In the age of artificial intelligence, what must higher education become? And just as important: who should higher education be for? The answer can no longer be limited to traditional students, full-time degree seekers, or those who can afford the rising cost of opportunity. If California is going to lead the future, its colleges and universities must help open the door to everyone willing to develop themselves, improve their lives, and serve their communities. That includes high school students preparing for adulthood, college students seeking direction, working adults changing careers, entrepreneurs building something real, retirees and seniors with experience to contribute, the unemployed and underemployed, people with disabilities, veterans, immigrants, minorities, underserved communities, and every person who has never been offered a real pathway to leadership. That is the promise of Universal Leadership Education.
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
Monday, June 15, 2026
UNC to Partner With Public Libraries for Statewide AI Study - GovTech
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will partner with public libraries across the state to study local responses to AI and develop tailored approaches to improving AI literacy. North Carolina’s public libraries will help shape new approaches to artificial intelligence literacy statewide through a new university research initiative at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Starting this summer and running through 2028, the two-year Local Libraries and Generative AI project will bring university researchers and local librarians together to study how different communities across the state are using generative AI, and how libraries can support residents in understanding and using the technology responsibly, according to a news release yesterday.
How AI is quietly changing what we think the human mind is on the deep differences between human minds and artificial ones - Shai Tubalig, Big Think
For all its alienness, however, Seth is convinced that the octopus remains our genuine kin, in a way AI may never be. What puzzles him is how easily our fascination with machines can eclipse this kinship. As a neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Seth has spent a lot of time thinking about how humans have come to liken themselves to AI systems. “It’s a two-way mirror in a sense,” Seth tells Big Think. “We see ourselves through the lens of the things that we create.” In academia, Seth says, the brain has long been imagined as a kind of computer. Now that AI systems seem smart and can talk to us, this old metaphor may seem far more concrete, galvanizing the idea that perhaps “that’s nothing more than we are.” You can also see this idea in responses to claims that large language models are “stochastic parrots” — systems that can generate human-like language by calculating statistical probabilities but without truly grasping the meaning.
Sunday, June 14, 2026
Most K-12 teachers say AI's impact on education will eclipse the internet or computers - Lee V. Gaines, NPR
The effects of artificial intelligence on learning are still largely unclear. But a new NPR/Ipsos poll of K-12 teachers found that nearly 3-in-4 believe AI has bigger implications for education than past innovations like the internet or computers. The nationally representative poll surveyed 545 respondents and paints a complex picture of teachers' views on AI: Many are using it to save time and improve their teaching materials, but a majority of teachers are worried AI is making it harder for students to learn to think for themselves.
Dual dimensions of artificial intelligence use among medical academia: related knowledge, attitudes and ethical concerns, a national survey, 2025 - Doaa Ibrahim Omar, Nature
AI integration into medical education and practice has its benefits and risks. This national web-based cross-sectional survey on Egyptian medical staff and students aimed to assess knowledge, attitudes, and concerns regarding the use of AI. This study comprised 2765 medical students and 500 medical staff, with a mean age of 20.8 and 29.9 years, respectively, and higher percentages of females among both groups. Medical students demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of AI compared to medical staff (p < 0.001). Unfortunately, the majority of both groups (80.4% of staff and 81.6% of students) expressed negative attitudes toward AI use. Male participants had significantly higher attitude scores than females in both groups.
Saturday, June 13, 2026
California State Bet Big on AI. Now Campuses Are Fighting Back - Temaz Tra, Meme Burn
CSU signed a major deal with OpenAI to give ChatGPT Edu access to students, faculty, and staff. Critics say the rollout came during budget pressure, layoffs, and deep confusion over AI rules. The story matters for South African universities too, as campuses from Cape Town to Johannesburg face the same AI trade-off. The real fight isn’t just about ChatGPT. It’s about who controls education when tech platforms move into the classroom.
Congressional committee examines higher education's role in teaching students to use AI - Bridger Beal-Cvetko, KSL
Utah Rep. Burgess Owens asked several education experts about the impacts artificial technology will have on college students during a committee hearing in Washington on Wednesday. Owens, who chairs the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, spoke of the potential benefits of using AI in education but said academic institutions should ensure students learn the skills necessary to succeed in an increasingly AI-driven workforce, without sacrificing other learning. The challenges presented by the new technology are "significant," he said.
Friday, June 12, 2026
Opinion: Moving Beyond AI Policies in Higher Education - Quimby Kaizer and Saravanan Subbaraya, Gov Tech
Every spring, college and university leaders watch another graduating class walk across the stage. It is a moment worth celebrating. Students worked hard. Faculty did their best to educate them. Families made sacrifices. And yet, for many presidents, provosts and chief academic officers standing at the podium this month, a central question remains: Are we leveraging AI effectively to both empower students and evolve how our institutions operate? This is both the challenge and the opportunity facing higher education, as headlines increasingly reflect parents and students questioning whether college is financially worth it.
https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/opinion-moving-beyond-ai-policies-in-higher-education
University of Maine System to launch shared AI tool to accelerate student, institutional success - Bangor Daily News
The University of Maine System is leading the nation in preparing students for the modern workforce and improving organizational effectiveness with the investment and responsible integration of a shared AI tool. Maine’s largest educational and research enterprise and one of the state’s biggest employers has awarded its first System-wide enterprise artificial intelligence platform contract to ChatGPT Edu from OpenAI. Under the two-year agreement that will begin July 1, every UMS faculty member, staff member and matriculated student will have access to ChatGPT Edu, which was developed specifically for use in higher education settings, though whether and how they use it will be entirely up to them.
Thursday, June 11, 2026
Dreaming: Better memory for a more helpful ChatGPT - OpenAI
Today we’re beginning to roll out a more capable and scalable system for synthesizing memory, developed to tackle the staleness, correctness, and scalability challenges that we observe when memory is applied to the hundreds of millions of users and multi-year time horizons in ChatGPT. Memory is what helps ChatGPT learn your preferences, projects, and constraints, allowing future conversations to start from shared context rather than from scratch. Over the last two years, memory has grown into a critical part of the ChatGPT experience, helping ChatGPT better understand your context so it can help you accomplish meaningful goals over time. This is central to making ChatGPT more useful: knowing you, helping you, and doing more for you.
The board’s role in managing emerging AI risks - McKinsey
During a recent panel discussion, McKinsey and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) gathered top chief information security officers (CISOs) and board directors, highlighting four priorities for effective oversight: strengthening governance and accountability, balancing innovation with risk, building real-time risk-management capabilities, and improving AI fluency in the boardroom. Together, these shifts signal that AI is no longer just a technology topic; it is now a core enterprise risk and strategic differentiator (see sidebar, “On the street: Sights and sounds from the world’s largest cybersecurity conference”).
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
AI isn’t eliminating gender gaps. It’s reorganizing them - Richard J. Smith, Ed.D., and Madeline Weiler, University Business
In the higher education workforce, women are overrepresented in office and clerical staff positions. They often occupy student-facing roles such as academic advising, which are relationship-focused positions with limited advancement opportunities. Not only are women far more likely to experience job displacement as administrative tasks are automated, but they are also less likely to hold the technical and decision-making roles that influence how AI is designed and deployed. Consequently, women are often positioned downstream of AI systems they did not build and cannot govern. Efficiency alone cannot guide effective AI strategies. Instead, leaders must advance technology and equity simultaneously. University policies should include safeguards to help ensure that employees are not quietly devalued through AI adoption.
AI Raises the Stakes for College Internships - Abby Sourwirne, GovTech
Internship postings on Handshake, a career networking site for college students and graduates, declined by more than 15 percent between January 2023 and January 2025, while the share of graduating students who applied to at least one internship rose from 34 percent to 41 percent. Yet even as internships grow harder to find, they're also becoming more important. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, internship experience with an employer’s organization or industry is among the most influential factors when employers choose between otherwise equally qualified candidates.Some colleges and universities are meeting this problem by providing credits for work experience, revamping on-campus work opportunities or directly partnering with local employers. If they don't, some workforce and higher-education experts warn, students will be left behind.
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Will AI Help Revive the ‘Stale’ OPM Market? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
Over the past few years, OPMs—including Coursera, iDesign and 2U—have adopted AI-powered features designed to enhance support for instructors and students through coaching, content creation, tutoring and curriculum mapping. According to an April analysis, 70 percent of OPMs are now deploying AI for such purposes. But experts are skeptical that the AI boom will have a big payoff for the beleaguered OPM market, which is attempting to rebound with the help of private equity after years of declining revenues, reputational damage and mounting government scrutiny.
AI Didn’t Break the University. It Revealed What Was Already Broken - Samuel J. Abrams, RealClear Education
I have argued in these pages before that AI itself is not the cause of the crisis; that blaming the chatbot for cheating and the LLM for loneliness is like blaming the calculator for poor math pedagogy. The deeper failure is institutional, and it preceded the technology. As I wrote here in March, the scarce resource in higher education is no longer knowledge but the human encounter itself. The most penetrating response to Hendrick’s essay confirms that and it did not come from another professor; it came from a 49-year-old graduate student named Norma Sancho, writing in the comments. Her reply has since circulated on its own, and it deserves to be read widely.
Monday, June 08, 2026
Are academics making an (em) dash for AI? - Times Higher Education
In the four years since its commercial launch, generative artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on personal and professional life. But are academics enthusiasts or sceptics? Five scholars explain how the technology has affected their own practice – for good and bad. Artificial intelligence writing is instantly recognisable, we are told—soulless, dispassionate, and devoid of the spark that marks genuine thought. Historian Jonathan Rees, in Academe this spring, calls it “bland, unspecific, pedestrian prose”. Journalist and UCL academic Sarfraz Manzoor, in a recent piece for The Independent, concluded that an AI article his students read was “competent but forgettable”. Scroll through r/professors on any given day and you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues enthusiastically nodding along and complaining bitterly about students submitting work that any fool can see was written by a machine.
Here’s how AI is driving the real revolution in higher education - Onur Bakiner, Seattle Times
What is education supposed to be like in the age of AI? The debate could not be more polarized: According to some, responsible educators should prepare students for artificial intelligence with AI, lest those students find themselves undesirable in the workplace of the future; others believe that the incursion of AI into education is destroying critical thinking skills, and consequently, learning itself. Boosters see in AI the combination of unprecedented opportunity and peril; critics say they have seen hyped-up educational technologies too many times before. The best is yet to come; the worst is yet to come; or maybe, we’ll spend enormous time and money just to stay where we are.
Sunday, June 07, 2026
Dismissing AI is not critical thinking. It’s intellectual closure = Zach Rossmiller, University Business
As a chief information officer, I have the privilege of interacting with students in many different settings, and conversations about artificial intelligence have become increasingly common.Recently, I read several student reflections explaining why they refuse to use generative AI in their coursework. Some described it as environmentally destructive, pointing to water and energy consumption that disproportionately harms vulnerable communities. Others called it a form of cheating, no different than passing off someone else’s work as your own. Several argued that the entire point of education is the struggle itself, and that outsourcing that struggle to a language model defeats the purpose of being in school.
Is AI Killing User Experience? - Scott A. Snyder and Mike Welsh, Knowledge at Wharton
A product manager can describe a workflow and get a working prototype. A strategist can turn a client’s rough concept into a clickable experience before the meeting ends. A founder with no technical background can “vibe code” a beta version of their product for an investor pitch. This is not a small shift. It compresses time, lowers barriers, and gives more people the ability to participate in creation. For organizations trying to move faster, it feels like a gift. Yet the customers on the receiving end are not sold. Despite the perceived gains in speed and personalization, only 17% of consumers believe their experiences are getting better, according to a March 2026 Medallia report. A separate February 2026 Pega study found that more than 60% of consumers lack confidence in how businesses use AI to interact with them.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-ai-killing-user-experience/
Saturday, June 06, 2026
Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers - Alejandro Salinas, et al; SSRN
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53% vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreement an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.
How Personalized AI Tutors Can Help Students Learn - Emma Needleman, Knowledge at Wharton
The researchers built an AI tutoring platform that gives all students access to the same gen AI chatbot and course materials, but varies the sequence in which practice problems are assigned. In a five-month Python course across 10 Taipei high schools, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: One received a standard sequence of problems progressing from easy to hard, while the other received a personalized sequence, in which an algorithm adjusted problem difficulty based on each student’s performance and interactions with the AI tutor. Because everything else was held constant, this design isolates the impact of personalized homework.
Friday, June 05, 2026
Agentic AI and job skills. How will agentic AI reshape the workforce? - McKinsey
In this video, McKinsey Senior Partners Kate Smaje and Robert Levin and Special Adviser Eric Lamarre, authors of Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI (Wiley, April 2026), discuss what’s real—and what isn’t—about AI-driven workforce disruption. The authors reflect on how AI is changing the kinds of skills organizations value most and what business leaders need to do now to build teams and capabilities that can keep pace with an AI-enabled enterprise. “The core issue is that we’ve really got to think about how organizations are going to work fundamentally differently,” says Smaje.
White House Aims to Establish Political Oversight of Federal Grants - Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed
The White House is advancing a sweeping rule change that would give administration officials more power over billions of dollars in federal grants. The regulations seek to codify that Trump officials have the right to keep doing what they started last year: canceling thousands of grants that they said didn’t align with the president’s priorities, and shooting down new ones for the same reason. The proposed rules would set up a process for this political review, possibly helping insulate it from legal challenges that stymied the administration in the past. Among many other changes, the rules direct “senior appointees” at federal agencies to take charge of awarding and terminating new and existing research grants and other federal awards—a change that reflects an August executive order.
Thursday, June 04, 2026
2026 EDUCAUSE The Impact of AI on Learning Assessment Report - Jenay Robert, EDUCAUSE
Few areas of higher education have been as passionately debated as learning assessment in the age of AI. Since the debut and rapid adoption of readily available generative AI chatbots, educators have grappled with how learning assessment would be impacted. By only surveying individuals who are currently doing the hands-on work of learning assessment, we can provide you with information about how the learning assessment landscape is changing in practice, not just in theory. Explore the full Impact of AI on Learning Assessment report: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2026/6/2026-educause-the-impact-of-ai-on-learning-assessment-report
AI Will Deliver Wisdom - Peter H. Diamandis, Metatrends
I’ve been thinking a lot about wisdom lately. Not intelligence. Not speed. Not raw compute. Wisdom. The thing we used to reserve for grandparents, philosophers, and tribal elders who’d seen enough life to know which paths lead to ruin. Here’s how I define it: wisdom is probabilistic pattern recognition across a vast number of lived experiences. When you go to the village elders and ask, “Which direction should I take?”, they don’t run equations. They draw on decades of watching people make choices and living with the consequences. They say, “If you go this way, based on everything I’ve seen, it won’t end well. Go this other way, and you have a real chance.” That accumulated experience, compressed into judgment, is what we call wisdom.
Wednesday, June 03, 2026
Generative AI use and misuse call for assessment reform in higher education - Igor Chirikov, Ivan Smirnov, and René F. Kizilcec, Science
The debate about the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on higher education is polarized. Some portray GenAI as normalizing cheating at scale (1), whereas others argue that misconduct patterns have changed little (2). These competing narratives underscore the need for reliable data on where GenAI use is concentrated and where misuse is most likely. Existing studies of GenAI adoption and perceptions in higher education provide useful early signals but often rely on small samples and lack measures designed to capture sensitive behaviors such as cheating across fields (3–5). We addressed this gap with survey data from 95,513 students in a representative sample of 20 major public researchintensive universities in the United States and an indirect method for estimating GenAI-assisted cheating across disciplines. We found substantial heterogeneity in GenAI use and misuse across disciplines and student groups. These patterns call for discipline-specific assessment reform, not blanket bans or universal detection regimes.
The largest study of AI use by undergrads is in, revealing disparities in access — and in cheating - Maya L. Kapoor, Berkeley News
The study, conducted in the spring of 2024, used data collected by Berkeley’s Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, a group of research universities that collaborate on surveying students to improve higher education. About two-thirds of respondents said they used GenAI, and almost 40% used it monthly or even more frequently. What’s more, at least 9% of students who used AI reported using it to cheat. That number varied significantly by academic discipline, with more non-STEM students cheating with AI than STEM students. But the researchers caution that banning GenAI won’t stop cheating and may even harm students when they look for work in industries that expect AI proficiency.
Tuesday, June 02, 2026
How Golden Gate’s big AI bet will energize fundamental changes - Alcino Donadel, University Business
At the height of California’s gold rush, a YMCA night school was founded to train students in gold assaying and assist Chinese immigrants with learning English. It marks the humble beginnings of Golden Gate University—and an enduring tale that inspires President Brent White to capitalize on a new national phenomenon.Golden Gate made three major announcements in April that emphasize the university’s radical embrace of artificial intelligence as a tool and societal force. It founded the School of Psychology to research how AI will transform human behavior. GGU Digital upgrades the university’s distance education platform with personalized, AI-assisted instruction. Lastly, nine new board members were introduced to help expand the university’s global footprint in emerging fields.
College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams - Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune
On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.
Monday, June 01, 2026
Should AI Nudge You or Tell You What to Do? - Stefanos Poulidis, Haosen Ge, Hamsa Bastani, and Osbert Bastani, Knowledge at Wharton
In general, AI guidance can fall into one of two categories: attention signals and action signals. Attention signals flag decisions that are important without offering a recommendation: “This is a critical decision: pay close attention.” Action signals go further and prescribe a specific action: “Here’s what you should do.” But which type of signal actually helps us make better decisions, especially when the AI is reliable and provides highly accurate advice? This question is increasingly relevant, as AI tools become better calibrated and consistently dependable. As this trend continues, we must ask: Are there costs to relying on AI too much, even when its advice is correct? We explored these questions in a study using chess — a setting where AI recommendations are trusted, accuracy is exceptionally high, and decision quality is easy to measure.
Higher education, stop policing AI. Know your students - Robert Mason, Rikard Jalkebro and Ziad Hani, University World News
The solution to AI in higher education is not more software. It is ‘knowing your student’ (KYS). The idea borrows from the banking sector’s ‘Know Your Customer’ regulatory and compliance process used to combat fraud. Banks do not solely rely on a single automated alert to determine suspicious behaviour. They build contextual understanding over time: patterns, histories, habits, inconsistencies and relationships. Universities should do the same. However, Know Your Students should not mean turning universities into compliance departments. It means using sustained teaching, feedback, mentoring and dialogue to understand how students actually learn.
Sunday, May 31, 2026
Here are states’ 3 highest priorities in developing AI policy - Alcino Donadel, University Business
States are defining what AI will look like in practice across K12 and higher education, building policy infrastructure that reflects both the technology’s reach and its risks. A new national overview from the Education Commission of the States spells out how public officials are issuing guidance, installing guardrails and coordinating across sectors to align AI use with school strategy and workforce demand. Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee now require public school districts and postsecondary institutions to adopt formal policies governing acceptable AI use. At the same time, at least 35 states have issued some form of guidance ranging from short advisories to full frameworks. Taken together, these efforts converge on a shared set of priorities that promote human decision-making, student AI literacy, safety and data protection.
If Canvas Goes Down Again, What’s the Contingency Plan? - Lisa Anderson and Mairéad Martin, Inside Higher Ed
Faculty and administrators across the country, shaped by their experience adapting instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, knew what to do last week. Shifting the modality of instruction is not new for us. Instructors quickly improvised alternative assignments, delayed quizzes and exams, populated offline course materials, and adjusted timelines in order to keep learning moving forward. When it came time to notify students of these adjustments, however, a more fundamental issue became apparent. Many instructors came to discover they had no reliable way to contact their students outside the learning management system itself. Some did not know how to access their course rosters outside Canvas. Others teaching large online lectures encountered institutional email delivery limits. Many had no established communication pathways beyond LMS announcements.
Saturday, May 30, 2026
Why Higher Education Needs Humanics - Michael J. Avaltroni, US News
In a world where artificial intelligence now permeates daily life and higher education, it has become essential to weave the human element throughout the delivery of instruction – particularly healthcare education.Enter humanics.The integration of humanics – often described as the study, understanding and development of key human qualities – represents a novel way to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in education, technology and the human component in an AI-driven world. It speaks to the urgent need to build healthcare teams that optimize all the advances in artificial intelligence with the humans in the middle – our students, clinicians and patients. It also speaks to the urgency to redefine higher education itself.
Grade inflation much higher in ‘AI-exposed’ degrees - Jack Groves, Times Higher Education
Drawing on publicly available data from a large research university in Texas, Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the marks awarded to more than 500,000 students between 2018 and 2025. When these grade patterns were compared against syllabus data on the types of writing tasks used for assessment, it revealed the share of A grades in “AI exposed” courses rose by 13 percentage points, or 30 per cent, compared with the 2022 baseline. Overall grade point average rose by 0.12 points for “high-homework” courses in which AI could potentially complete the assessment, says the study, which was published as a working paper by Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. Grade inflation occurred only in homework-based writing and coding tasks and was not found to the same extent in in-person examination, explains the study, which suggests the computing power of “AI [is] substituting for student effort specifically on the unsupervised assessments where instructors cannot observe the production of submitted work”.
Friday, May 29, 2026
Maine's Public University System on verge of Closing Deal for First System Wide AI Tool - Kristian Moravec, Central Maine
Maine’s public university system plans to award its first contract for an artificial intelligence platform to ChatGPT Edu, an OpenAI chatbot tool for higher education, the system told employees and students in an email Friday. The two-year contract will cost about $1.39 million and serve the system’s estimated 25,200 students and 5,600 employees, likely starting in July, according to Ryan Low, the system’s vice chancellor for finance and strategic AI integration. OpenAI’s winning bid, which was submitted by a vendor, Carasoft, is not yet set in stone.
Can colleges still deliver in the age of AI? One Ivy League school is investing $30 million to improve career outcomes - Jessica Dickler, CNBC
College students are increasingly worried about what an AI-driven jobs apocalypse could mean for their employment prospects. To that end, many colleges and universities are racing to recalibrate.
Even at nation’s most elite schools, the focus is shifting to career readiness. Fears that artificial intelligence will upend students’ future career plans are reverberating across college campuses. “Higher education needs to do better,” said Joseph Catrino, the inaugural director of Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design. “We need to do better for our students — we need to step up and help students be prepared.” The Ivy League college recently raised $30 million in endowed funds to support internship opportunities. Now students can access up to $6,500 during any term to help finance unpaid or underpaid internships. “This allows the student to explore and engage in a field that they normally wouldn’t be able to,” Catrino said.
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Why Indiana University’s AI skills course is free - Pamela Whitten, University Businiess
Indiana University just gave away our most popular AI skills course by making it completely free and open to all, with no application or tuition required. Anyone who completes the course that we’ve come to know as GenAI 101 will earn an AI skills badge from our world-renowned Kelley School of Business at no cost.Our decision to make such a highly sought-after course available for free is rather unconventional for a major university. Tuition is one of the ways we pay the bills, yet we know that the ability to wisely work alongside artificial intelligence is too important of a skill to lock behind a paywall. When our faculty developed and launched GenAI 101 eight months ago, we could not fully predict the continuing and accelerating appetite for AI literacy among corporations, small businesses, state agencies, and universities across the country. They asked us to share it, and we have now done so by making the class freely available to anyone.
MIT president blames federal policy shifts for big drop in research on campus - Washington Post
MIT is doing less research and enrolling fewer graduate students as a result of federal actions, the university president warned Thursday. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, told the campus community in a video message, and the number of new federal research awards is also down more than 20 percent.“That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Kornbluth said.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists - Joshua Dzieza, the Verge
“It’s a huge burden on the peer-review system, which is already at the limit,” Degen said. “There’s just too many papers being published and there’s not enough peer reviewers, and if the LLMs make it so much easier to mass produce papers, then this will reach a breaking point.” Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.
The AI assembly line: Strategic imperatives for CEOs - Gianmarco Cilento, Steffen Fuchs , and Varun Marya; McKinsey
Just as Ford’s production line transformed physical labor, agentic AI—systems that can act autonomously rather than just responding to prompts—is now reshaping cognitive work, including engineering design, supply chain planning, and risk assessment. (We will refer to agentic AI simply as “AI” throughout this article.) With AI, companies no longer need to depend solely on the judgment and availability of a small number of experts to make complex decisions or create sophisticated products. Instead, knowledge becomes broadly accessible to anyone with the right AI capabilities, accelerating decision-making, product customization, and other tasks once limited to experts.
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Quantum’s bold promise: What business leaders need to know - Henning Soller and Sven Smit with Anna Heid, McKiney
For years, business leaders and corporate boards have viewed quantum computing (QC) as a threat—and for good reason: It has the potential to break today’s strongest encryptions. That moment, commonly known as Q-Day, will occur when quantum computers succeed in factoring exceptionally large numbers, undermining the math that public-key cryptography depends on. Though business leaders are keeping Q-Day top of mind, they are viewing QC through a new lens—less a threat and more an opportunity. Many are spurring their companies to experiment with QC now so that they will be ready to deploy it at scale once quantum computers become mainstream, which could happen within the next five years.
Landscape of Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: A Review - Sharin Jacob, Heather Miceli and Hannah Schneider, Digital Promise
This literature review explores the rapid integration of artificial intelligence in higher education, examining both institutional influences and instructional practices. It highlights how governance frameworks, resource allocation, and faculty attitudes shape access and responsible technology adoption. Pedagogically, the paper emphasizes the necessity of embedding AI literacy, critical evaluation, and ethical reasoning into curricula to prevent student overreliance on AI tools. Ultimately, institutions must balance innovation with accountability by carefully aligning AI tools with educational values to advance authentic learning.
Monday, May 25, 2026
The Third Wave of Online Education: Why AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Could Disrupt Universities, Corporate Training, and Workforce Development - Tim King, Solutions Review
The Third Wave of Online Education Has Begun. Artificial intelligence is beginning to fundamentally reshape education. Not simply classroom technology. Not digital homework systems. Not video-based e-learning platforms. Education itself. During a recent episode of Inside Jam, Solutions Review President Doug Atkinson sat down with Jonathan Cornelissen to discuss what may become one of the defining transformations of the next decade: the rise of AI-powered adaptive learning systems capable of personalizing education at scale. The discussion explored the evolution of online learning, enterprise AI upskilling, workforce disruption, higher education economics, AI-native tutoring systems, and the growing realization that traditional educational models may no longer align with the pace of technological change.
Quantum’s bold promise: What business leaders need to know - Henning Soller and Sven Smit with Anna Heid - McKinsey Quarterly
For years, business leaders and corporate boards have viewed quantum computing (QC) as a threat—and for good reason: It has the potential to break today’s strongest encryptions. That moment, commonly known as Q-Day, will occur when quantum computers succeed in factoring exceptionally large numbers, undermining the math that public-key cryptography depends on. Though business leaders are keeping Q-Day top of mind, they are viewing QC through a new lens—less a threat and more an opportunity. Many are spurring their companies to experiment with QC now so that they will be ready to deploy it at scale once quantum computers become mainstream, which could happen within the next five years.
Sunday, May 24, 2026
The AI industry is still in flux, and university programs are trying to keep up - Marketplace
Welcome to May — the job market is currently awash in fresh graduates looking for that first post-college job, and it’s not an easy task. The unemployment rate for young college graduates jumped to 5.6% at the end of last year, entry-level job postings in the U.S. are down by a third since 2023, and grads are even up against artificial intelligence outsourcing. At the same time, some universities, and the students within, are making a big bet on AI to secure their future. When Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, unveiled a new program in 2022 called “AI and decision-making,” students showed up. Professor Asuman Ozdaglar is an engineering professor and a deputy dean of academics at MIT. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to discuss how universities are staying ahead of the curve with the labor market, and how professors think about teaching for an industry that’s still changing so rapidly. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
5 Things to Know About the Changing Cybersecurity Landscape in Higher Education - UMass Amherst
Recent incidents affecting institutions nationwide, including the widely used Canvas learning management system, have reinforced the importance of cybersecurity not only as a technical priority, but as a shared community responsibility. For Jeremy Pelegrin, Chief Information Security Officer at UMass Amherst, the conversation around cybersecurity today extends far beyond firewalls and software updates. It’s about protecting teaching and research, strengthening digital trust, and helping the university community develop habits that support a safer digital environment for everyone. “We have reached a point as a society where cybersecurity must be a responsibility for every person on the UMass campus,” Pelegrin said. “As we navigate through a changing landscape of threats and compliance requirements, it’s really about developing good cyber habits that can be applicable regardless of where the world is going to lead us.” As technology, artificial intelligence, and online threats continue to evolve, UMass Amherst is approaching digital safety as an ongoing partnership across campus. Here are five things the community should know about how the landscape is changing and how the university is adapting alongside it.
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Assessing students when artificial intelligence is ubiquitous - Michelle Seref, Times Higher Education
If we continue to prioritise memorisation in an age of wall-to-wall information, we send the wrong message to our students and employers. Michelle Seref offers advice on assessment that builds critical thinking skills. For much of higher education’s modern history, assessment has followed a familiar formula: a midterm and a final exam, with a heavy emphasis on whether students can retain and reproduce information. That model made sense in a world where knowledge was scarce and expertise lived primarily in textbooks and lectures. That world no longer exists. With students’ early access to technology, they can find most information from Google, YouTube and, now, AI chatbots. The rapid rise of generative AI hasn’t made assessment obsolete, but it has made its misalignment impossible to ignore. The real question is no longer what students know, but how they think, decide, adapt and apply judgement. Yet many assessments still measure recall rather than application.
AI and the Employment Outlook for College Grads - Jim A. Jorstad, GovTech
It’s that time of the year when graduation ceremonies take place at colleges and universities throughout the country. Students will fill auditoriums, gymnasiums and stadiums, each with their own dreams and hopes of landing that ideal job they’ve been working toward. Some will have taken certification courses, served as researchers or graduate assistants, or participated in internships. Hopefully, they received the necessary education and training to be successful in their careers of choice. But they're among the first graduating classes to have had most of their college experience upended by artificial intelligence. What will be the impact of AI? Are students graduating with the necessary AI skills, and what kind of employment environment are they entering? I want to focus specifically on IT-related jobs, although many of the same hiring trends can be applied to other disciplines. Let’s consider what factors are affecting the job market, and what graduates may experience during their job and career search.
Friday, May 22, 2026
The Case for Data Centers in Space- McKinsey
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on the potential role orbital data centers could play in meeting growing AI compute demand—and the technical and economic uncertainties that remain. Philip Johnston, a McKinsey alumnus and cofounder of orbital compute infrastructure provider Starcloud, believes that space-based systems could become a meaningful part of the future compute landscape. He recently spoke to McKinsey Partner Luca Bennici about how the space-based data center technology is evolving, the challenges involved, and what needs to happen for orbital data centers to become a viable complement to terrestrial infrastructure. The interview transcript has been edited for clarity and style.
From Restriction to Integration: Practical Strategies for Embracing AI in Online Courses - Taoufik Ennoure, Faculty Focus
Instead of prohibiting the use of AI, it is more effective to assign tasks that require students to use AI tools and then have them critically assess the outputs. In asynchronous online courses with less frequent instructor interaction, I have adopted a new approach to enhance engagement in weekly discussions. I ask students to use AI tools to generate practice questions and sample answers, allowing them to self-assess their understanding. Students then post their AI-generated questions and answers as original discussion posts, reflecting on which questions were most helpful and identifying any gaps in the tool’s knowledge. Additionally, they evaluate at least two other question/answer sets created by their peers. This method fosters a peer dialogue focused on critical assessment, reducing the instructor’s workload in creating every quiz while encouraging collaborative learning.
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Layoffs down from early '25 — except in this one field - Emma W. Thorne, Editor at LinkedIn News
Layoffs fell 50% from the first third of 2025 to the first third of 2026 — with one glaring exception. Tech was hit the hardest, laying off more than 85,000 workers in the first four months of the year, according to a new report out Thursday from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's a 33% jump year-over-year. The main culprit? Artificial intelligence, which was the top-cited reason for the second month in a row. A separate release from the Labor Department showed continuing unemployment claims hit a two-year low last week.
‘Student Guide to AI’ returns for third year with a new focus: Human capabilities - Elon University News Bureau
“Human Wisdom for the Age of AI: A Field Guide to Cultivating Essential Skills”, a publication by Elon University, the American Association of Colleges and Universities and The Princeton Review, is provided to students and institutions free of charge. The new publication, “Human Wisdom for the Age of AI: A Field Guide to Cultivating Essential Skills,” helps students cultivate the human skills they need to thrive in a digital world, whether working with AI technologies or learning independently of those tools. The guide includes engaging and fun exercises on curiosity, critical and deep thinking, creativity, ethical perspectives, communication and relational skills, among others. Like the 2024 and 2025 editions, this year’s guide is provided to students and institutions free of charge and is available for download at: www.studentguidetoai.org. The guide draws on 10 voices across centuries and cultures — from Aristotle, Cicero and Descartes to Mencius and Ptahhotep — whose enduring insights into human judgment, creativity, ethics and wisdom take on new urgency as AI reshapes how we learn and work.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
AI risk to university jobs despite staff believing roles are safe - Juliette Rowsell, Times Higher Ed
University workers generally do not believe that their jobs will be taken by artificial intelligence in the short term but experts have warned against complacency, saying that automation may still be used as “justification” to cut roles anyway. While respondents to Times Higher Education’s UK University Redundancy Survey expressed widespread concern about the impact of the tens of thousands of job losses across the UK sector, concerns over the effect of AI remain low. Asked: “Do you fear you will be made redundant within the next three years due to the rise of AI?” more than half (55 per cent) disagreed, with 17 per cent of these strongly disagreeing. Just under 5 per cent strongly agreed and 14 per cent said they agree, while a fifth (21 per cent) neither agreed or disagreed.
In an AI-driven world, the most important skills are still human - Eric Townsend, Inside Higher Ed
Across higher education, artificial intelligence is now embedded in everyday academic work, from early research to final drafts. For many students, it has become a default starting point. The urgent question is not whether students use AI, but how they use it—specifically, whether these tools are reinforcing learning or bypassing the cognitive work that leads to it. As AI accelerates core academic tasks, educators are confronting a central challenge: how to preserve depth, judgment and intellectual engagement in an environment optimized for speed.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Micro-credentials gain ground as focus shifts from degrees to skills - Enterprise AM
A university degree is no longer the only ticket to a career. Employers across the globe — and increasingly in Egypt — are placing more emphasis on practical skills and targeted expertise, fueling demand for short courses, professional certifications, and micro-credentials that offer faster and cheaper avenues into the labor market. Short courses, big gains: Micro-credentials — short, skills-focused programs granting a verified certificate or digital badge — are gaining ground in fast-changing sectors like tech, digital marketing, AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics. Programs span local training from the Information Technology Institute and the Digital Egypt Pioneers Initiative (DEPI) to global options like Google Career Certificates on Coursera and Udacity Nanodegrees, iCareer founder and CEO Akram Marwan tells EnterpriseAM. The shift reflects a broader rethink of education — less a one-time university experience, more a continuous process of reskilling. As technologies evolve faster than universities can adapt, workers and employers want cheaper, targeted ways to build job-ready skills, Marwan says. Lower-cost online programs and funded initiatives like DEPI are also widening access beyond Cairo and Alexandria, potentially expanding the pool for remote and digital jobs.
Monday, May 18, 2026
Education Department Finalizes AI Priorities - Georgina Mackie, Broadband Breakfast
Under the policy, schools and higher education institutions can use AI to expand computer science and AI coursework, integrate AI into instruction, and provide professional development for educators. The priority also encourages AI use for personalized learning, tutoring, and student support, including for students with disabilities and those below grade levelThe department said the policy is necessary to maintain U.S. competitiveness, stating it “must provide our Nation’s youth with opportunities to learn how to use AI technology effectively.” The final rule follows more than 300 public comments, reflecting both support for expanding AI literacy and concerns about privacy, safety, and student development.
Bringing the AI-Active Lesson to Life in Higher Education - Adam Stone, EdTech
Evolving from researching artificial intelligence tools to substantive applications of AI, colleges are both boosting student engagement and supporting modern teaching in college classrooms.Across the higher education la ndscape, “we’re moving past AI readiness and starting to talk about how we can activate learning environments with AI,” says Micah Shippee, director of education at Samsung. Samsung’s AI-powered interactive display, for example, can give learners a shared point of focus and empower teachers with a range of capabilities to ensure student engagement.
https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2026/05/bringing-ai-active-lesson-life-higher-education
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Artificial intelligence assisted design of a novel cooperative learning technique for higher education - Özgür Tutal, Nature
Cooperative learning has long been recognized as an effective pedagogical strategy, yet the development of innovative techniques tailored to modern educational demands remains a challenge. This study introduces the Curriculum Concept Constellation Technique (CCCT), a novel cooperative learning technique developed with the support of artificial intelligence (AI). The CCCT employs a metaphorical and visual approach, wherein students collaboratively map key curriculum concepts into visual ‘constellations,’ (Throughout this manuscript, references to ‘constellations’ should be understood as a pedagogical metaphor for conceptual relationships, not as an astronomical or literal representation)—a metaphor representing how individual ideas (like stars) interconnect to form meaningful patterns. This approach fosters deeper conceptual understanding through creativity, role-based collaboration, and peer interaction.
Nature Retracts Oft-Cited Paper on Positive Impact of ChatGPT - GovTech
A widely read and frequently cited 2025 meta-analysis of 51 studies, which found positive effects of ChatGPT in education settings, has been retracted due to uncertainties about the studies and conclusions. A 2025 research paper finding substantial positive effects of ChatGPT on student learning outcomes was retracted last month, with the publishing journal Nature saying discrepancies “undermine the confidence the editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions.” The paper, The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis, reviewed findings from 51 research studies published between November 2022 and February 2025.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
The Secret to Understanding AI “Imagine the tech without the tech companies.” - Josh Tyrangiel, the Atlantic
Yet for all of the noise, a simple question stayed unanswered: What exactly was this new technology going to do for people? Not for corporations or the billionaires who aspired to become trillionaires, but for people with mortgages and sick parents and children struggling to learn things. Answers, when they came, were either so enormous as to be meaningless or so specific as to seem beside the point: AI would cure cancer and write your text messages
Rewiring for AI: From ambition to advantage - Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro, McKinsey Podcast
Companies chase AI everywhere but often fail to capture value—because they’re missing the muscle to scale what works. As generative and agentic AI reshape how work gets done, the real divide isn’t who has the best ideas—it’s who can turn them into real results at speed and scale. In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partners Kate Smaje and Robert Levin speak to Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly about the updated Rewired playbook—and why winning with AI now depends less on ambition and more on building the organizational capabilities to deliver.
Friday, May 15, 2026
Canvas owner confirms cybersecurity incident - Anna Merod, Higher Ed Dive
Ed tech company Instructure said the data breach affected user names, messages and email addresses, as well as student ID numbers. A recent cybersecurity attack on Instructure exposed certain student information, the ed tech company confirmed in a May 1 status update. The following day, it said it believes the incident has been contained. Information impacted by the data breach includes messages between users, names, email addresses and student ID numbers, according to Instructure. The company said no passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information were believed to have been compromised as of May 2. While Instructure said it is actively investigating the incident alongside forensics experts, the company has not disclosed how many school districts were affected.
UNESCO and Tec Launch Regional Observatory on the Benefits and Risks of AI in Education - Ricardo Treviño, TecScience
Artificial intelligence is already being used as a tool in classrooms, but it can be a double-edged sword: either accelerating learning or exposing deep inequalities. Through the observatory, the goal is to promote evidence-based public policies that support the responsible and effective use of AI in the region’s educational systems. The observatory will conduct an assessment of AI use in education to generate evidence that can help shape public policy design. One of the observatory’s first ambitions is to reach more than 250,000 teachers across the region. During its first year of operation, the observatory will organize working groups to define impact measurement models.
Thursday, May 14, 2026
One New Thing: Campus Libraries Become AI Hubs - B. Navarre, US News
Alina Tugend is an award-winning education reporter. Here is her latest rave on an EdTech innovation: Campus libraries are becoming the go-to place for helping students, faculty and researchers learn about artificial intelligence and how to best integrate it into their work. For example, the libraries at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Oklahoma both provide AI “sandboxes” – shared virtual spaces for experimentation and education about various AI tools with ongoing support. This year, the University of Virginia launched its AI Literacy and Action Lab, developed in partnership with the university’s library. The lab is based on a framework created by Leo S. Lo, UVA’s new university librarian and dean of libraries, that integrates technical knowledge, ethical awareness, critical thinking, practical use and societal impact.
Chico State’s 2026-27 Book in Common to Tackle Artificial Intelligence - Chico State
The AI Con is a thought-provoking work examining the rise of artificial intelligence and its far-reaching impacts on society, education and the economy. The selection comes amid heightened interest and debate surrounding AI technologies, including within higher education. Co-authored by a University of Washington linguistics professor and a former Google employee, the book takes a critical look at artificial intelligence, exploring how it functions, the realities behind its rapid expansion, and the social, ethical and environmental implications of its use. Topics include the influence of AI on jobs and creative industries, concerns about academic integrity, and the environmental costs associated with large-scale data centers. “AI is now part of nearly every aspect of our lives,” Mahlis said. “This book helps readers understand not just what AI does, but how it works, and encourages us to question both the hype and the real consequences.”
https://today.csuchico.edu/chico-states-2026-27-book-in-common-to-tackle-artificial-intelligence/
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Leadership Vision of the COLO to Shape Higher Ed Future? - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
The chief online learning officers at colleges and universities are increasingly charting the future of teaching and learning. We are now on the cusp of a significant adjustment in the model of higher education. Who else within the institution’s administration has the combination of technological, pedagogical and innovative knowledge and experience to lead us into the future? The COLO’s knowledge of advanced technologies coupled with the experience of overseeing the application of the vast array of online technologies as they have evolved over the past 30 years is the combination we need to succeed. Our chief online learning officers bring credibility and sagacity to the table in leading us while making this critically important next step in enhancing online learning in higher education.
Instructure Pays Ransom to Canvas Hackers - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
Although the monetary value of the deal is unknown, Instructure says the cybercriminals have returned the hacked personal data and offered assurance “that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident.” Instructure has paid a ransom to a gang of cybercriminals that have twice hacked the company’s learning management system, Canvas, over the past week and a half. According to an update published by the education-technology company Monday night, the deal means that the hackers have returned the compromised data of some 275 million users across more than 8,800 institutions.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Global infrastructure’s inflection poin - Alistair Green, ReThink McKinsey
Infrastructure is a crucial component of economic growth. Reliable transport, logistics, energy, communications, and other critical building blocks are vital to keep industries running. But much of the world’s infrastructure is getting old and outmoded and is no longer suited for the challenges ahead. Many systems that were built decades ago are nearing the end of their lifespans. Even newer infrastructure can come under pressure from shifting population dynamics, climate volatility, or digital disruption. Growing urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and the arrival of new technologies are revealing the limits of existing infrastructure systems.Meanwhile, what we call “infrastructure” is changing. For decades, this term referred mostly to traditional assets such as roads, bridges, ports, and power grids. Today, the definition of infrastructure is expanding to include tech-driven prerequisites for modern growth, such as hyperscale data centers, fiber networks, and electric-vehicle-charging stations.
AI Outperforms ER Doctors in Diagnostic Cases, Study Points to Collaborative Care - Macy Meyer, CNN
The study, published in the journal Science, found that a state-of-the-art large language model outperformed human doctors on a range of common clinical tasks. Using real emergency department data and hundreds of physician comparisons, the model matched or even exceeded human clinician performance in diagnostic choices, emergency triage and determining next steps in management. The authors of the study said those results do not mean AI models are ready to replace human doctors. Instead, the results indicate that industry professionals need faster, more rigorous standards for evaluation and rules for using AI in medicine.
Monday, May 11, 2026
Staying Ahead with AI: My Experience Completing a Micro Credential - Blog Donegal ETB
I decided to enrol in the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Level 4) micro‑credential with Donegal ETB: to build a strong foundation in AI and ensure that I stay ahead of the curve in my field. AI is transforming industries at a pace we’ve never seen before. As someone responsible for supporting resiliency across a large healthcare organisation, I need to understand the tools and technologies that are becoming integral to decision‑making, risk management, and operational continuity. I wanted to understand what’s behind the systems, how they work, and what they mean for the future of my profession. This micro‑credential felt like the right first step. One of the biggest benefits was gaining a solid grounding in what AI is and the real concepts and systems behind it. Understanding AI’s origins and fundamentals has given me a stronger lens through which to view the changes happening across our sector. I’m already applying that insight in my day‑to‑day work, especially when considering the risks, opportunities, and implications of new technologies.
Making mergers work: A playbook for public sector consolidations - McKinsey
Government consolidations are far less common than private sector ones. However, when government M&A occurs, five principles can guide the process and facilitate smooth transitions. Private sector M&A is widely reported on, and while they have a mixed track record, they often demonstrate how large, independent organizations can come together to create value. However, government M&A occurs far less frequently. Although the public sector differs in important ways—such as lacking a profit motive, operating under distinct governance structures, and moving through slower decision cycles—core change-management principles still apply. This article explores five principles, in particular, that can help ensure public sector M&A is successful.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
UW System Will Give Raises to Faculty in High-Demand Fields - Inside Higher Ed
The University of Wisconsin system will give more than 2,300 faculty in high-demand fields a pay raise this summer, The Cap Times reported. The State Legislature appropriated $27 million annually for the increases, which will be doled out with the “goal of focusing on market competitiveness of those faculty in high demand fields of study,” which include biomedical sciences, education, graphic design and veterinary medicine, the distribution plan states. To determine which fields are included, the system used Department of Workforce Development data on high-demand jobs that require a bachelor’s degree. Nearly 16 percent fewer adults started college for the first time this fall compared to the previous year.
What’s Behind a Drop in New Adult Learners This Fall? - Inside Higher Ed
Nearly 16 percent fewer adults started college for the first time this fall compared to the previous year. Some say the change represents rightsizing after an enrollment boom, but others say it’s a reversal worth keeping an eye on. In the economic upheaval that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, adult students flocked to higher education in droves. Every fall from 2021 to 2024, the number of first-time students over the age of 25 grew—including a substantial jump in fall 2024, when new students older than 25 grew 18.7 percent over the previous year, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data. But this past fall, that trend reversed. The number of first-time learners over the age of 25 dropped by 15.5 percent from fall 2024 to fall 2025.
Saturday, May 09, 2026
AI Is Now Improving Itself - There's an AI for That
This video explores the concept of recursive self-improvement, where AI systems increasingly design and refine their own successors. It traces this idea from mid-century predictions of an "intelligence explosion" to current milestones, such as Google DeepMind's Alpha Evolve and OpenAI’s GPT models, which are now being used to write their own code and accelerate the training of future iterations. The narrative suggests we are moving toward a "singularity" where AI contribution to its own development may eventually outpace human input. [00:36] However, the video also highlights significant bottlenecks that could flatten this growth curve, including the exhaustion of high-quality training data by 2028, immense energy requirements, and the "mother of all demos" lesson that team-based innovation often hits a wall. Instead of endless exponential growth, the trend is shifting toward "reasoning" models that think longer rather than just getting larger, and the race to build fully autonomous AI researchers by 2028. [09:01] {Gemini 3 Thinking Mode assisted with the summary of this video)
Personalized Learning and AI: Revolutionizing Education in the Modern Era - Sanjay Kulkarni, Jaro Education
The Strategic Importance of AI in Education: Scaling Excellence
How AI Revolutionizes Personalized Learning: The Mechanics of Adaptation
AI in Education Examples: From Virtual Tutors to Predictive Analytics
The Future of AI in Education: Immersive and Predictive Frontiers
Friday, May 08, 2026
AI Agents in Education: What’s Working and What’s Missing - Abby Sourwine, GovTech
As universities pilot agentic AI for advising and administrative tasks, its place in teaching and learning remains unclear. Experts say decision-makers will need to look carefully at reliability, risks and partners. “We are in the earliest days,” said Nicole Engelbert, vice president of product strategy for student systems at Oracle. “Take a side eye on what anyone is saying about what’s happening in a pervasive way.” “Education is specifically different than your normal institutional tasks,” said Jake Burley, a researcher at the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “There’s a strong sense that there’s something personal or powerful about the educational experience.”
Teach students to ask better questions with Artificial Intelligence - Yiming V. Wang & Christoph Heubeck, Nature
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered university classrooms at a remarkable speed, challenging not only how students learn but also how teachers can tell where thinking is happening1,2,3. AI use shows more than rapid adaptation to a new tool: it also exposes how academic training has long shaped the questions students ask. Conventionally, many questions are framed to elicit coherence rather than conflict, synthesis rather than uncertainty, for example: “Summarise the state of knowledge …”, “Explain the mechanisms of…”. Put to an AI system, the responses often smooth disagreement and blur the limits of evidence4,5. The challenge in AI use is therefore not how far students should rely on AI but whether universities can help them ask questions that expose uncertainty rather than conceal it. We call this approach “grounded inquiry”, which we define as using AI to expose disagreements and weak support, trace claims to evidence, and make uncertainty apparent within a curated set of primary literature sources. We find that this approach helps Earth science students to think more independently and critically.
Thursday, May 07, 2026
Mountain View-based Khan Academy partners with nonprofits to build online AI degree program - Emma Montalbano, Moutain View Voice
Amid emerging conversations about the future of white collar jobs in the age of artificial intelligence, Sal Khan thinks that now is the time to create something he’s been thinking about for years — a new pathway for higher education. Khan Academy, an online learning platform headquartered in Mountain View, TED, a nonprofit that aims to uplift ideas, and ETS, an organization that develops and administers standardized tests, have partnered to establish an online college called Khan TED Institute. Its inaugural program will allow students to earn a bachelor’s of science degree in applied AI, which Khan believes could benefit people interested in many careers.
Faculty Concerned About ASU’s ‘Frankensteinian’ AI Course Builder - Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed
Arizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU. But several professors whose content Atom pulls from were surprised to learn that their materials—including video lectures, slide decks and online assignments—were being perused, clipped and repackaged for these short online course modules. The faculty wasn’t told anything about the app, ASU Atomic, they said.
Wednesday, May 06, 2026
The Impact of AI on Engineering Jobs - Intuit Blog
Artificial intelligence has become fundamental enough to shift traditional engineering roles, changing how engineers work and the work itself. 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Engineers are using AI to tackle complex real-world problems, with applications spanning predictive maintenance, design optimization, and automation. AI’s impact on engineering is just beginning. But it’s already creating new job opportunities and demanding new skills to stay relevant. AI likely won’t replace engineers, but it will affect some roles more than others. That makes adaptability 1 of the most valuable traits in the field right now.
How should universities define AI proficiency? - Junghwan Kim, Inside Higher Ed
But what does “AI readiness” mean? I began reframing that question after attending a global technology gathering of 148,000 attendees and more than 4,000 companies in Las Vegas this January. At CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2026, leaders from Nvidia, AMD and OpenAI described the future of AI. I saw robots playing table tennis and AI systems embedded in everything from mobility platforms to health devices. One idea stood out. Three essential components for AI success: A keynote speaker, Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens AG, described three essential components for success in the AI era: technology, domain know-how and partnerships. That framework has reshaped how I think about AI proficiency – and how I design my courses.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-should-universities-define-ai-proficiency
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
Musk and Altman’s bitter feud over OpenAI to be laid bare in court - the Guardian
The bitter rivalry between two of the tech world’s most powerful men arrives in court this week, as Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI heads to trial in Oakland, California. The case is set to feature some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and its outcome could affect the course of the AI boom. Musk’s suit, filed in 2024, focuses on the formative years of OpenAI when he, Altman and others co-founded the artificial intelligence company as a nonprofit with a grand purpose. “OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” reads the company’s mission statement, published in late 2015.
College students are changing course in search of ‘AI-proof’ majors. But no one knows what they are - JOCELYN GECKER and LINLEY SANDERS, Associated Press
Two years ago, Josephine Timperman arrived at college with a plan. She declared a major in business analytics, figuring she’d learn niche skills that would stand out on a resume and help land a good job after college. But the rise of artificial intelligence has scrambled those calculations. The basic skills she was learning in things like statistical analysis and coding can now easily be automated. “Everyone has a fear that entry-level jobs will be taken by AI,” said the 20-year-old at Miami University in Ohio. A few weeks ago, Timperman switched her major to marketing. Her new strategy is to use her undergraduate studies to build critical thinking and interpersonal skills — areas where humans still have an edge.
Monday, May 04, 2026
How AI is Reshaping the Future of Work - Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how work happens. It is changing daily workflows, influencing how teams make decisions, and pushing leaders to rethink how organizations are structured. As with any major shift, the impact depends less on the technology itself and more on the conditions leaders create around it. As AI becomes more common across industries, the future of work will depend on leaders who can integrate these tools responsibly. AI introduces new capabilities, but leadership determines how they are applied.
Penn State launches AI literacy course for employees - EdScoop
The AI Essentials training program is designed to provide "the knowledge, skills and ethical grounding" needed to use AI responsibly. “By organizing the course into modules focused on technical knowledge, ethical awareness, critical thinking and practical application, we are empowering students, faculty and staff to engage with AI as informed, responsible participants both within the University and beyond,” Executive Vice President and Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos said in the announcement. “By aligning our AI literacy programming with the release of a new enterprise service, we are positioning Penn State at the forefront of institutions embedding comprehensive AI literacy into the undergraduate experience and in preparing our community to lead thoughtfully in an evolving technological landscape. I want to thank the AI Coordinating Council for their ongoing leadership and the instructional designers who developed this curriculum, with the support of subject matter experts, for our community.”
Sunday, May 03, 2026
GPT 5.5: Autonomous Intelligence Breakthrough - AI Revolution
OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 marks a transition toward autonomous intelligence designed for complex, long-horizon tasks, focusing on functional output over simple capability upgrades [00:24]. A key technical highlight is its efficiency: the model matches the latency of its predecessor despite its larger scale and even assisted in optimizing its own inference infrastructure during training [01:11]. Its effectiveness is demonstrated in benchmarks like Terminal Bench 2.0 and OSWorld Verified, where it scored significantly higher than competitors in navigating real computer environments and managing command-line workflows [01:33].
In specialized applications, GPT 5.5 shows advanced reasoning by contributing to new mathematical proofs and accelerating complex genomic research [10:00]. Users emphasize its "conceptual clarity" in coding and its ability to stay persistent on long-running engineering projects without premature failure [07:19]. Although its API pricing is double that of the previous version, its ability to build functional, data-driven applications from single prompts suggests a high value for enterprise-level automation and scientific discovery [07:43]. (Gemini 3 Thinking provided assistance in the summary of this review)
Meta to Cut 10 Percent of Work Force - Mike Isaac, NY Times
Meta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work being done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by A.I. powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.
Saturday, May 02, 2026
Research cuts are now having a chilling effect on academia - Alcino Donadel, University Business
Some experts see early and dire consequences for the science and education research community. “We’ve been hearing about the cuts coming down, but this spring, you’re really starting to see the effects,” says Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at New York University and council member for the American Association of University Professors. In February, Congress passed a fiscal year 2026 spending package that rejected Trump’s proposed 40% cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy. While the agencies saw most of their budgets restored, the Trump administration has stalled in releasing the funds.As of March 24, the NIH has only awarded 15% of its nearly $40 billion budget in academic research to institutions, according to a report from the Association of Medical Colleges.
College Students Are More Polarized Than Ever. Can AI Help? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
Over the past few years, higher education institutions have adopted emerging artificial intelligence tools in an effort to enhance nearly every aspect of campus life—not just teaching and learning but also admissions, alumni networks, fundraising and advising. Now some are even experimenting with AI’s ability to advance one of the hottest trends on college campuses: fostering constructive dialogue among students, who are more divided over politics now than at any point in the past 40 years. To help bridge those divides, colleges are increasingly partnering with organizations aimed at promoting civil dialogue, including Braver Angels, BridgeUSA, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Constructive Dialogue Institute. And lately, AI is becoming part of the conversation.
Friday, May 01, 2026
This is the fastest-growing job for young workers, LinkedIn says - Mary Cunningham, CBS News
As the rise of artificial intelligence stirs anxiety over the technology taking people's jobs, AI is also opening pathways to new careers, according to LinkedIn. The fastest-growing job title for young workers on the networking platform is "AI engineer," a recent report from the company found. LinkedIn analyzed millions of member profiles to determine the number of entry-level workers hired over the last three years and the roles they were hired to fill. "It's measuring momentum for these job titles," said Kory Kantenga, the head of economics, Americas, at LinkedIn. "Companies are just gorging on AI talent."
US security agency is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist, Axios reports - Reuters
The United States National Security Agency is using Anthropic's Mythos Preview AI tool despite the Pentagon hitting the company with a formal supply-chain risk designation, Axios reported on Sunday.
The Mythos Preview model was being used more widely within the department, Axios said, citing sources. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Anthropic, the NSA and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours. The NSA is part of the Defense Department.
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