie, and is very close with several of her Sex Education castmates. Follow her @simoneasshley

Her Indian family was nervous about her pursuing an acting career.

In an interview with Veylex, Ashley revealed that her family was (and sometimes still is) skeptical about her career. But she's continued to pursue it due to her creative passions and her desire to rebel against Indian stereotypes.

"I’ve just always wanted to create, and anything that allows me to do that has got my attention! It allows me to be spontaneous and play—I guess it’s something I’ve always wanted to pursue and didn’t think twice about it. My father has always been deeply passionate about music, film, and photography. Growing up the record player was always playing rock n roll tunes, or Bob Marley, and the TV always had epic movies on, like Kill Bill. It’s a bit ironic, I grew up in a household full of Indian academics, you know, the doctors, the engineers, the accountants—it’s pretty cliche! I was never a budding academic and always thrived in creative fields."

She added, "They still find it quite scary and unsettling. There is no crystal ball, no security, no guarantee. Which can be a parents' worst nightmare. But they know I’m a smart lady. You can’t spend your life going with what your parents want, or your friends, teachers, lovers, want. You have to be your own hero and just go with your gut... It can be hard for my parents to understand that sometimes, but I just try to empathize with them and reassure them that I’m going to be fine."

In regard to education policy in the November 2020 election, from student loan policy and COVID-19 education rules to public versus for-profit schools, much of it comes down to one woman: Betsy DeVos. President Trump's Secretary of Education, a woman who has been described as "the most unpopular person in our government," is behind what some pundits describe as the longest-lasting and most seismic legacies of the current administration. In particular, critics have taken aim at DeVos' policies that work towards defunding and delegitimizing public education.

It's likely that under another term of President Trump and DeVos, public schools will continue to suffer and lose resources; meanwhile, private, religious, and for-profit institutions are likely to be deregulated and given tools to flourish. Here, some of the most critical issues in regard to education policy, and where the Democratic and Republican candidates stand on each.

Education and COVID-19

Trump and DeVos: Trump threatened to defund schools that do not open despite COVID-19 concerns—a threat that DeVos supported—in a move that has been called "dangerous" and is at odds with CDC recommendations. Experts said he has no legal authority to withhold the funds. DeVos, meanwhile, is using the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization law to funnel money designed for public school to private and religious schools, and was accused of “exploiting Congressional relief efforts.”

Harris and Biden: As for Harris and Biden's COVID-19 plan as it relates to schools, the plan is to allow the CDC to provide national-level guidance about the dangers of COVID-19 spread to young people; to utilize funds to account for shortfalls in budget that impact teachers; and to use a "dial" analogy to make critical decisions about when to close or open schools and how to re-open them safely based on risk and spread.

Public vs. For-Profit and Private Schools

Trump and DeVos: DeVos has strongly advocated for private religious schools like the one she attended. For the fiscal year 2020, DeVos supported the administration's providing no support to the community schools program but $40 million to charter schools. That proposal would cut $5 billion from public schools and cut Department of Education budgeting by 10 percent. DeVos also champions federal vouchers for private schools, which would drain money from public schools.

Harris and Biden: The Biden-Harris education plan proposes prioritizing public schools and providing additional supports like health professionals; leveraging community resources for additional care to students and parents; eliminating gaps in funding between white and non-white schools; establishing universal pre-K; and ensuring a safe school environment (including investing in infrastructure and increased gun control).

Teachers' Rights and Salary

Trump and Devos: DeVos has criticized teachers and called them "bullies." She's very anti-union, and anti-teachers' unions in particular. She has favored programs that arm teachers in the classroom.

Harris and Biden: Jill Biden, an educator for three decades, is the face of Biden's plan for education. Biden has said that he'll ensure teachers receive adequate compensation and benefits (the average teacher's salary hasn't increased since 1996). As a presidential candidate, Harris proposed raising teachers' salaries by $13,500.

Student Loan Debt and College Tuition

Trump and DeVos: DeVos and the current administration are accused of enabling debt collection companies to engage in "deceptive" collection practices by misleading or cheating borrowers, which they deny. DeVos repealed the "gainful employment rule" that prevents for-profit schools from preying on students by offering education and then failing to deliver on those results. DeVos also made it harder for these students to obtain help after being defrauded.

Biden and Harris: Both Biden and Harris supported a bill to cancel $10,000 in student loans for every borrower. Harris has stated that she's in favor of free community college, debt-free four-year public college, and universal pre-K. Their plan includes providing two years of free community college; investing in facilities and technology; making public education free for families making less than $125,000; giving additional monetary support to students; and reducing existing loan amounts.

Education and Social Justice

Trump and DeVos: The current administration has rolled back protections for assault survivors and transgender students, as well as students who face racism and Obama-era policies that aim to reduce racism in education.

Biden and Harris: For Harris, the issue is personal: She was one of the students in the historical Berkeley busing program as the schools integrated. The current Biden-Harris plan for education includes expanding students' ability to be able to use grants and aid for more than just tuition, and using community programs to provide support for students who face challenges like poverty. Institutions like HBCUs will also be supported.

• Meghan Markle and Prince Harry recently video-chatted with Malala Yousafzai about the importance of female education, to celebrate the International Day of the Girl.
• Meghan, who's known for her minimal makeup looks, debuted a bold new look that's ideal for fall.
• The Duchess of Sussex wore a berry lip with a deep smoky eye.

Who better to inspire your fall makeup looks than Meghan Markle? The Duchess of Sussex is a well-established fan of subtle beauty looks, typically pairing a soft brown eye with a pinky-beige lip and natural, glowing skin. But in a newly-released video chat with activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, Meghan debuted a bolder look, as Hello! notes. With her hair in a sleek low bun with a center parting, she wore a more smoky eye than usual, completing the look with a deep berry lip. And, naturally, she looked stunning. 

Meghan spoke to Yousafzai about the importance of educating young girls, and why she's long championed female education in her own charity work. "When young girls have access to education everyone wins and everyone succeeds. It just opens the door for societal success at the highest level," she said, as People reports.

"What I had realized very early on was that when women have a seat at the table, conversations in terms of policy change, conversations in terms of legislation and the dynamics of the community are all shifted," Meghan continued. "And when you have to see how you get a woman to embrace her voice, you have to start with where she is a young girl."

Yousafzai, who recently graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, spoke about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on girls' education. "Right now, there are already 130 million girls out of school, but an additional 20 million more girls are at risk of dropping out of school because of this pandemic."

"They're at risk of never being able to return to their schools because they are likely to be pushed into early child marriages or they might become the breadwinners or financial supporters of their families," she continued. "COVID has made things worse. We cannot ignore this. This is an emergency right now and this is a crisis right now. We need to ensure that in this time we do not ignore the issue of girls' education."

Meghan Markle's Most Iconic Fashion Moments

• Kate Middleton appeared on British TV show BBC Breakfast Tuesday to launch Tiny Happy People, an educational initiative to help children under 5 develop language skills.
• The Duchess of Cambridge spoke about the information she wished she'd had as a first-time mother to Prince George.
• Kate revealed a summery new hair look, featuring soft face-framing layers and rich honey blonde highlights.

Kate Middleton has switched her hair up for summer! The Duchess of Cambridge appeared on British morning show BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, in order to launch a new educational initiative for under 5s. And she debuted a new hairdo in the process, revealing soft, face-framing layers and honey blonde highlights, a significantly lighter hue to her previous rich brown shade. 

Kate appeared on TV to help launch the BBC's Tiny Happy People program, an initiative to support parents and boost language development in children under 5. The Duchess of Cambridge played a role in developing the program, the royals revealed on Instagram, assisting with "character and background development for two animations on parenting."

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Kate discussed meeting with families who used the Tiny Happy People platform, and shared the parenting advice she wished she'd received as a new mom. Talking about the experiences of Ryan, father to 8-month-old Mia, as People reports, Kate said, "He’s learnt a huge amount from Tiny Happy People. It’s information like that I wish I had had as a first-time mom." She continued, "It’s gold dust, really, for families to be given those tips and tools to be able to use, particularly in those first five years."

"In the first few months there’s a huge amount of support from the midwives and health visitors, but from then onwards, there’s a massive gap before they then start school," she continued

Kate Middleton's Most Iconic Fashion Moments

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America has finally woken up to the systemic racism that is embedded in our country, and it's up to white people to continue educating themselves on how we contribute to it. When George Floyd's murder sparked Black Lives Matter protests across all 50 states, articles flooded the internet with reading lists composed of Black authors, documentaries on Black history to watch, and resources on how to be a white ally. These are all great, but if we're going to implement real change in our everyday lives, we'll need to do the work offline and seek out additional resources that aren't constantly being reposted on social media.

A great way to begin expanding our traditional reading list is by subscribing to daily, weekly, and monthly newsletters like these, below, that will help keep us informed on important issues our country is facing. There are also, of course, the newsletters that simply exist to entertain—providing us with new voices and perspectives that may not have reached us otherwise.

Vote.org Election Reminders

The change we want to see begins with who we choose as our leaders. Vote.org's newsletter sends important upcoming election reminders and recurring text messages if you choose to submit your phone number. Register to vote here.

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Well-Read Black Girl

Well-Read Black Girl is an online destination slash IRL nationwide book club that amplifies the voices of Black writers. This is where the whole "don't just read books about injustices towards Black people" comes into play. It's important to read books by Black authors to enjoy the collective experience of Black people. Well-Read Black Girl encourages readers who identify as genderqueer, non-binary, or others to join its community. The newsletter specifically focuses on sharing new reads by Black women writers and information on upcoming events.

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ACLU Weekly Newsletter

Every Saturday, the ACLU will send out a roundup of important civil rights and civil liberties developments, as well as analysis from lawyers, activists, and organizers. In addition to subscribing to the newsletter, you can also sign up for text alerts by texting "FIGHT" to 82623.

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Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter frequently posts resources for people using the #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. Another way to stay in the loop is by signing up for the organization's newsletter, which will send updates on events, how to support its work, and direct access to resources.

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Fruity by Phillip Picardi

Phil Picardi, former EIC of Out Magazine, CCO of Teen Vogue, and founder of Them, launched a newsletter called "Fruity" that shares his beautiful, introspective pieces of writing like, "Three of the People Behind the Numbers," where he spoke to people who lost loved ones to COVID-19, "I Have Some Regrets," where he gets candid about burnout and self-expectations, and "The Empathy Crisis of White America," where he speaks on our nation's lack of compassion while Black people continue to die at disproportionate rates than white people.

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The Innocence Project

After you've donated to community bail funds across the country, subscribe to The Innocence Project's newsletter to get updated on ways you can help prevent wrongful convictions. If you're unfamiliar with The Innocence Project, the organization "exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice."

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For Harriet

For Harriet is an online community that celebrates Black womanhood at its core. Kimberly Foster launched the site in June 2010, and continues to speak out about what's going on in our society on For Harriet's Instagram. To put it simply: Listen to Black women.

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Lipstick and Other Stories by Jasmine Guillory

Jasmine Guillory, author of The Proposal, The Wedding Date, The Wedding Party, and more juicy rom-coms, created a personal newsletter where she shares the books she's reading and writing, what she's cooking, the beauty products she's obsessed with, and anything else she feels compelled to talk about. The other day, she sent out an emotional newsletter centered on Breonna Taylor.

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After you've donated to the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund, sign up for the civil rights organization's newsletter and choose from topics like civic engagement, economic opportunity, education, health, and youth engagement to receive frequent updates on.

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xoNecole

xoNecole.com is a platform that aims to "promote positive images of women of color as well as empower, educate, and inspire millennials through our interviews, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, career, and travel features." Keep up with top stories on the site by subscribing to xoNecole's newsletter, where you'll receive a free empowerment workbook when you enter your information.

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National Center for Transgender Equality

Black Trans Lives Matter. The National Center for Transgender Equality, the nation’s leading social justice advocacy organization for transgender people, continues to amplify this message. Show your support for transgender people by subscribing to the center's newsletter and learning about opportunities to get involved with the organization.

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Teen Vogue Take

Teen Vogue's dedicated news and politics newsletter, Teen Vogue Take, is an easy way to make sure you're staying on top of what's going on in the social justice arena. Even though the magazine's target audience is teens, the content is relevant to people of all ages and identities. 

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Everytown for Gun Safety

Say it with me: Police violence is gun violence. Everytown for Gun Safety works in tandem with Moms Demand Action to keep subscribers informed on what petitions to sign, legislation that plans to be enacted or repealed by lawmakers, and how we can fight for common-sense gun reform.

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WTF Is Ashley Ray Tweeting About Now?

Comedian and writer Ashley Ray created a newsletter that explains her tweets more in-depth, which is the content we could all use right about now. She covers topics from why we shouldn't ask Black people to teach us about race to why she shamefully watched Dave. It's genius.

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Often, there's no better way to absorb information about the world or be exposed to new ideas, culture, and histories than through film. And these days, that means seeking out complex, beautiful, and sometimes uncomfortable films about Black history, in an effort to be a more educated and stronger white ally. Some of these might be a tough watch, but that's the point—education and desire for change often come when we feel sad or enraged. But these stories can also be wildly entertaining, funny, and oftentimes Oscar-worthy. Also worth checking out if you're interested in the subject: Our lists of the most iconic movies in Black cinema and documentaries about Black history.

Selma

The absolute brilliance of Ava DuVernay's Selma is that it's contained to a small window (in 1965, over three months) during some of the most tumultuous moments of the Civil Rights Movement. David Oyelowo not only depicts the voice and mannerisms of Martin Luther King Jr. perfectly, but he also beautifully represents him as a man—filled with his own quirks and foibles—in addition to being the larger-than-life leader. The film is so compelling, it will barely register how educational it is. Basically, it's the perfect historical drama.

Do the Right Thing

This film also ranks on our "Films You Need to Watch at Least Once" list because of how frighteningly relevant it remains in 2020. While it wasn't necessarily based off a specific true story, director Spike Lee said he was partially inspired by the Howard Beach incident, in which a Black man was murdered as he fled a mob of white men. The event galvanized racial tensions in New York City—again, proving how it's a must-watch right now. The film is also snarky and funny, and the fact that all the characters are clearly and complexly drawn makes it feel like a real community.

Hidden Figures

There's a valid reason this Oscar-nominated movie is so beloved—and it's not just because it spotlights the untold story of Black women who were major, but unacknowledged players in the U.S. space race. It's also very heartwarming, with beautiful performances from Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe, and Octavia Spencer. Their brilliance (and workplace talent) are a joy to watch. Admittedly, the movie has received some (valid) criticism about dipping into white savior territory, but it's still absolutely still worthy as a cultural and educational tool.

12 Years a Slave

As an adaptation of Solomon Northup's memoir, 12 Years a Slave is filled with frank, horrific violence as free man Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is kidnapped from his happy life and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Director Steve McQueen carefully researched and verified the story to make it hew as closely to real events as possible. With its unflinching portrayals of rape and torture it'll be very tempting to look away, but it's important not to. So take a deep breath, and dive in to this film, which won multiple Oscars—including Best Picture. 

Malcolm X

Unfortunately, history often reduces Malcolm X to the more violent counterpart to Martin Luther King Jr.. But as this film proves, his life contained so much more; The film thoughtfully delves into his family life and his complex and well-formed perspectives. Denzel Washington imbues the character with nuance and intensity from head to toe—with rage, power, and energy radiating from his face. Director Spike Lee managed to draw a stark on-screen connection between the Rodney King beatings and history—and it's not hard to continue that connection to 2020.

Glory

This Oscar-winning film does the impressive work of spotlighting another story previously lost to history. The 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first all-black regiments in the Union army, is regularly undermined and disparaged despite its heroism in the Civil War. Over 20 years later, the film is mostly known for its ending—no spoilers here, though. It's not a perfect story, and it can skew white savior-y at times, but the whole film is watchable for its thoughtful performances. In fact, Denzel Washington nabbed his first Oscar from Glory.

Straight Outta Compton

If you're familiar with the rap group N.W.A., its members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, or any of their songs, this movie's for you. And if you're somehow not familiar with their work, then this movie's definitely for you. Set in California in the 1980s-90s, the movie does a terrific job of explaining how the music and musicians tapped into the zeitgeist and the Black experience of the time. It's an individual and unique story about the rise and fall of the group, but it's got a universal message in its telling of systemic racism and injustice.

42

This is a strong, often candid look at the career of the first Black Major League Baseball player, Jackie Robinson (a phenomenal pre-Black Panther Chadwick Boseman). And it really goes there, all the way to graphic slurs. Boseman plays Robinson resilient and quiet, with occasional flares of deep feeling, and it's beautiful to watch. Just as beautiful is his epic baseball performance: Even if you don't care about the sport, watching him dominate on the field is awe-inspiring. 

Mudbound

You may have heard of this movie because it led to Mary J. Blige being the first person to be nominated for both a singing and acting Academy Award in the same year (2017). But the epic story is just as impressive as her achievement: Two families struggle against social and racial injustices—and, at times, each other—in the post World War II South. It doesn't gloss over racism or make the story schmaltzy, and it also covers the traumas of war with equal intelligence. The issues are just as relevant today as they were then.

A Raisin in the Sun

Based on the award-winning play of the same name, this is a spectacular performance from acting legend Sidney Poitier. It's a bit dated at this point (the original came out in 1961) but it paved the way for honest stories about Black families. In the film, the Younger family receives a $10,000 insurance check after the patriarch dies, and suddenly their whole lives are upended. What should they do with the money? Could it really change their lives? Is change, or opportunity, even possible for them?

BlacKkKlansman

Pulled from Ron Stallworth's memoir of a similar name, the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs police department hopes to make an immediate impact by going after the KKK—by impersonating a white man. The third Spike Lee film on this list is the probably his most overtly funny film and, I'd argue, one of his most impactful too (it won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay). John David Washington—Denzel's son, and awesome in his own right—has pitch-perfect chemistry with Adam Driver as the white detective who infiltrates the Klan in person. We don't have to make much of a leap to the current political climate; Lee makes it for us, in stark terms.

Black Lives Matter

For the class of 2020, the future might be looking a little fuzzier than it did just a few months ago. It’s a tough time to break into the real world, so this year, give your college grad a boost that will get them excited to move forward. Perhaps a tech upgrade that’s just as savvy as they are or a style investment that’s sure to pay-off with big returns. Here are a few cutting-edge gifts that will help set them on the path to success, no matter where their next steps take them.

Tired of missing all your favorites from Moordale Secondary? Don't panic. The coming-of-age Netflix show is coming back for its second season on January 17, 2020.

We all fell in love with the high school drama/comedy when it premiered on Netflix in early January of this year; Netflix estimated that over 40 million households watched the show within the first four weeks. So, in February, the show was given the green-light to start working on the second season, and filming started later that spring. I mean, look how cute they looked at the first reading of the new season!

If you're late to the Sex Education train, here's what to know: The show follows 17-year-old Otis (played by Asa Butterfield) as he uses his knowledge he's learned from his sex therapist mother (played by Gillian Anderson) to good use. He becomes a counselor for his classmates for all things sex, not to mention all the other fun/terrifying aspects of puberty. The show has featured hot-button topics like abortion, slut-shaming, coming out, and revenge porn. It's also been highly praised for its LGBTQ+ representation and diverse cast of characters.

So grab your backpacks and freshen up your knowledge of British slang, for here's everything we know about season two of Sex Education.

The season two trailer is here, and it looks drama-filled.

The trailer reveals that Otis has left the clinic. He now wants to put all his focus on his new relationship with his new love interest, Ola Nyman, played by Patricia Allison, despite the small detail that his mother is dating Ola's father.

"It's a new term. No more clinic, no more drama. Maeve has moved on, and so have I," Otis says to his best friend Eric Effoing (Ncuti Gatwa.)

But of course, nothing is ever what it seems, and Otis is bombarded with requests for help due to the chlamydia outbreak at school, and it looks like everyone really needs his help. Despite the fact Otis claims the clinic is over, he and Maeve Wiley, played by Emma Mackey, seem to have to face the truth this season on their feelings for each other.

We see Maeve's jock ex-boyfriend Jackson Marchetti, played by Kedar Williams-Stirling, tell Otis, "Maeve broke up with me because she's in love with you."

The trailer seems to be Otis-centric, but creator Laurie Nunn told Digital Spy that this season might be a little more female-centric than the first."A lot of our female characters come to the foreground a little bit more in season two," she says. "It's subtle, but we lightly shift focus and spend a little bit more time with our girls and women, which is also really, really fun to watch."

We have some first images from Netflix.

Netflix knows what the people want, and the people want a first look at the new season. If your memory of what happened with Otis last season is a little foggy: We left off on him and Ola becoming a couple. This put a damper on the friendship between Otis and Maeve.

Fans of the show know that Otis is a bit of a late bloomer compared to his classmates sexual experiences, so season two will almost certainly feature Otis trying to figure out the physical aspect of his new relationship.

It'll be interesting to see what plays out when Otis and Ola discover that their parents are dating each other as well.

Maeve and the crew are also going through some major changes.

There's no reason to break a sweat—all your favorites are coming back this time around. Even Adam Groff, played by Connor Swindells, who at the end of last season was shipped off to a Navy faculty after discovering his feelings for Otis' best friend Eric Effoing, played by the wonderful Ncuti Gatwa.

As for Maeve and Aimee Gibs, played by Aimee Lou Wood, it looks like the duo have gotten themselves into a bit of trouble. In an interview with Teen Vogue, Mackey talked about Maeve and Aimee focusing more on their friendship in the second season."Their friendship comes to the forefront and center stage because I think there's something really beautiful there. I love Maeve and Aimee's interactions," she said. "Aimee Lou Woods, the actor, is such a joy to be around, so all the scenes we did together were such a laugh. Anything you see onscreen was just us having fun. A focus on female friendships would be amazing."

Mackey also discussed what she would like out of Maeve in the second season. "To see Maeve just carrying on being independent and trying to figure sh*t out for herself and also being able to ask for help," she said.

Look out for the new kids at school.

Three new faces will be coming to your screen, and it looks like they'll definitely be shaking things up a bit.

Chinenye Ezeudu will play Viv, a super smart and talented student who seems to be able to ace everything but love. (Perhaps Otis will be able to give her advice on that?) Then there's Sami Outalbali, who will play Rahim, a new French student who will be getting some major attention at Moordale Secondary.

Lastly, Isaac is a student played by George Robinson, and he'll join the series as the new boy who moves into Maeve's caravan park. (I smell a possible love interest now that Otis is occupied, but I guess we'll have to watch to find out.)

What will become of our beloved students as they tackle the wonders of high school this season? Who will hook up? Will Adam and Eric ever see each other again? We have so many questions. Until they get answered with the new season, we'll be re-watching the first season in all of its hilarious but heartfelt glory.

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As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s royal tour continues, Meghan Markle’s feminism has remained at the forefront. Case in point? Her Skype call Sunday to the Nalikule College of Education in Lilongwe, Malawi, where she spoke with women who went to school with assistance from the Campaign for Female Education, or CAMFED. Prince Harry traveled to Malawi to visit the school while Meghan remained in Cape Town, South Africa with Archie, before heading to Johannesburg—but the Duchess found a way to be present for an issue so close to her heart.

On the Sussex Royal Instagram account, the royals shared a video of members of the CAMFED alumni network, known as CAMA, greeting Meghan with song (and Meghan dancing in response). The caption explained the impact of the nonprofit, which is supported by the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust: “These CAMA women are part of a major network across Africa, which has 140,000 members and 17,500 in Malawi alone. These positive female role models, leaders and entrepreneurs, are working to lift their communities out of poverty. Money distributed by CAMA goes directly to each of their alumni, who then use their own resources to support another three children to attend school.”

According to Metro, Meghan told the CAMA members, "We’re just so proud as president and vice-president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust that we can support you in everything that you do because we cannot begin to express how valuable and vital that work is, we’re just incredibly proud to be part of it."

"I wish I could be with you," the Duchess continued. "We’re in South Africa right now—Archie’s taking a nap. I’m with you in spirit."

Angie Murimirwa, CAMFED’s executive director for Africa, told the Duchess, “Since you yourself were a young girl you have advocated for women as equal beings with the power to make lasting change, and I know this is something you will instil in Archie,” according to a post on the organization’s Instagram account.

“I always think of a saying in my local language, Shona: ‘Chinonzi rasa ndechirimumaoko kwete muropa,’” she continued. “It means ‘You can only be told to throw away what is in your hands, not what is in your blood.’ The fact that you care, that you advocate, that you shine a light on this and always have done, means so much.”

Last Thursday, the Duchess of Sussex met with female change-makers in Cape Town, as the BBC reports, including anti-apartheid activist Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, the last living leader of the 1956 Women's March, and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, anti-apartheid activist, doctor, and former World Bank managing director.

Meghan went on to share a powerful Instagram post, writing that it had "weighed heavily on [her] heart" to see "countless violations against women" in South Africa before beginning the royal tour. "Issues of gender inequality affect women throughout the world, independent of race, color, creed, or socioeconomic background. In the last week I’ve met with women from all walks of life—religious leaders such as the first female rabbi in Capetown, grassroots leaders in Nyanga at Mbokodo, community activists, parliamentarians, and so many more," she said.

"In sitting down with these forward thinkers, it was abundantly clear—it is not enough to simply hope for a better future; the only way forward is 'hope in action,'" the Duchess continued. "I’m eager to spend the next few days in South Africa continuing to learn, listen and absorb the resilience and optimism I’ve felt here."

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Well, class of 2019, it's official: You're adults, in some official sense of the word. Over the next few weeks, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll walk across a stage, shake hands with your dean, and smile for the camera. It’s a ritual that has continued for decades, but there’s something special about your class: You’re the last of the millennial generation to graduate college. Us elder millennials stayed up late hogging the family phone line, downloading N’Sync on Napster, and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Your class, the final millennials, has been sliding into your friends’ DMs since high school and never knew a world without Bieber. But, together, we share a total bafflement of Gen Z’s obsession with Tik Tok and complete misuse of the word Yeet.

I imagine you'll hear from some very accomplished commencement speakers, telling you that anything is possible if you follow your dreams and never quit—and that’s true. You’ll have opportunities that no generation before us has had, but you will also be facing an unprecedentedly challenging financial future. At some point after the adrenaline rush subsides, you might find yourself trying to figure out how to balance your mountain of student loan debt and new, astronomical living expenses, and I’m writing to assure you that you’re not alone. All millennials were born into Generation Broke, and today, I want to share some ideas for what can be done about it.

Older generations will take every opportunity to tell you that this economic struggle is somehow your fault, that you are “entitled” or simply spending your money poorly. But the truth is, we can do everything the “right” way—go to college, get a job, show up to work—yet unlike our parents or grandparents, we just can’t seem to get ahead. Where our parents could save enough for a home after just two years of renting, it takes us more than six years. And while boomers only had to work 306 hours at minimum wage to pay off a 4-year college tuition, our generation has to work 4,459 hours to do the same thing?? You’re choked by student loan debt, you give up half of your income on rent, you can’t really afford health insurance, and you definitely don’t have the money to start a family. What happened?

The primary reason millennials are the least financially secure generation in a century is that over the past few decades the cost of living has skyrocketed, but our wages haven’t. Even though the economy is technically still growing, most people in our generation aren’t seeing the benefits. If you look at the state of millennials today, nearly 50 percent of us have zero savings; almost 70 percent of us can't afford a $1,000 emergency expense. We’re on track for the worst income inequality in generations, and it’s not even our fault to begin with.

The expenses that hurt us the most—rent, healthcare, student loans, child care—are all the result of outdated industries that have become incredibly out of touch with the realities of our generation. As this election cycle gears up, we'll start to hear promises from 2020 candidates that they have a solution to fix these financial woes. Elizabeth Warren has announced that she will wipe out all of our student loan debt and make college free. Bernie Sanders has pledged to make our healthcare free.

It can be tempting to just sit back and wait for 2021, but you should know from experience that we can’t rely on elections going our way. As millennials, we have to be ready and willing to solve our own problems. By the time the next election is over, no matter who wins, the federal budget deficit will exceed $1 trillion, and student loan debt in the U.S. is projected to have already reached $2 trillion. We simply can’t wait to take action and we can’t count on any single politician to fix our problems. Our only immediate option when we encounter these broken systems is to create new business models that work for everyone now.

I’ll share a personal example: When renting an apartment, we’re required to pay an outrageous amount of money upfront. Landlords often ask for, among other things, first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and a security deposit. For a generation that barely has any savings, they may as well be telling us to hand over our first born child.

We could have waited for our government to fix this system, but instead a couple of friends and I worked on an idea that turned into a startup called Rhino. Together, we discovered that more than $45 billion of our generation’s hard earned savings are locked up in security deposits nationwide, and we came up with a solution that makes moving into an apartment far more affordable. Rather than tie up thousands of dollars when you sign a lease, we replaced the security deposit with a $5-per-month insurance plan. Renters are able to save money and landlords are still protected. In just one year, the concept has already saved people tens of millions of dollars. Think of suddenly having that $1,200 security deposit back in your checking account; $1,200 could translate into months of student loan payments or an emergency fund for healthcare costs.

What else can we solve together? In the coming years, you’ll probably find your Instagram feed evolving from graduation photos to engagement photos to baby photos—80 percent of new parents are millennials. And when (or if) you decide to take that leap, you might be faced with a very difficult decision: Stay in the workforce and try affording child care or keep one partner at home to raise the kids. The terrible irony is that child care can cost as much as your whole post-tax salary. The tightrope walk continues. But we can fix this.

As a generation, we need more bold attempts to turn the odds back in our favor. Our workforce is set to be 50 percent contractors by 2030; can we create a new benefits system for a new-age workforce? The median down payment on a home has increased to $20,000; can we turn months or years of rent payments into the down payment for future home ownership? Can we tie college degrees to future income so we aren’t drowning in student loans?

We cannot be afraid to fail, and we will need a relentless entrepreneurial spirit to continue creating shots on goal. To help do our part, my partners and I at Kairos have been focused on building more solutions to student loans, healthcare, childcare, and housing costs. In addition to getting rid of security deposits, we are creating a housing network to save people hundreds a month on rent. We are creating a membership to help new families save thousands of dollars on child care, and a delivery service to provide working parents with affordable, nutritious baby food right to their door. I tell you all this because I want you to know that many of us are trying, and you have allies amongst the ‘elder millennials’ too.

Millennials are the most entrepreneurial generation. Together we can use the same spirit of creative ingenuity to come up with real solutions to the crazy costs of living, so that they give us feelings of excitement rather than doom. If more of us do so, there’s a future in which we don’t have to automatically write off the idea of buying a house because we can’t afford it, and in which we can actually envision making enough to start putting money into savings. Together, we can create businesses that will bring down these insane costs and provide not just our generation, but future ones as well, a path to unprecedented economic prosperity.

Millennials: This Is Everything That's Happened In Your Generation

Ankur Jain is the Founder and Co-CEO of Kairos, working to make housing, student loans, healthcare, and child care more affordable. He was previously the VP of Product at Tinder.

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On Wednesday, Kate Middleton stepped out for the Royal Foundation's Mental Health in Education conference to discuss an issue near and dear to her heart: children's mental health issues.

During the conference, Kate attended several discussions and panel sessions, including one about the benefits of integrating mental health training into teacher training courses, during which the Duchess of Cambridge took the opportunity to speak up and share some of her own experiences.

Kate got incredibly candid while advocating for mental health training for educators. Per People, she said: 

The royal is a mother of three to Prince George, 5, Princess Charlotte, 3, and little baby Prince Louis, 10 months. Kate is an outspoken advocate of mental health support for children and focuses much of her charity work on the topic.

"Providing a specific training for newly-qualified teachers helps with their understanding with how children come to school with everyday challenges—whether it’s from home life or school life," explained Catherine Roche, the chief executive of Place2be, one of Kate's favorite charities.

This story about refugee education was produced in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

A sea of 76 students in bright violet uniforms with pointed white collars confronted Jessica Deng as she stepped into her classroom. The students—all girls in the eighth grade—crowded around worn wooden desks and battered textbooks as she briskly set them to work on a math problem. The equatorial sun had begun to heat up the September day and burned through the curtainless windows of Deng’s classroom at Bahr El Naam Primary School, a compound of dusty one-story cement rooms lacking air conditioning and electricity in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya.

Deng is just 21; her students are only a few years younger. Standing tall in a black T-shirt and gray slacks, a braided bun on top of her head, she carries a red pen as she walks up and down the aisles. The girls watch her pass with eager eyes and wave their notebooks for her to correct.

Some want to be lawyers or doctors. One wants to be a pilot. For most, the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving these ambitions are insurmountable.

Deng herself wonders if she will reach her goals. She wants to go to college to study public health. She’s applied for a scholarship to a university in Canada. But it’s highly competitive; she’s already been rejected. Twice.

“My students, myself, every other girl or woman that is in the camp, if all of us were given the opportunity to get quality educations somewhere else, we would lead better lives,” Deng says. “We would go back to our homelands and change some things.”

These young, resilient girls are an untapped resource. But they’re at risk of being indirect casualties of entrenched conflicts, their potential squandered in underfunded schools and wasted by lack of opportunity.

For now, Deng and her students are stuck—along with 185,000 other refugees—in Kakuma. It’s a purgatory where most people depend on the subsistence rations passed out by the U.N. for survival. They're barred from working outside the camp and must search for jobs within the small economy that has sprung up—running makeshift shops selling soda or shoes or working for aid organizations.

Career options are limited, and so are chances to leave. Kakuma’s refugees were driven from their homes in countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, or South Sudan by war or famine. Going home is seldom a realistic option. Resettlement in another country is a long and difficult process that less than 1 percent of refugees ever achieve.

The United States resettles more refugees than any other country, but the number allowed in has been decreasing steadily since President Trump took office. In 2016, the United States welcomed 84,994 refugees, just six shy of its cap. In September, the Trump Administration proposed lowering the cap to 30,000.

The administration has defended the reductions in part by arguing that refugees don’t want to come to the United States; they want to go home. That’s not entirely wrong. None of the refugees I meet during a week reporting in Kakuma mention coming to the United States. Many talk instead about returning home and working to rebuild once violence subsides.

But when I ask what they wish outsiders knew about their lives, most say they want people to understand that Kakuma is an exceptionally tough place to live. They stay only because they have no other options. Many students get upset talking about their education, frustration showing on their faces. They don’t want much: A light so they can study at night. Smaller classes. Access to computers.

“More than 50 percent are not living how they wanted to live,” Deng says of her students. “They want to get out.”

One day I see a girl unconscious—she fainted during a break between classes. The school doesn’t have a nurse. Instead, the girl’s friends carry her into a space between two buildings seeking room and shade. They gather around, fretting and shaking her. The scene escapes the notice of most students and teachers. The teacher I’m talking to checks in and tells me the girl has been fainting regularly lately, but she’ll wake up. There’s nothing else to be done.

The harsh reality here contributes to low school enrollment, particularly among girls, that only gets worse as they get older. Forty percent of primary school students in Kakuma are girls, but they make up less than a quarter of all secondary school enrollments. That’s despite research that shows educating girls leads to a drop in child marriage and child mortality rates and an increase in female earnings.

In the camp and elsewhere, agencies work to change cultural beliefs that girls don’t need to be educated or should be married off as teens to the highest bidder. Programs have begun to make progress increasing female retention in school, but a lack of resources makes it hard for these girls to capitalize on the slowly shifting attitudes.

Nearly 20 million refugees live under the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate, more than half of whom are under the age of 18. More than a third of those children and teens don’t attend school. When they do, the schools are chronically underfunded. Windle Trust Kenya, the nonprofit that runs Kakuma’s secondary schools in partnership with UNHCR, lacks the money to do more than triage. It spends just $153 per pupil. (By comparison, per pupil sending in the United States tops $11,000.) That’s not enough money to reduce class sizes that frequently surpass 100, or make sure every student has access to textbooks.

Young women here, like Deng and her students, know full well the obstacles they face. And yet they get up each morning and make the trek to school on foot, each hoping they might be the one to get out. “It sometimes breaks our hearts that you’ve trained them, but at the end of the day they’re still in the camp,” says Kakuma’s Greenlight Secondary School Principal Robert Bett. “Their lives haven’t changed.”

In 1991, Kakuma was just a small town in a barren part of Kenya. The camp was established as a UNHCR location in 1992 when thousands of refugees—including the orphaned Lost Boys of Sudan—began arriving. Soon, more refugees poured in from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. By 2014, Kakuma was 58,000 people over capacity and the UN created a new settlement just north to accommodate those continuing to flee.

Deng’s parents were among those who came to Kakuma to escape the civil war in Sudan. They don’t tell Deng much about what drove them from their home, and she doesn’t ask. When they arrived in 1992, refugees were creating a makeshift city of tarp and mudbrick homes with dirt floors. These small dwellings covered a landscape previously dotted with the one thorny tree stubborn enough to grow in the cruel conditions.

Deng was born at the camp in 1997. In some ways, growing up in the camp—surrounded by a variety of cultures as well as fellow South Sudanese refugees—was exciting. “But at the same time, it was not easy,” she says. “I didn’t get everything I should have gotten as a child.”

Refugees rely on UN disbursements for most of their food—they eat the same thing over and over again and there isn’t always enough to go around. On each block, there’s one water tap where people line up daily, holding empty jerry cans to fill.

Most days, the sun is hot and unforgiving. But when the rain comes, it often floods the camp and washes away homes. It happened to Deng’s family “all the time” when she was younger, before they were able to move to higher ground, she says. “We’d have to come back again and build it again because there’s no where we can go.”

She attended primary school at Bahr El Naam, the same all-girls school where she currently teaches. She sometimes had a hard time paying attention in the overcrowded classrooms. The din of dozens of students packed in the room meant she sometimes “couldn’t even hear what teachers were saying.”

Although the physical conditions of Bahr El Naam have improved since Deng was a student—better buildings, more trees—many of the problems remain. The UN aims to have a 40:1 student-to-teacher ratio in its refugee schools. In Kakuma, there are more than 95 students for each teacher. I visit one classroom that has more than 200 students, leaving the teacher only a few square feet in which to stand. There aren’t enough textbooks or desks; students in the early grades must sit on the floor.

About 85 percent of teachers are refugees themselves, most of whom have gone to school at the camp and many of whom begin teaching without any formal training. The only qualification necessary is a high school degree.

Deng fell into teaching without any real enthusiasm shortly after finishing secondary school. She wanted a job and there were few other options. She earns about $74 a month.

At first, she struggled to manage her students. But then she signed up for a training program called Teachers for Teachers. (Disclaimer: Teachers for Teachers is run by Teachers College, Columbia University. The Hechinger Report is an independent unit based at Teachers College.) The program taught her how to control her classroom and keep her students’ attention. It also helped her grow to love teaching. “When a girl understands mathematics—and I had trouble getting maths in school—but when I teach and somebody understands, it feels nice,” she tells me.

Deng’s family was able to pull together enough money from relatives to send her to a boarding school in the country’s capital, Nairobi. (In Kenya, boarding schools generally offer the highest quality education.) Deng recalls her mother saying, “I’m not educated, but if I was, we wouldn’t be living like this. So it’s your turn to be educated and not live like this.”

Many men in the community scoffed at the idea that Deng would go away for high school, telling her that girls were stupid and she would drop out. Deng was tempted, as she struggled with subjects like chemistry and geography and the intense pressure to do well on tests. One time, she failed an exam badly, despite studying hard, and came to her teacher crying. “I wanted to go home,” she recalls. “I told her I was very discouraged…I rather would stay at home than get such results.” Her teacher talked her down.

She never forgot the naysayers. “It was my drive,” she says. “It’s what made me actually complete my secondary school…I did it for myself, but I also wanted to prove others wrong.”

Looking back, Deng says her parents were right to send her away, even if it meant only going home once in four years. “They knew what I would turn out to be if I continued learning in the refugee camp,” she says. “I would not be who I am right now.” Leaving Kakuma for high school, “gave me the opportunity to realize who I was and what I could do, other than just being a refugee.”

Had Deng not gone to boarding school, she likely would have attended Kakuma Refugee Secondary School. Opened in 1992, it’s the oldest of the secondary schools at the camp and enrolls more than 3,000 students. Because of space issues, one group of students comes in the morning and the other comes in the afternoon.

The five secondary day schools in Kakuma face many of the same problems as primary schools. The classrooms are overcrowded; students sit four or five across at desks designed for three. They share textbooks among as many as eight other pupils. Schools don’t have the money to do all the science labs in the curriculum.

Marie Jeserine, a 20-year-old in her third year of high school, has other gripes. She wants a bigger library and more latrines (the school has 18 right now for 3,000 students, although an additional 16 are under construction). She’d also like school buses. Jeserine walks 50 minutes to get to school. By the time she arrives, she’s already tired.

She says her father sometimes tells her to just stay home: “Since you will stay here in the camp, you have gained nothing so you should not go to school.”

Like Deng, Jeserine was born in Kakuma and struggles to remain hopeful about life after high school. It’s helpful to meet with the school counselor. “She tells me not to give up, that there are many things in the future waiting for me,” Jeserine says. Attending university is one of them, she hopes.

The year before Deng graduated high school, a new option opened up right along the edge of the camp: the Morneau Shepell Secondary School for Girls, the first refugee boarding school in the world. Now, a relatively small group of girls (352) benefit from the most intensive intervention to improve female education at the camp.

Martha John Korok, 19, is one of them. She’s among the thousands of South Sudanese driven from their homes in the last decade. Her family first tried to outrun the violence without leaving the country, moving from place to place. But Korok remembers the gunshots each night. In South Sudan, “you can’t spend a night without bullet,” she says.

Her family heard about a safe haven in Kenya, and in February 2013, they fled on UN transport to Kakuma with nothing but a few possessions.

Korok thought the camp would be like a real city, fully developed with “lights all around.” Instead, she saw single-room shacks, dust, and fences. There were fences everywhere. “I thought maybe they were keeping cattle,” she says. “It was all about human beings.”

She enrolled in primary school, where she watched many of her female classmates drop out. She had to ignore the boys who felt threatened by her and told her a girl couldn’t do well academically. “You’re not supposed to be higher than them,” she explains.

In September 2013, her father unexpectedly passed away, after seeking help for a headache. Korok blames the health care providers. Her uncles back in South Sudan tried to convince the family to return so they could arrange a marriage for her. Her mother ignored them and the uncles stopped sending her family money.

The whole ordeal strengthened Korok’s resolve to do well in school. She had a new dream: She would become a doctor and prevent what happened to her dad from happening to others. So when she got the chance to attend Morneau Shepell, she took it.

Girls who perform well enough on their exit exam from primary school are invited to apply. From there, school officials work with the UNHCR to determine which girls need protection the most—which ones are at risk for forced marriage or violence, are in single parent homes, or are orphans. For the 2018 school year, there were 1,000 applications for 90 spots.

Principal Irene Kinyanjui says that every morning at the start of a new term as many as 20 girls show up asking to be enrolled. A self-proclaimed “polite notice” on the deputy principal’s door announces “there are no vacancies in all the classes.”

At Morneau Shepell, the girls live in an educational oasis set away from the chaos of camp. They don’t have to worry about assault on the walk to school. They have electricity (unless it’s too cloudy for the solar power to work well). The classes are relatively small (around 40 students each) and are full of laughter.

When classes finish, students meander in groups to their dormitories to change from their plaid skirts and teal T-shirts into colorful sundresses. They gather in the dining hall on weekends to hold dance parties or watch movies on the school’s small flat screen television. Some girls are married; their husbands can come to visit, but the girls can’t leave campus during term.

Morneau Shepell, the Canadian-based human resource company that funds the program, opened the school after learning about the barriers girls face. In 2016, the firm pledged more than $1 million over five years to the school, which costs $700 per pupil to run each year, including teacher salaries, dorm supplies, and security.

Korok remains grateful that Morneau Shepell has provided her with a refuge within the camp and allowed her to focus on school, giving her a chance at a future. A future that she, like Deng, has pinned on Canada.

In Kakuma, going to Canada is the holy grail of post-secondary plans. Girls at Morneau Shepell have a shot at a scholarship to the University of Toronto. They must meet minimum requirements on the end-of-high-school exam and go through an interview, although not everyone who qualifies gets in. Last year, fewer than 10 of Morneau Shepell’s 70 graduates earned a spot at the university.

Still, their odds are better than those students from other Kakuma secondary schools, who must try for a scholarship run by the World University Service of Canada (WUSC). It allows refugees living in five countries, including Kenya, to resettle and attend a university in Canada. This is the scholarship Deng has applied for three times.

In 2017, more than 2,000 students from the five countries applied for 130 spots. Student visas are almost impossible for refugees to get, so this opportunity is one of best options students have to get out Kakuma and continue their education.

While waiting for word on her application, Deng teaches classes to primary school girls on sexual assault prevention. She works on an online diploma course through Regis University, one of 10 schools that the camp has partnered with to offer higher education. She also waits to hear about two other scholarships at universities in Kenya.

Deng tries to keep her expectations about the Canadian scholarship low to avoid the devastation she felt when rejected the previous two times. She’s even thought about going to South Sudan despite the dangers there.

Then, in September, after weeks of waiting, the news finally arrives: Deng gets a text message telling her she’s secured a scholarship to Canada. She’s one of 31 applicants from Kakuma, and 124 refugees overall—a majority of whom are girls—selected to begin classes in 2019.

Deng is so happy, she cries for the first 20 minutes after reading the news. “I knew that I could do this,” she says. “That I deserved it.”

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Yesterday, Meghan Markle attended a meeting with The Association of Commonwealth Universities at King’s College London, where she discussed the role of higher education. Though the gathering was closed to the public, Kensington Palace shared a photo of the royal at work, discussing issues like human trafficking, modern slavery, gender equality, peace and reconciliation, and climate change. Markle was pictured wearing a black dress with a wool coat draped over her shoulders. (She also debuted what appeared to be a haircut.)

While we don't have much information on her dress, we do know Meghan's beige coat is from Canadian brand Aritzia. (Before she became a royal, Meghan lived in Canada for a period of time while filming her show Suits.)

Markle has worn the label several times before, including earlier this year when she and Prince Harry visited some of the participants in the Invictus Games. The label has become one of Meghan's favorites, which makes sense because it offers tailored, sophisticated preppy basics. Her exact coat is still available to shop, but it also comes in two other colors should you have enough beige/blush outerwear in your wardrobe. The Duchess of Sussex, however, loves sticking to neutral hues.

If you need more beige outerwear options, check out the ones below, too.

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Last week, Secretary of the Department of Education Betsy DeVos announced rulings that would significantly limit Title IX, the 1972 civil rights act that made it unlawful to discriminate against students “on the basis of sex.” Typically, the law as it stands has made it easier for women to get equal education at the college level, but DeVos’s proposed changes target one aspect of the law in particular: They make it so that people accused of sexual harassment and misconduct on campus will have far more options than the people who accuse them, potentially putting power into the hands of rapists and taking it away from survivors.

Sexual assault among college students is already an epidemic. RAINN reports that nearly 12 percent of college students experience rape or sexual assault (taking into account that many survivors never report), and universities are often responsible for determining how reporting and due process play out. The proposed changes would make this problem far worse by, among other things, forcing accusers to confront the people they’re accusing, limiting the resources for reporting, and tying universities’ hands when it comes to seeking justice for survivors. That likely means that even fewer survivors will report, greatly exacerbating the already alarming statistic.

Fortunately, there is something you can do to stop these propose changes. The rules are now open to a comment period, which means the public can air their concerns and, if written in a correct and compelling manner, the department must respond or else face potential lawsuits. (If you want to skip the following explanations, scroll down to where it says “How can I make sure my comment is read?” to find out the best practices for filing.)

DeVos’s proposed changes are sweeping but convoluted, so to find out exactly what they mean for survivors of campus sexual assault—and how best to do something about them—Marie Claire spoke with Jess Davidson, executive director of the advocacy organization End Rape on Campus. Here’s everything you need to know:

What does Title IX have to do with sexual assault?

Even if you don’t know the specifics, you probably recognize the name Title IX from things like sports and admissions. It was a segment of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which broadly outlined the ways learning institutions had to conduct themselves. Title IX is the most notable part, and it reads:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

It’s often and famously used to guarantee that women have equal access to things like sports, on-campus housing, education, and even employment opportunities.

Davidson explains that Title IX started being applied to sexual assault in the 1980s. “If Title IX is in place to prevent people from experiencing lack of equal access to education, there was probably a case to be made that experiencing sexual violence was preventing equal access to education,” she says. “Courts have upheld that students have a right to not be assaulted and harassed in education and schools have a responsibility to respond when they’re aware of it, and they have to help student protect their Title IX rights.”

So what do these proposed changes do to Title IX?

Davidson points to three big changes that would seriously impact people wishing to seek recourse for sexual harassment. The first is a rule change that would make a university no longer responsible for students who are assaulted off-campus. “That is extraordinarily harmful. Nine out of every ten students live off-campus,” she says. “This rule would leave out all students who go to community colleges, who go to technical colleges, cosmetology school, students who live at home to save money, students who go to schools that don’t have the endowment to have a dorm—all of those students would be left out by that policy.”

The new rules would also change who a student could report their sexual assault to, and what that person’s ability to pursue action would look like. “Right now, if a student reports to their coach or to their student government advisor, then that person is responsible for going to the Title IX office and helping the university become aware of this incident and take action if that’s what the survivor would like.” This regulation would change the definition of who the survivor could report to, and if they didn’t report to the right person initially then the university would not be responsible for handling the incident.

This one makes very little sense: A survivor would likely talk to someone they believe would support them—a coach or trusted professor—and not the dean or an administrator they may have never met before. That means that many cases will go unreported. “We’re going to see fewer cases get to the Title IX office, through the Department of Education cutting students off at the knees there.”

And a third rule change would redefine sexual harassment that violates Title IX rights as “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” so that the survivor can prove that they had already lost access to education as a result of it. “It’s unconscionable,” says Davidson of the rule. “What we’re going to see is a lot of students trying to get assistance for sexual harassment and them being turned away.”

She also points to the impact this would have on students below the college level. “We are going to see a disproportionate impact on young brown and black girls, too, who experience disproportionate sexual harassment.”

One way this would manifest? According to the Washington Post, it would mean that the accused would not only get to look at all the evidence a school investigation has produced against them, but be able to cross-examine the person accusing them of harassment or assault, which could further traumatize survivors.

How is Secretary DeVos defending this?

DeVos has said that the existing system is unfair to the accused. But, says Davidson, “What the secretary is doing to these policies isn’t making the process fair; it’s preventing students from accessing the process whatsoever.”

Though Davidson says she doesn’t have insight into DeVos’s thought process, she identifies what she thinks is at least one clear motivation. “There’s a section in the regulation that talks about how this is going to save schools money, because it’s going to reduce the number of investigations—in the K-12 level by 51 percent and in college campuses by 39 percent,” she says. “So I think we’re seeing a motivation to prevent people from accessing help whatsoever, because it’s going to save schools money and time if they don’t have to investigate sexual assault and harassment when it’s happening.”

Can these rule changes be stopped?

Yes, but you’ll have to help. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—stay with me here—is a requirement for a period called Notice and Comment. When the comment period opens on regulations.gov, the public is invited to comment on the rule change by following specific comment guidelines. If those guidelines are met, then the government is legally required to consider what you’ve said. If they don’t listen to your comment, they are required to explain why.

“If it seems that they did not take these comments truly into consideration, that they just moved forward with what they wanted, [then] you can sue them and stop the rule in court,” says Davidson.

How can I make sure my comment is read?

The site HandsOffIX.org—a partnership between End Rape on Campus and the youth-led project Know Your IX—hopes to make the process as simple as possible. When the comment period opens, likely later this week, head to HandsOffIX.org to view data you can use in your comment, alternatives you can propose, and foreseeable problems with DeVos’ rule changes. If you write your own comment, the site will also provide the opportunity to have it vetted by a law student, who can make sure it will count under the APA. The site will also set up tools if you want to host your own comment-writing events around the country.

“We need hundreds of thousands of people to submit comments, because it can really show that the public is resoundingly opposed to this rule and the government moves forward with it anyway, we can stop this in court.”

Even if you think these rule changes don’t affect you, they might pave the way for something that does. If Title IX is gutted, it could be a harbinger for more Trump administration attacks on civil rights. There’s a way to stop these proposed changes, but we have to act now.

It’s not hyperbolic to say that the future depends on us doing something.

We’ll update as more information becomes available.

This story about school violence was produced in a collaboration between The Trace, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to shining a light on America's gun violence crisis; The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education; and Marie Claire.

One central message of post-Parkland activism: Gun violence has changed what it means to be a student in America. Teachers say that everything has changed for them, too.

In a survey conducted by Educators for Excellence, a teacher-led advocacy group, gun violence ranked as teachers’ number one school safety concern. Arming teachers is among the recommendations offered by the Department of Education in an upcoming report, but it would be unpopular: The survey found that 65 percent of teachers are against carrying firearms to protect students from active shooters.

As educators settle into the 2018–19 school year, we asked nine teachers and administrators how they wrestle with one persistent truth about American gun violence: It can happen anywhere.

Their responses reflect their different backgrounds, experiences, and student populations. One teacher from rural Kansas worries that her small town isn’t adequately prepared to respond to a school shooting. Another recalls fielding difficult questions from first-graders after an active shooter drill. Some told us of the classroom supplies they’ve transformed into tools of survival: a cement hall pass ready to be used as a bludgeon, a ball of yarn that can double as a tourniquet band. An educator in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where violent crime is high, isn’t worried about a mass shooting: Gun violence is an ever-present threat for his students. But all teachers agree that in the America of today, their job is no longer just about helping students learn—it’s also about keeping children safe.

“The day that I have to carry a gun as a requirement for me to teach, I’m done.”

Harley Brook is about to enter his 12th year of teaching English at a public high school near Chicago.

“I have a bookshelf in my room. I used to think, I’m going to populate this with books in case a kid needs something to read. Now, every year, when I go back to restock that bookshelf, there’s a part of me that’s also thinking, This is something a kid could pick up and throw if someone made their way into my classroom. It’s mind-blowing to me that that’s something I even have to think about.

The day that I have to carry a gun as a requirement for me to teach, I’m done. I’ll find some other way to make use of my education and my background and experience. I didn’t get into this because I want ‘To teach, protect, and serve’ to be my job description.”

“I have yet to hear a student add ‘guns’ to a list of things that would make them feel safe.”

Nina Leuzzi has taught pre-K in Boston for 10 years. She is now the dean of School Culture and Community at a Boston charter school, where she also teaches educators how to support students who have experienced trauma and create supportive classroom communities.

“If I’m a kid and I walk into a school where my teacher had a handgun and there were metal detectors, I think my anxiety level would be significantly higher than if I walked in and my teacher gave me a hug, or if I knew that there were a counselor I could talk to if something happened at home that night or that morning. Those are the kinds of things that breathe safety into schools.

In my 10 years of teaching, I have yet to hear a student add ‘guns’ to a list of things that would make them feel safe. What they’re really looking for is to feel like they’re cared for.”

“This really could happen.”

Nivia Vizurraga is going into her 12th year of teaching. She currently teaches K–5 special education at an elementary school in Reseda, California.

“During the drills, we close our blinds, lock our doors and have our students go under the tables or somewhere they could actually hide. In the moment of the drill, it is a somewhat scary situation. After 15 or 20 minutes, the principal will say the drill is over, but then there’s the conversation that happens afterward.

The students ask questions like, ‘If someone knocks on the door, should we answer?’ ‘When do our parents get called?’ ‘Are we going to be okay?’

It’s difficult as a teacher because you want to let your children know that they are safe. But you also have to be realistic in telling them that this really could happen.”

“Would I ask a teacher to put their life on the line for my kids?”

Melissa Dorcemus is in her seventh year of teaching. She currently teaches ninth-grade special education math at a high school in New York City.

“My husband is in law enforcement. We’ve had discussions about putting his life on the line in his job. When I first started teaching, that wasn’t something I thought about for myself. I never thought I would be the person defending a room of innocent children. The thought has started to cross my mind more as tragedies keep happening.

Now, I’m pregnant. I’ve gotten very emotional thinking about sending my own child to school someday. Would I ask a teacher to put his or her life on the line for my kids? Would I do it for other people’s kids? You love them like they’re your own, but at the end of the day, they’re not.

If I do this for my class, will I be home for my baby?”

“My students aren’t worried about mass shootings. It’s when they leave school that they are more at risk.”

Isaiah Sago taught math for 10 years in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He recently started a new position as a restorative justice teacher advisor for Los Angeles Unified School District, working inside schools to help teachers create safe and welcoming classrooms.

“We’ve never dealt with any gun violence on campus. We have had students who stay on campus longer because they feel more protected at school versus out in their community.

Gun violence in Watts is not uncommon. Whether it’s from police officers or whether it’s from gangs or the projects, it’s something students are used to. So for most of my kids, school is somewhere to get away from all that. It’s a safe haven for them. [Arming teachers] would make it even harder for my students.”

“We’ve gone from ‘I’m here to help you prepare for your future’ to ‘I’m here to decide who gets to live and who gets to die.’”

Margo L. going on two decades spent teaching social studies at a public school in rural Kansas.

“We live in a small, rural town that has one police officer on duty and an extremely small hospital. I’m not sure it has ever seen a gunshot wound. Last spring, after Parkland, we had a full-blown active-shooter drill to test our town’s response. Student actors had fake blood on them with different injuries to test whether the hospital would be able to respond to those types of wounds.

During the drill, they asked us to do what we would actually do in the situation. Once you’re in lockdown, you’re not supposed to open the door, even if you know the person, because school shooters have been students. They placed one of my best friend’s kids outside my room. She was crying. I failed. I opened the door and pulled her in. She had been ‘shot’ in the leg. I had some yarn in my cabinet, so I tied a tourniquet around her leg. If this were real, I don’t think I would be able to let a kid die out in the hallway.

I was shocked at how emotional I became. We’re at the place where I have to decide whether the kid in the hall gets saved or whether I open up my students in my classroom to possible harm. We’ve gone from ‘I’m here to help you prepare for your future’ to ‘I’m here to decide who gets to live and who gets to die.’ It’s crazy to me that that’s now part of my job.

I have an extremely heavy hall pass. My plan is to stand by the door with that. Whoever enters is going to get a face full of concrete. We’ve also got bug spray that can shoot up to twenty feet. And I’ve got a baseball bat locked away in my closet.”

“I would take a bullet for my kids, but I shouldn't have to.”

Marla Savage teaches third grade in New Jersey. This school year will be her eighth year of teaching.

“Sometimes we tell the kids that we do the drills in case there's ever bad weather or a wild animal gets in the building. But by third grade, the kids know that's not true.

During the drills, administration always walks around and checks the whole building, making sure doors are locked. When I hear our doorknob jiggle, it always gives me goose bumps. I look at these amazing, beautiful children in front of me, huddled together silently in the closet. I would take a bullet for my kids, but I shouldn't have to.”

“We need help to help these kids.”

Christina Kim is going into her 14th year teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is currently a Title III instructional coach working with English language learner students.

“You hear stories about the kids who have committed mass shootings and you hear about how they were bullied or were struggling emotionally. I wonder what situation we would be in now if we had counselors, school psychologists, or people specialized in trauma consistently working on school campuses with these students.

At one school site I worked at, we had a student who witnessed his father being arrested by cops. He saw them pull a gun on him. He was running out of the classroom all the time, bullying other kids, and pushing and kicking adults. I used all the tools I had to help him, but I realized that this situation was beyond my skill set. He was calling out for help. We needed someone who was specialized in trauma to help him. We need help to help these kids. We need resources.”

“After Parkland, I bought a baseball bat that I keep in my classroom closet.”

Michael Raney is in her eighth year of teaching. She teaches third grade in a public school district in Texas.

“After Parkland, I bought a baseball bat that I keep in my closet. I don’t know if it would be useful in the event of a shooting. But as a teacher, you want to be prepared.

When I’m doing something like buying a baseball bat or Googling ‘What are strategies to use in a school shooting?’ I just keep thinking, This shouldn’t be my problem. This is not the level at which this needs to be handled.”

Title IX is often conflated with girl power in sports. That's because the number of athletic scholarships a university offers men and women is perhaps the easiest thing to enforce under the law. And the number of girls who participate in high school athletics has risen ten-fold since its passing, from 300,000 nationwide in 1971 to over 3 million today. It's a choice that sets them up for success later on in life: Research shows that among C-level business women, 94 percent played sports and over half competed at the collegiate level.

But the bill wasn't passed into federal law on this day in 1972 to create a nation of future female Olympians. In fact, it states that: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

For those of us born in the years since, it's easy to overlook the fact that the basic, fundamental fairness of the law wasn't always a given. "When I was a kid, I couldn't figure out why we didn't have any woman lawyers and doctors," says tennis champion and feminist icon Billie Jean King. "But then I found out later the classroom quotas in those graduate programs only allowed for five percent to be women. Without Title IX, we'd still have those quotas."

To be sure, we've come a long way toward gender equality in the last 45 years. According to a January report from the American Bar Association, women made up 47 percent of law school graduates in the class of 2015, the most recent year for which that data is publicly available. But when it comes to leadership positions, we still have a long way to go. Only 31 percent of law school deans are women, while just 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies employ women as general counsel. Gender parity has yet to be reached at the top tier of nearly any field. Two egregious examples: Women are CEOs of just 28 companies in the S&P 500, and directed only seven percent of the top 250 grossing movies released in 2016.

Why does it matter that women are equally represented? Well, aside from basic human decency and respect for the Civil Rights Act, a recent Harvard University study concluded that you will be safer and healthier if your physician is female. It estimated that if male doctors provided the same level of personalized, patient-focused care that their female counterparts do, 32,000 fewer Americans would die each year. In spite of this, female doctors are paid less money and promoted less often.

But perhaps the place where women most need to catch up is in the United States Congress. Women make up approximately 51 percent of the American population, and there are 435 members of our House of Representatives. Eighty-three are women. That's just 18 percent. The U.S. Senate is slightly better, but still disturbingly bereft: Just 21 of our 100 senators are women. For the past month, thirteen male senators have been writing health care reform that will shape one-sixth of our economy without the input of one female voice. Is it any wonder, then, that the bill strips President Obama's mandate that all health insurance plans cover maternity care?

While Title IX has done wonders to make sure that women and girls have the same opportunities that boys and men do in educational settings, we can't rely on it to mandate that half of all jobs go to women; that's not what it does. And of course, discrepancies in the workforce and in government are not entirely due to discrimination. (Millions of women choose to focus on child-rearing, for example, rather than pursue a demanding career—a perfectly legitimate choice.) But we can look to the legislation for inspiration as we fight to narrow the gap. That 47 percent of all the people graduating law school today are women would have been unthinkable in 1972.

Warren Buffett famously said that one of the main reasons he has achieved so much success in his life is he was only competing with half the population. To wit, we are not going to have a country that works for women until we have equal representation in its highest institutions.

So on this, the 45th anniversary of Title IX, I encourage each of you to take a minute out of your day to locate an exhausted woman in your life and tell her you think she's doing a great job. Tomorrow, think about the ladies you know who would make strong leaders in your community or at work, and encourage them to apply for, or step into, open leadership positions. And the day after that, maybe visit this website and nominate someone you know to run for office. When she wins, we'll be one person closer to the egalitarian utopia of Title IX's dreams.

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In 2005, Tina Kieffer, then editor-in-chief of Marie Claire France, was on a flight home from Cambodia with an ill 5-year-old girl named Chandara in her arms and an idea forming in her mind: a school for poor girls in Cambodia that would be a refuge from the destitution and child prostitution that still plague the country even decades after the Khmer Rouge's devastating genocide.

Months earlier, Kieffer had been visiting a Cambodian orphanage to donate clothes when she came across Chandara, a weak, crying little girl unable to make eye contact. "I was traveling with my two youngest children," says Kieffer. "After we left the orphanage, I thought about Chandara the whole time during our travels in Cambodia, because I was very upset. She was so sad." Back home in Paris, she checked in and learned that the 5-year-old was sick with a disease that prevented her from being adopted, so Kieffer returned to Cambodia with a medical visa to take Chandara back to France for treatment. She eventually adopted the tiny patient in her care, and in 2005, with the help of Marie Claire, she founded the nonprofit Toutes à l'école, opening a school months later for 92 girls in a rural area 12 kilometers from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. The school's name? Happy Chandara.

Today, Happy Chandara has 1,200 students and a campus with a primary school; secondary school; gym; dormitory; and vocational, medical, and social centers. As Kieffer explains, Cambodian families typically send their sons for schooling instead of their daughters, and the impoverished, uneducated girls often turn to prostitution to make money as they get older. That's one reason she decided to start the nonprofit; another is that educating women benefits the country as a whole. "Girls become mothers who pass knowledge down to their daughters and sons," she says. In 2009, Kieffer retired from Marie Claire to devote all her time to managing Toutes à l'école from Paris.

At Happy Chandara, personal and academic health are inseparable: The school offers medical and dental care, and also boards more than 130 girls who come from homes that are unsafe or too far away. Last year, Happy Chandara took in Sokunthea, an 11-year-old girl whose father had killed her mother (her little sister enrolled soon after). "Sometimes we see a shadow darkening her eyes, but she still lives the life a child her age should, laughing and playing with her friends," says Kieffer. "Here, the girls find a place to be themselves and grow." They also succeed academically: For the past two years, 100 percent of graduating students have passed the country's national exams.

These achievements take the dedication of the school's entire staff as well as Kieffer's steadfast fundraising efforts, which include partnerships with corporate donors. This month, for example, beauty company L'Occitane and Marie Claire have teamed up to create and sell La Flamme Marie Claire, a verbena-scented candle that will benefit charities focused on educating women. All profits from the candle's sale will be divided among Toutes à l'école; Entrepreneurs du Monde, an NGO that operates microfinancing programs on three continents; and She's the First, a New York City–based nonprofit that helps girls worldwide become the first in their families to complete school.

Kieffer says that with the money raised, Happy Chandara's goals for 2017 are to provide more career counseling to graduating students and expand the school's gym so it can serve as a weekend recreation space for the entire community. "We want to help the girls until they get a job," Kieffer explains. "We are so proud of what they accomplish by the time they graduate, but we can't leave them on the roadside—we want to see them through to a better future."

Purchase the candle here to benefit charities focused on educating women around the world.

This article appears in the May issue of Marie Claire, on newsstands now.

In the 15 years since Bill and I started our foundation, I've spent a lot of time overseas in developing countries, meeting people, seeing their homes, hearing their stories, and learning about what their lives are like.

I just got back from India—my ninth trip there—where I visited with families in two rural villages, Kamrawa and Kola. We had long, candid conversations about everything from education to gender equality to contraceptives.

For many years, women in these villages have had no access to contraceptives, which means no options for deciding whether—or  even when—to get pregnant. But now, contraceptives are slowly becoming more prevalent. There's a new generation of young women in this part of the world who are finding that family planning tools are helping them take charge of their futures.

Here are some other takeaways from my trip:

1. Access to Contraceptives Is Empowering a New Generation of Women

Like most women I know, I have used contraceptives for many years. The decision about whether and when to get pregnant was a decision that Bill and I made together based on what was right for our family –and that's a Western privilege: Over 220 million women around the world don't have access to modern contraceptives.

For many years, that was the reality for women in Kamrawa. But now, they have many more places to turn to for family planning services and counseling—especially on the community's monthly "health and nutrition day." This new initiative is empowering a younger generation of women to make decisions for themselves.

2. Cultural Norms Are Shifting

When she was young, Anita didn't have access to modern contraceptives like the women in her village do today. There was no doctor she could visit to talk to about her options, nor a pharmacy where she could pick up a prescription. Instead, she got married when she was only 16 and started having children right away. The birth of her first child was quickly followed by the birth of four more. As a result, she worried constantly about whether she could afford to feed them and keep them in school.

Today, Anita loves spending time with her 6-month-old granddaughter, Neha, and is determined to give her every opportunity to live her best possible life. She says that she hopes Neha's mother—her daughter-in-law—will take advantage of the newfound contraceptive access and space out her pregnancies. In a society where mothers-in-law have traditionally encouraged their daughters-in-law to have big families, Anita's attitude is a sign of shifting cultural norms.

3. Time Poverty Is Impacting Women's Ability to Prosper

On average, Indian women spend about six hours a day on the everyday chores that keep households running–jobs like cleaning, caring for children, and preparing food, like the papad Anita is making in this photo. Men, on the other hand, typically spend less than an hour on these tasks. Anita told me that for long stretches of her life, her household work took up her whole day, leaving her no time to get a job outside the home or pursue any sort of education. As I wrote in our annual letter earlier this year, this inequity is one that many women around the world face.

4. Working Mothers Are on the Rise

Sushila has two kids, including 2-year-old Sakshi. She told me that she and her husband are using contraceptives because they want to wait until their finances are a little more secure to have more children. When her daughter starts school, Sushila is going back to her job as a teacher. Working mothers are rare in this community—so Sushila's decision is a visible step toward equality for the women who live there.

5. Vaccines Are Saving Lives

This year, more children around the world will live to see their fifth birthday than ever before—and vaccines are a key reason why. No baby likes getting a shot, but parents and health workers know that a vaccine can mean the difference between life or death. Archana knows how important her work is to her community: She told me that the responsibility she feels for the women and children she takes care of keeps her going through long workdays in the sweltering heat.

6. These Women Are Paving the Way Forward

All of these women told me they're just as ambitious for their daughters as they are for their sons. I can't wait to see what this next generation of young women grows up to accomplish.

Follow me on Instagram at @melindafrenchgates to see more snapshots from my travels and learn about my work advocating for women and girls.

You know those horrible few days before your period when the cramps are so bad you're just counting down the hours at work until you can curl up on the couch with a cozy blanket?

One British company is incorporating "period time" to deal with that very issue. 

Coexist, an education non-profit, will allow female employees to take time off for their periods, similar to sick days.  

"I have managed many female members of staff over the years and I have seen women at work who are bent over double because of the pain caused by their periods. Despite this, they feel they cannot go home because they do not class themselves as unwell. And this is unfair," Bex Baxter, one of the company's directors, told the Bristol Post. "At Coexist we are very understanding. If someone is in pain—no matter what kind—they are encouraged to go home."

Baxter is confident the company's new policy will increase productivity for the largely female staff. 

"Naturally, when women are having their periods they are in a winter state, when they need to regroup, keep warm and nourish their bodies.The spring section of the cycle, immediately after a period, is a time when women are actually three times as productive as usual," she told the outlet. "So it is about balancing work-load in line with the natural cycles of the body."

If winter state means needing to hibernate, binge on Fuller House, and eat every carb in sight, then we totally agree with this theory. 

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Last month, Intel announced a $5 million investment in Georgia Tech to increase the number of women and minorities studying computer science and engineering over the next five years. It's only the latest example of a big-name university's push to shrink the well-known gender and racial diversity gaps in STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math) studies. Similar efforts at four-year schools go back more than a decade and a half, heralded by the landmark 1999 MIT report "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT" that led to sweeping changes at that school in order to boost faculty diversity. 

Overlooked in all the talk about closing the STEM gender gap? Community colleges, where women are apparently killing it. According to a 2012 Institute for Women's Policy Research report, over half of women who get advanced degrees in STEM-related fields started out at community college (54.7 percent of women, versus 44.4 percent of men). 

What's more, a recent study by two Iowa State University researchers found that women at community colleges reported a friendlier atmosphere in STEM-related classes than at four-year colleges. "It is just such a global community," one student said of her community college experience. The researchers found that similarity in backgrounds and lifestyles made women feel more comfortable stepping into leadership roles in activities and assignments. Strong advising and support from faculty also marked a major difference. Since so many students transfer out, they often work closely with guidance counselors to develop transfer plans. "The two-year plan keeps me focused, and saved me with financial aid," another woman said. 

"Community college is a great avenue for those who are considering STEM but aren't completely comfortable yet with the idea of going into a field that's heavily mathematical," says Catherine Hill, the vice president for research at the American Association of University Women (AAUW). "If you decide that you're interested in the sciences a little bit later in your career, you can inexpensively catch up on the coursework you're going to need." 

Because community colleges cater to students seeking not just affordability, but flexibility to accommodate jobs and families, they tend to attract women—57% of community college students are women.

So when we talk about the STEM gender gap in academia, why aren't we focusing our attentions on community colleges—and what they're doing right? "There has been a stigma about community colleges, in part because they do let in a wider variety of students," says Hill. "You'll tend to spot people who are very prepared at community colleges and also those who are struggling to get through remedial courses and catch up. But you see more women than men using community colleges as a platform to get to a four-year college."

One of the most vocal advocates of community college is Dr. Jill Biden—wife of Vice President Joe Biden—who's been an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College since 2009. Earlier this month, Biden, alongside President Obama, traveled to Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan to deliver remarks on the importance of America's community colleges and promote the administration's American College Promise, a $60 billion plan to make two years of community college free for students who met requirements like a minimum 2.5 GPA that's currently stalled in Congress. 

"Women who are interested in pursuing bachelors and master's degrees—especially in STEM fields—benefit from starting at a community college," Dr. Biden told us. "Women who earn a certificate or degree from a community college will be ready to move into a good-paying job in the growing global economy." 

In fact, community colleges boast rockstar female alums, in some cases going back decades. "The courses I took at Corning Community College were exactly what I wanted," says Eileen Collins, NASA's first female shuttle commander, whom Corning's observatory is named for. "I never felt self-conscious being a woman in the classroom. I never felt that way at all." 

That's not to say earning an associate's degree in STEM is smooth sailing—because community college students tend to juggle other responsibilities with their studies, the graduation rates are lower than four-year colleges. Nearly 40% of community college students graduate from a two- or a four-year school in six years versus the 74% of students at four-year private colleges. 

Another big problem: College and university marketing materials tend to spotlight men in engineering settings (you know, the guys in the white lab coats and in the computer lab). "I can't tell you how often I go to a school's website before I train them, and they have all males on the program page," says Donna Milgram, the Executive Director of the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology, and Science (IWITTS).

But that's a problem easy enough to fix, Milgram says.  She heads up the CalWomenTech Scale Up project, a collaboration among several California community colleges to recruit and retain women into STEM fields, where role models are a key focus. "Even if they have just one or two graduates of the program as available resources, it's a key part of outreach," she says. At the City College of San Francisco, enrollment in the networking and information technology program went from 19 percent women in 2006 to 33 percent two years later after brochures and posters were updated to feature women and college counselors stepped up active recruitment efforts. 

Community colleges have also seen success by enrolling more women in so-called "bridge classes"—entry-level courses in subjects like auto-repair, which traditionally draw men and are a good launchpad into more sophisticated engineering courses. The CalWomenTech project developed an "Auto Repair for the Layperson" class at Evergreen Valley College and promoted it heavily to women. The result? Nine female students who took the course enrolled in the school's introductory automative technology course the next semester, the largest number of women ever to do so. 

Of course, no matter where they get their degrees, women in STEM careers face daunting challenges. But there's no question that improving their numbers at the undergraduate level can go a long way in getting more women into these workplaces. Says Hill, "Community colleges might be the back door right now, but they'll be the front door soon." 

Follow Marie Claire on Instagram for the latest celeb news, pretty pics, funny stuff, and an insider POV.

Want to make more money than men? Major in engineering. A new study found that female engineers outearn men—at least at the beginning of their careers.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the gender pay gap hardly exists at all when it comes to recent college grads. Young women are making 97 cents on the dollar compared to young men with the same college majors and the same jobs. And 29 of the 73 most common college majors, young women are actually making more money than their male counterparts. 

Alas, there's a catch: By mid-career, that gender gap reverses itself in many of those fields. For example, in social services, women start out making 16% more than men, but by mid career, men make 10% more than women. Bloomberg posits that this might be because recruiters are looking for a diverse group of recent college grads to hire—but then when HR gets less involved in hiring mid-career candidates, it's easier for managers to be biased.

Of course, it would be ideal if both genders made equal money for the same job. But for now, why not join a field where women get paid what they're worth? Here are 15 college majors where women go on to outearn men, ranked by how big that difference is:

A friend recently asked me about my career path and whether I thought I had found my dream job. Instead of being able to come out and say a definitive yes or an outright no, I settled on an unresounding (and unimpressive) "maybe." 

I'm 10 years out of college and I'm not on the same path I started out on. If you had asked College Me if she could see herself going down this road, she would have scoffed in your face.

When I was in school, I knew I wanted to write for a living, so when I landed a spot at the journalism program at USC in Los Angeles, I felt like I had found my calling. And two months after I graduated, 

I was offered a position as an assistant editor at a glossy celebrity lifestyle magazine. In truth, it was probably as close to a "dream job" as I  could imagine for myself: perfect for a 21-year-old pop culture devotee. I interviewed movie stars, brought home crazy amounts of swag every day—from beauty products to gym memberships—and went to parties every night of the week.

It was exciting! It was exhilarating! It was…exhausting. And, to be honest, unfulfilling. (Surprise: Celebrities can be incredibly boring, especially when they're on the record.) And despite the freebies, my laughably low salary kept me from making rent. When I wasn't rubbing elbows with starlets, I was scarfing down budget Lean Cuisines at home with a bottle of Two Buck Chuck, unable to go anywhere on weekends because I couldn't buy gas until I got my next paycheck. I found myself slowly crawling into the gaping maw of debt.

One day, my work best friend said something that changed my life. She was a bit older than me, incredibly talented, and, having been raised in Romania, she had seen more turmoil as a child than I had seen in my entire life. "You know that you're not your job, right? Too many Americans focus on that. There is more to life than your business card. Find your own way."

I initially brushed her off ("Of course my job is my life, what are you talking about?"), but she had planted a seed. It took almost another whole year of silver-gilded poverty for it to grow, but it did eventually bloom. Finally, fed up and with no responsibilities to hold me back, I decided to make a big change. In the form of...digital marketing. And I said "I am not my job" whenever I found myself getting fed up with my new role.

Honestly I wasn't sure this career was right for me, but I had supposedly found my "dream job" right out of school and I didn't like that, either. I (like everyone else) had always thought that if you have

 your eyes on the prize, you'll climb your way up the ladder and eventually get the golden ring, corner office, insert-the-cliché-of-your-choice-here. But is that even the way it works anymore? 

So I up and moved again, this time to New York. 

And I hated it.

Not New York—New York was everything. I loved living in the East Village with my Craigslist roommate in our tiny little apartment. But I hated my new job, role, and company. I was managing other peoples' money, and I didn't like the pressure that came with it. I would get yelled at several times a day for problems that were out of my control and the stress was insane. I guess I just couldn't hang. Despite now living in the location of my dreams, the job of my dreams (whatever that was) felt like more of a mystery than ever.

I would go home at night and cry on the phone to my parents,who were thousands of miles away in California. I was certain I had made a terrible mistake. I should have never left LA, I thought during my mopier moments. I should have climbed up that journalism ladder and eventually gotten myself out of the hole. Maybe I could have been happy?

But here's where I am now: I found a new job in New York that's somewhere in the middle. It marries my passions with all the other knowledge I'd reaped over the years, and it pays the bills. Like so many other struggling writers in the world, I have my sights set on something bigger (writing a book), but instead of saying to myself, "You are not your job," now I think, "Jeffrey Eugenides used to have a day job, too," which helps keep me sane. You may not be what you do for a living, but you are what you do with your life. And so what if I'm still figuring mine out? 

Yesterday, a group of democratic senators introduced a landmark bill that, if approved, would require all federally funded hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. Titled "The Emergency Contraception Access and Education Act," this legislation targets hospitals with Medicare funding, and covers all FDA-approved emergency contraceptives, but does not apply to already-established pregnancies. It would also require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide information regarding this emergency contraception to pharmacists and other health care providers—in turn, spreading the knowledge that these options are available for victims to a greater audience. (The political obstacles for obtaining contraception and a lack of widespread education about available options—particularly in hotbed states—are closely intertwined, for both victims of sexual assault and the general public.)

Related: A Day in Her Life: Going to Class with Rape Victim and Mattress Performance Artist Emma Sulkowicz

This bill hits the floor at a time when the conversation surrounding both sexual abuse and the right to contraception is churning more furiously than ever. But in the same vein, the senators behind the act also recognize the political challenges ahead. "As we saw in the aftermath of the Hobby Lobby decision, and as we've seen in state legislatures across the country, Republicans are intent on standing in the way of women and their ability to make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own health care," Washington Senator Patty Murray told Time in a statement. "This means, now more than ever, it is our job to protect these kinds of decisions for women, their families, and particularly for survivors of sexual assault. Emergency contraception is a critical part of these family planning choices and it's time Republicans join us in supporting this safe and responsible means of preventing unintended pregnancies."

Related: 10 Medical Reasons Why a Woman Might Be Prescribed Birth Control

Less than two months out from midterm elections, the timing couldn't be more crucial, and Democrats know this—in wake of decisions like Hobby Lobby, both parties are aiming to use the contraception debate to draw female voters to the polls. It's further proof that it is essential that women recognize that with their reproductive rights at stake, voting—in addition to continuing the conversation—is crucial.

Related:

Colleges and Sexual Assault: 5 Things to Know

Big Shame on Campus

Sexual Assault Survivors Speak Out About Campus Rape

Via

Campus sexual assault was once a hush-hush topic that was kept within the confines of dorm rooms and behind closed office doors. Today, it's regarded as an epidemic serious enough to garner the attention of The White House. Even with the national attention surrounding the issue, some schools still aren't getting the message, as allegations continue to surface about schools's handling of sexual assault and rape reports.

Recently added to the growing list of 76 schools that the U.S. Department of Education is investigating for violations of Title IX and the Clery Act, is Pace University, due to a recent complaint filed by a student after an incident that allegedly occurred on Valentine's Day this year. The student was notified last month that the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which is handling the other investigations of this nature, is beginning to look into her complaint.

What differs about this report from complaints against other colleges is the action taken by Pace University after the assault. Frequently, reports state that schools will refuse to delve further into an accusation of sexual violence. In this complainant's case, however, it's that an investigation was performed when the victim didn't desire one.

Originally, the victim wasn't seeking an investigation to be brought against her alleged rapist. She wasn't even the one to disclose the incident to the university—the doctor she saw at the school's health center did. At the time, she was unaware that telling the campus health center about the attack was akin to reporting it to the university—she had gone to the health center to be tested for STI's following the alleged incident. To the victim, the national reputation universities have for mishandling allegations of sexual assault was enough for her to stray from further involving herself in the process. "I did not want to report my rapist, because it is a very miserable and tedious process in which the victim rarely gets justice," she told The Huffington Post.

After the attack was reported, she decide to go along with the investigation, in the hopes that it would be handled properly. The Pace University student's experience with campus sexual assault brings a few important points to the forefront of the discussion on sexual assault. First, if schools were to universally handle these sort of allegations properly, a greater number of students would undoubtedly feel more comfortable reporting these instances of sexual violence to campus officials. Second, where is the line for university health center employees when it comes to confessions of this nature: Do their responsibilities as a university employee outweigh the promise of doctor-patient confidentiality?

While the university did take action, it wasn't ultimately fruitful for the victim: Her attacker was found not guilty. Throughout the month-long investigation, the victim claims that she was never approached for in-person questioning. She also did not receive an explanation for the university's decision not to bring charges against her reported attacker. After the inquest, university officials stated that they did not have enough information to punish the alleged assailant. What they did find, was regardless of the details of the night, alcohol was involved. The university then mandated that both the victim and the alleged attacker attend an "training on alcohol and substance abuse, and on date rape."

This situation speaks to numerous problems with the way sexual violence is handled on campuses today. First, a student who has been assaulted should feel that his or her university will support him or her in a time of crisis, so they are compelled to report an assault or rape. But schools should also respect a student's request for privacy in a time of trauma. It's a balancing act of what should be viewed as more pertinent to the health and safety of students: Privacy or the potential for deserved punishment.

Related:

White House to Colleges: Here's How You Can Curb Rape on Campus


Sexual Assault Survivors Speak Out Against Campus Rape


The Fight Against Sexual Violence on College Campuses: End Rape on Campus


55 Colleges Face Investigation Over Sexual Assault Cases

Who: Shakira, Founder, Barefoot Foundation

Day Job: Singer.

If You Build It: A newly opened hilltop school in Cartagena, Colombia, is a gleaming monument to modern education: a three-and-a-half-acre campus equipped with state-of-the art computers and sports facilities. "I don't know if there are many schools like it in America," says Shakira, 37, the school's founder. Many of its 1,700 students are refugees in their own country, who lacked access to clean water, electricity, and, of course, any real prospect of getting out. "In countries like mine, kids who are born poor, die poor—unless people do something about it," she says.

Extra Credit: The new K–12 public school offers all of that free of charge, but what's amazing is that it's not unique: It's one of six opened by Shakira's Pies Descalzos ("barefoot," in English) Foundation, which she created at 18 when she made her first million. She has also helped open 25 early-childhood centers, while recruiting an impressive roster of supporters, including billionaires (such as Carlos Slim) and heads of state (including President Barack Obama).

Credo: "I'm not embarrassed to ask for money for education—we cannot see it as a luxury. It is a birthright that belongs to every human being."

Get Involved: fundacionpiesdescalzos.com/en to donate

Related: 19 Other Women Who Are Changing the World

Photo via Jason Merritt/Getty Images Entertainment

Who: Rachel Lloyd, Founder and CEO, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS)

Why She Had to Act: In 2006, Rachel Lloyd asked the police for help rescuing a 12-year-old named Yesenia who was being kept, drugged, and abused by a pimp in Harlem. Their response? If she's 12, she's old enough to walk out by herself. Shocking? A common attitude, says Lloyd. "Rather than being seen as victims," she says, "[girls in the sex industry] are seen as willing participants in their own abuse."

Proof Positive: GEMS provides services like counseling, legal assistance, and housing to domestic trafficking victims, helping more than 350 girls and young women leave the sex trade each year. "It's all the baby steps, the one-day-at-a-time decisions, and persistence despite the pain, that lead women [out of the life] and into getting their diploma, their first apartment, their first job," says Lloyd, 39. "You have to be there cheering them on every single step."

The Big Picture: In 2008, she lobbied New York state to pass the Safe Harbor for Exploited Children Act, which treats children in the sex trade as victims rather than criminals and provides social services instead of punishing them in juvenile detention. Eleven additional states have since passed this law. "It's about perception," Lloyd says. "These girls are victims, and they'll become survivors if we as a society value them."

Get Involved: gems-girls.org or donate here

Related: 19 Other Women Who Are Changing the World

Photo via Peter Hapak

Who: Eva Longoria, Founder, Eva Longoria Foundation, and Cofounder, Eva's Hero's

Day Job: Actress.

Pomp and Circumstance: Recently, Eva Longoria, 39, presided over a graduation ceremony of sorts: presenting diplomas to parents in Compton, California, who'd passed a nine-week course on improving their children's education.

The Big Picture: It's all part of Longoria's plan to close the education gap plaguing Latinas, and for those who participate, it is life-changing: 90 percent of kids with parents who finish the program graduate from high school. Many of the parents themselves never made it through grade school.

Proof Positive: "I talked to a parent with a third-grade education who was crying because she had never had a certificate in her life," Longoria recalls. "Now she's taking a class at a community college—and that model behavior can be emulated by her daughter: If Mom can do it, I can do it, too."

Extra Credit: She has advocated for immigration reform and children with special needs; started a political action committee; and created a program that provides training, mentoring, and seed capital to Latina business owners. "The people I want to help most are women," she says, "because they are the center of our societies."

Get Involved: evalongoriafoundation.org/donate or donate to Padres Contra El Cancer, Eva Longoria Foundation, or Eva's Heroes

Related: 19 Other Women Who Are Changing the World

Photo via Peter Hapak

In the craziest news you've heard all day, Brazilian employers are mandating that women must take virginity tests before they're hired. The Sao Paulo education department is requiring women to provide a doctor's certificate or undergo a pap smear to prove that they're not only cancer-free, but that they're abstaining from sex (or preferably, that they've never had it in the first place).

This crazy ask is not about purity of body and mind, the department says, but rather ensuring the health of their employees, which in turn, leads to career longevity. More specificially, they ask for the test because certain STI's, like HPV, can lead to cervical cancer, and since virgins's exposure to STI's is little to none, their risk is lower than candidates that are sexually active.

What more, the Sao Paulo's education department isn't the only Brazilian agency to require the "proof of chastity" before they bring a woman on as a part of their team. Female applicants for the police force in Bahia, a state in northeast Brazil, were similarly asked for proof of an unbroken hymen.

Countries all over the world have mandated health exams in exchange for employment in prior years, but only to make rule out ailments that may impact the actual job (think: a near-sighted pilot). Asking for such a invasive and irrelevant information crosses the line into unethical territory. Not to mention, it makes zero sense. Sure, virgins are less likely to contract STI's, but there's lots of things that can harm your health besides sex—smoking, poor eating habits, etc. Perhaps the education department should focus on encouraging good teaching, and leave their employees's health up to the employees themselves.

Related:

The 10 Countries Where It's THE WORST to be a Woman


The Best Countries for Women Around the World


The States That Have the Biggest Pay Gap for Women


Why You Should Care About Equal Pay

Photo via Getty Images

With more than 200 schoolgirls still held captive in Nigeria, Dr. Jill Biden chose an apt time to talk about women's education, empowerment, and government in Africa. On a trip last month to Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone, Dr. Biden visited parliaments, schools, and hospitals where victims of gender-based violence are treated, and hosted discussions on the issues holding women and girls back from reaching their full potential. "Everyone seems to be moving forward in the same direction—in a positive direction," Dr. Biden said.

The video above, released exclusively to us, shows the highlights from Dr. Biden's time in the countries, including a speech before the all-girls St. Joseph's Secondary School in Freetown, Sierra Leone. "Without an education, the entire medical team at the Panzi Hospital wouldn't be able to help the women and children of sexual and gender-based violence in the Congo," Dr. Biden said in the speech. "Without finishing engineering school, women entrepreneurs like one named Terez wouldn't be able to help provide safety for her community. And without teachers, all of you young students here today might not have the opportunity to realize your dreams and give back to your community and your country."

Catherine Russell, the U.S. ambassador at-large for global women's issues, and Rajiv Shah, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, accompanied the Second Lady. "Dr. Biden is a role model to so many people, students and educators in particular," Shah says in the video. "As a teacher, she has a real opportunity to be an illustration of what's possible and help country leaders throughout Africa see the value of education and commit to investing in better schools, better teachers, and better learning outcomes for kids, girls in particular."

The trip came just weeks ahead of a three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which kicks off August 4 in Washington D.C. The first event of its kind, President Barack Obama will welcome leaders from across Africa to further U.S. trade and investment in the continent. One of the sessions, called "Investing in Women, Peace, and Prosperity," will recognize that women's leadership and participation at all levels, from government to the economy to civil society, helps advance a country's economic and democratic development, improve health and education outcomes, and increases safety and security. Discussions will focus on expanding economic opportunity for women, promoting civic and political leadership for women and girls, and increasing women's meaningful roles in conflict prevention, peace-building, and security decision-making.

Shah says the summit is a "historic moment" and "represents a pivot to seeing Africa as a place of opportunity, of growth, of respect for their leaders and their kids and their young people in particular."

Related:

These Rape Victims Get Four-Wheeled Retribution
"I Would Rather Die Than Stay With These People" (An Escaped Nigerian Schoolgirl)

Chelsea Clinton hosted a discussion on Monday about STEM-based education and how it can lead women to successful careers. STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are dominated by men, and girls today are still largely opting out of these subjects as they choose their career paths. She explained in her opening remarks that while women have made great strides over the last two decades in many areas, "one area where not only does a gap remain, but a gap has grown, is in the participation of women and girls in the STEM fields," in the US and around the world.

Clinton notes that today, "there are fewer girls who are aspirational in the United States in the math and science fields than there were twenty years ago, we have significantly fewer women graduating with computer science degrees, we have significantly fewer women graduation with mechanical engineering degrees than we did in the 1980s." This trend not only limits career options for girls and women, but also limits talent in these growing fields. "We know that more than a million jobs are being created in the next decade in the STEM fields, and we want to have the best and brightest in those jobs." That obviously can't happen if an entire population is left out.

Held at the planetarium in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, From STEM to Success: A No Ceilings Conversation brought together middle and high school-aged girls with successful women in STEM fields to share how their science and math backgrounds led them to their current careers. Panelists included Debbie Sterling, founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, and Danielle Feinberg, a Director of Photography at Pixar Animation Studios, with moderator Kari Byron, Co-Host of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters.

The event was streamed live and invited people around the world to submit questions online and answer polling questions via Bing Pulse. Asked what keeps women form entering STEM professions, 32 percent of participants chose "social norms or pressure," and 25 percent responded "not having a supportive environment." In talking about what does get girls interested, one audience member, now a computer science major at Harvard, credited going to STEM events, where she met other girls who were interested in these subjects too and realized she had a network of support.

Students from STEM programs in the Denver area participated in the discussion, along with women in STEM-related professions ranging from city planning to technology development. The event was part of the Clinton Foundation's No Ceilings: Full Participation Project, which aims to advance the participation of women and girls everywhere. You can watch the video of the event on the foundation's website, and keep the conversation going!

When you think of college, you might recall football games, frat parties, lifelong friends, and the freshman 15. But if you're among the 71 percent of newly minted graduates who took out student loans, you'll start getting sobering reminders of undergraduate life in the form of payment due bills just six months after the ink has dried on your diploma. Overall, 39 million Americans carry student-loan debt, to the tune of more than $1.2 trillion—more than all credit card debt.

How did we get here? Tuition prices are increasing at about twice the rate of inflation, while state governments are slashing billions from their higher education budgets, leaving students to foot more of the bill. While the average debt is $29,400, it's not hard to find people like Aisha Gayle Turner, 33, of South Orange, New Jersey, who owes more than $200,000 in federal and private loans. "My parents told me, 'The sky is the limit—do whatever you want, be whomever you want,'" says Gayle Turner, the managing director of corporate and foundation relations for Teach for America's New York region. "But if I'd realized the price tag all of that came with, I would have asked myself, 'Are you sure?'"

What's certain is that women are more likely to borrow money for college than men and have a tougher time paying it off, thanks to the gender pay gap (women earn 77 cents to a man's dollar) and because we are more likely to pursue fields that don't pull in bank. The longer we take to pay, the more interest accumulates, so we spend more of our earnings on retiring debt than men do. The upshot? Debtees are less likely to own a home, take out a car loan, or even make rent payments. "It's great that more women than ever are going to college, but they're mortgaging their futures with amazing amounts of debt," says Lisa Maatz, vice president of government relations for the American Association of University Women.

The unemployment rate among those who finish only high school is triple that of those who go on to get a college degree. So higher education has value—but at what cost?

HOW THESE FOUR WOMEN ARE PAYING OFF THEIR STUDENT-LOAN DEBT

Name: Beza Ayalew
Age: 27
Hometown: Atlanta
Education: B.A. at Denison University; M.A. at Boston University
Occupation: Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Annual Income: $45,000
Total Student Debt: $58,000 Financial Path: "Even with scholarships, part-time jobs, and living rent- free with my parents as a grad student, I had to take on loans."
Payment Plan: "Seeing my debt added up after graduation was daunting, but I qualified for Income-Based Repayment, which made me feel a bit more confident that I could manage."
Was It Worth It? "My job was a direct result of my master's in public health. Seventy-five people applied for my position; without my degree, I wouldn't have been considered."

Name: Melodie Vernet
Age: 26
Hometown: Houston
Education: B.A. at Loyola University in New Orleans
Occupation: Analyst at a tech consulting firm
Annual Income: $60,000
Total Student Debt: $100,000
Payment Plan: "I pay $1,000 a month to Sallie Mae, about $600 in interest alone."
Trade-Offs: "I'd love to get an MBA, but there's no way I can justify more debt. Also, I'd like to start a family someday. But I wonder: Is that even an option for me? Can I afford children?"
Was It Worth It? "I work with brilliant people who don't have college degrees. My degree has never come up—not even in my job interview—so I don't think I needed it. My brother, who has no degree but is entrepreneurial, makes twice what I do and doesn't carry the burden of being in debt."

Name: Xiomara Ferrera
Age: 32
Hometown: Las Vegas
Education: B.A. at the University of California-Berkeley; law degree at Fordham University
Occupation: Deputy public defender
Annual Income: $75,000
Total Student Debt: $200,000
Payment Plan: "I'm in the government's Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. After 10 years of making payments and working in the public interest, what remains of my federal loans will be forgiven. But I have to pay a $17,000 private loan in full."
Trade-Offs: "I don't get to buy the fancy suits lawyers are supposed to wear in court. I scour the racks at T.J. Maxx to look presentable."
Was It Worth It? "I love my job, but I still feel like I'm an indentured servant. You practically have to rob a bank to pay back these things."

Name: Darrelle Beeler
Age: 28
Hometown: Spokane, WA
Education: B.A. at Washington State University
Occupation: Pharmaceutical sales rep
Annual Income: $55,500, plus commission
Total Student Debt: $17,000
Financial Path: "I received a $5,000 scholarship and worked part-time all four years, but it wasn't enough."
Payment Plan: "Every month I pay $430 to three lenders—I cringe because so much of what I pay is interest. It makes me wonder if I really needed that extra $5,000 for living expenses."
Trade-Offs: "Saving money for a down payment on a house is hard. I also neglected to set up a 401(k) at my first two jobs."
Was It Worth It? "I don't have pride over my debt, exactly, but it's nice to say I paid my own way. It's made me more responsible."

YOUR STUDENT DEBT RELIEF CENTER:

These Sites Help You With Your Student Debt
Help on the Web: Your Representatives Can Help You
This Senator Is Fighting for Student-Loan Reform
Are Recession Proof Degrees Really Worth the Six-Figure Debt?
Till Debt Do Us Part: His Student Loans Are Now Yours
Expert Financial Advice to Pay Off Your Debt

Scoring that first job out of college can be tough. You need a top-notch resume, killer cover letter, and a network of well-connected friends (that you just don't have straight out of school). Also, your social media presence is more important than ever. According to recruiting firm Jobvite, 92 percent of recruiters have hired through LinkedIn, 24 percent through Facebook, and 14 percent through Twitter.

But there's no need to stress; we've got you covered! Interested in working at AHAlife, an online marketplace for creative, inspiring objects you can't find anywhere else? Follow these five simple tips from AHAlife CEO and Founder Shauna Mei, and you'll be a shoe-in for the job.

1. Understand the brand and the broader online retail marketplace.

"We love when candidates really know the company. Remark on something you've seen on our social media, tell us about your favorite AHAlife designers, and know our competitors. We want to see that you've invested time and effort into learning about our company and that you're as passionate about AHAlife as we are."

2. Relate college leadership roles to the job you want.

"We look for candidates with intellectual horsepower, problem solving ability, and analytical skills, but we have no preferences in degrees and areas of study. What's important is how people apply past experiences to their future goals."

3. Be polite to your interviewer.

"It was raining when I went to meet a candidate near our office on Bond Street. He took off his jacket and made an umbrella for me since I had forgotten mine. He was applying for a brand manager position, so his generosity of spirit immediately proved he was a great fit for the position."

4. Know what your superpower is.

"During an interview we always ask the following questions: 'What makes your background most suitable for the online marketplace business model?' 'What does the concept of "conscious consumption" mean to you?' and 'What's your superpower and why?'"

5. Google yourself before you apply.

"We do a Google search to find unique facts about you that we missed out on during the interview. When your LinkedIn comes up it offers a fast way to see your experience, education, skill sets, and interests. We won't be trolling your Facebook for pictures your college roommate posted – but make sure there isn't anything you'd be embarrassed for us to see!"

How to apply: http://www.ahalife.com/jobs