Mike Rose is a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has taught in a wide range of educational settings - from elementary school to adult literacy and job training programs--and has directed an Educational Opportunity (EOP) tutorial center. He is an author and member of the National Academy of Education and a Founding Fellow of the Council of Learning Assistance and Developmental Education Associations. In this interview with Peter Adams, he discusses his own background where he had a sense of what it was like to not know much about how college works: from lacking knowledge and strategies for selecting courses to being overwhelmed by the intricacies of financial aid. Rose also discusses his most recent book, "Back to School," a book about the huge and growing number of students who are coming into schools from a wide variety of backgrounds and goals. Rose talks about how "Back to School" fits into the body of his other works and says that a major theme in "Back to School" is rethinking the divide between the academic and vocational courses of study. He believes that faculty and their leadership need to think deeply about the received beliefs and entrenched practices at their institutions that reinforce the split between the academic and the vocational. Rose feels that reforms in education today crucially need to be more than simply structural, and one key is professional development for faculty.