"I had so much interest in higher education, always. I'm interested in adult education, how universities work, how we finance education, who gets a chance to get education. So this was very important for me, how people decide 'this person would go to higher education and get a degree and this person would not.' This was a very important question for me. 

"Since I started in Japan, I saw... a very different system here in the United States. There, it's extremely centralized in Japan, and here it's very decentralized. They're opposites completely, so that got me interested into this. I was really interested to learn about these dynamics. Access was also important to me, thinking about how you make education accessible for people. Why only rich people get education, or can get education, in most of places. So how to make it more available to people.