Education – Page 5

Award Winner, Higher Education, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Science & Technology News

Harvard’s prestigious debate team loses to New York prison inmates

November 11, 2019

Prisoners participating in Bard College initiative to provide them a liberal arts education beat Ivy League students who won national title only months ago

Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.

The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.

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Business, Employment, Finance, Higher Education, Science & Technology News

Why no one wants to be an MBA anymore

October 30, 2019

A recent Wall Street Journal article focused on the steep decline in elite MBA program applications. In an era of an increasing divide between the economic haves and have nots, you’d think that the vaunted Masters in Business Administration degree would be valued more than ever. After all, with the recent boom in the stock market coinciding with a steep reduction in corporate taxes, big corporations are awash in profits to reward their highest achievers. Though there has been only slight progress in wage increases for rank and file employees, the top brass is enjoying greater compensation than ever. And a quick look at the CEOs of the companies with highest market caps reveal at least one thing in common: both leaders obtained MBAs from prestigious institutions. Apple’s Tim Cook graduated from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, while Satya Nadella of Microsoft received his MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Yet MBA applications are down sharply, even at the most celebrated institutions. The Journal article has highlighted declines between 5-20% in applications to the top U.S. MBA programs. What gives?

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Employment, Higher Education, Latest Trend, Report, Science & Technology News

Why some say college is no longer the sure path to success

October 8, 2019

An alarming—yet illuminating—new study conducted by Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, concludes that many who go to college come out earning less than the typical salary of a high school graduate. Contrary to popular opinion, which contends that the path to success is rooted in attaining a college education, the findings indicate that half of U.S. colleges in 2018 left their students earning under $28,000 a year.

In past generations, primarily the upper-class, wealthy elites attended universities. After World War II and the passing of the G.I. bill, soldiers returning from the battlefields were offered financial assistance to attend college—and they did so in large numbers. Slowly over time, in the ensuing decades, enrolling into college became almost commonplace for the average American. Today, there is great pressure put upon high school students to attend universities—even if they lack the aptitude or interest. Sometimes the pressure exerted on kids to attend top-tier institutions is intense. This was clearly exemplified by the recent college admittance scandal, in which the rich and famous parents allegedly bribed school officials to get their children into ivy league and top-tier universities.

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Augmented Reality, Education, Science & Technology News, VR

A new immersive classroom uses AI and VR to teach Mandarin Chinese

August 3, 2019

Students will learn the language by ordering food or haggling with street vendors on a virtual Beijing street.

Often the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in an environment where people speak it. The constant exposure, along with the pressure to communicate, helps you swiftly pick up and practice new vocabulary. But not everyone gets the opportunity to live or study abroad.

In a new collaboration with IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a university based in Troy, New York, now offers its students studying Chinese another option: a 360-degree virtual environment that teleports them to the busy streets of Beijing or a crowded Chinese restaurant. Students get to haggle with street vendors or order food, and the environment is equipped with different AI capabilities to respond to them in real time. While the classroom is largely experimental, it is being used for the first time in a six-week, for-credit course at the university this summer.

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Children, Education, Music, Science & Technology News

Want your kids to do well in math and science? This is the 1 totally unexpected subject they should study (says science)

July 22, 2019

A new study offers extraordinary findings.

You want the best for your kids. Even if they don’t deserve it. The world has become an ever more traumatized place, so you feel you should do ever more to give them a helping hand.

Though it surely stops before you pay a fixer $500,000 for them to go to USC. I want to help you for free, oh traumatized parent.

So I’ve just found a fascinating piece of research that might be a good guide, should you want your children to be good at the basics.

Continue reading… “Want your kids to do well in math and science? This is the 1 totally unexpected subject they should study (says science)”

Education, Higher Education, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Top 6 trends in higher education

July 11, 2019

Around the world, tuition at universities is rising at a much faster rate than inflation and challenging students’ return on investment. Reduced government funding and higher operating costs are driving the need for change at universities. The mismatch in employer needs and employee skills is leaving over seven million jobs unfilled in the U.S.

These trends are opening the way for new approaches in higher education. Innovations in how post-secondary education are delivered, financed, and recognized are driven by a range of actors—from large public universities like Arizona State University to elite private institutions like MIT to the many relatively new education companies entering the sector like Make School, Coursera, and Trilogy Education.

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Education, Higher Education, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Non-Degree Certificates And Certifications: Fast, Cheap And Effective

May 26, 2019

Sub-baccalaureate certificates and certifications bring significant economic advantages,
especially for adults who do not have a college degree.

Non-degree certificates convey substantial economic value, including higher employment rates and income, greater marketability and more personal satisfaction. Those are the key results from a just-released survey of about 50,000 working adults between the ages of 25-64. The survey focused on respondents who did not have a college degree and were not attending college.

The study was conducted by the Strada Educational Group and Gallup as part of their Education Consumer Survey, and the report, “Certified Value: When Do Adults Without Degrees Benefit From Earning Certificates and Certifications?” was published by Strada and the Lumina Foundation.

The results point to the multiple, positive economic impacts that sub-baccalaureate certificates and certifications have for adult workers, 5% of whom are estimated to hold such credentials as their highest level of educational attainment. A certificate is a credential awarded by a postsecondary institution for completion of occupationally oriented courses typically lasting a year or less; a certification is a credential awarded by industry or independent organizations based on examinations that verify the acquisition of skills.

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Higher Education, Latest Trend, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

Colleges are upending majors

April 20, 2019

Princeton commencement, 1909. Photo: Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images

In 1869, at Harvard, Charles Eliot invented the college major as we know it — each student would be channeled into a specialized area of study, and move on to a stable, lifelong job.

The big picture: A century and a half later, American colleges pump out some 4.5 million new bachelor’s degrees every year, but the context — the present and future of work — has changed entirely.

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Education, Higher Education, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

A movement to prepare students for the future of work

April 5, 2019

Details: Breaking with traditional schooling, these new models emphasize capabilities over knowledge — with extra weight on interpersonal skills that appear likely to become ever more valuable.

In high schools across the U.S., a quiet movement is underway to better prepare students for a hazy new future of work in which graduates will vie for fast-changing jobs being transformed by increasingly capable machines.

The big picture: No one really knows what future jobs will look like or the skills that will be necessary to carry them out. But researchers and companies alike widely believe that, as a start, interpersonal and management skills will differentiate humans from machines.

High schoolers are often being taught skills that will soon be handed over to machines, and they’re missing out on more valuable ones.

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Amazon.com, Employment, Higher Education, Science & Technology News

A Harvard Professor Says Half of All Colleges Won’t Exist in 10 Years (and Why a New Model Might Provide a Better Path to Career Success)

March 23, 2019

Sound far-fetched? Clayton Christensen’s argument is based on a premise familiar to successful entrepreneurs.

Similar to the prediction made by Futurist Thomas Frey in 2013, many colleges will soon struggle to survive.

If you’ve ever used the word disruption to refer to innovations that create new markets and displace long-established companies and products, you might have Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his best-selling book The Innovator’s Dilemma to thank.

More recently, Christensen has predicted traditional colleges and universities are ripe for disruption, arguing online education will undermine their business models (because education is, ultimately, a business) to such a degree that many won’t survive.

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Education, Employment, Higher Education, Science & Technology News

Does it even matter where you go to college? Here’s what the data says.

March 22, 2019

Let’s not forget that billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates all dropped out of college.

Does it matter where a person went to college? Well, it’s a complicated answer, depending on whom you ask.

After Operation Varsity Blues ensnared 50 people in a college admissions scam, including famous actresses and heads of major financial companies, the scandal is raising the question of what matters more: a fancy school name on a résumé, or an education.

“I have no idea where most of the people who worked for me went to college. I just know: Did they get stuff done or did they not?” former President Barack Obama said last week at a tech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, before news of the arrests broke.

Continue reading… “Does it even matter where you go to college? Here’s what the data says.”

DaVinci Institute, Education, Futurist, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

Awaiting the Advent of a Sleeping Giant in Edtech

March 15, 2019

Online learning taught by robots could be widespread by 2030. Thirty years ago, it was a big deal when schools got their first computers. Today, it’s a big deal when students get their own laptops.

According to futurist Thomas Frey, in 14 years it’ll be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the internet.

It’s not just because the technology will be that sophisticated, Frey says, but because the company responsible for it will be the largest of its kind.

“I’ve been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet,” Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, tells Business Insider.

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