For a while, various reporters and writers have mentioned the pending demographic cliff, the year in which the number of U.S. high school seniors peak. The data, based on birth rates, indicates that graduating seniors will peak in the Spring of 2025, and colleges will experience fewer applicants for the next dozen or so years […]
Every state in the U.S. provides free education to its residents from grades K-12. Some states have added Pre-K to that free education continuum, and others have added funding for free community college tuition. The higher education initiatives aim to improve college affordability for certain students. Unlike other countries, the U.S. does not have a […]
Read More… from College Affordability: Is the Market Driving the Cost of Tuition?
Whenever I read an article touting an announced financial aid policy that eliminates tuition for students whose family incomes are below a specified amount, I cringe. Many reporters appear to have forgotten that tuition is not the only cost of attending college. Moreover, no one attempts to check the potential impact in advance. Financial Aid […]
Read More… from New Tuition-Free Financial Aid Announcements
After decades of touting the benefits of earning a graduate degree, I’m beginning to believe that more and more evidence touts the opposite. In July 2021, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporters Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller published an article titled “Financially Hobbled for Life: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.” The WSJ’s first […]
Read More… from New Studies Indicate Many Master’s Degrees Have No Value
From my earliest years in school, everything was about academic meritocracy. America was in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the “Space Race” to be the first nation to land a man on the moon. Schoolchildren were encouraged to be scientists and engineers to help America succeed. In sixth grade, […]
About a year ago, I received a FedEx envelope delivered to my house in Austin. Inside was an invitation to Penrose Far West, which billed itself as “an intimate gathering of the most intriguing people in the science world.” The invitation was exquisite, handprinted on a letterpress, and included an RSVP card with embroidered stitching […]
I am a long-time reader and unabashed fan of The Economist. The UK-centric perspective of its business reporting provides an unfiltered (in my opinion) commentary on companies, trends, and events in the United States. In its October 14 issue, The Economist issued a Special Report on the American Economy. The writer notes the Competitiveness Policy […]
Read More… from The American Economy in 2024: An Overseas Perspective
In the 22-plus months since ChatGPT was released, I’ve shared a few observations and tips with friends and readers. One of the tips I frequently share is my morning routine of using AI for 20 to 30 minutes every day. Last week, I opened One Useful Thing, a Substack blog by Ethan Mollick, and read […]
I’ve written about artificial intelligence (AI) for more than a dozen years. For most of that period, my articles were about machine learning and its capability to process tasks that humans have traditionally performed. With the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, I began writing about generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and ChatGPT. One […]
Read More… from STORM: A Stanford University AI Writing System
The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles in 2021 about the costs of graduate degrees and the income earned by graduates of those programs. I wrote a series of six blog articles that reported on and commented about their articles and the data presented in their reporting tool. These posts included: Incurring Debt […]
Read More… from Graduate Degrees: Risky and Unequal Paths to the Top
