Are you a high schooler wondering what career to pursue that won’t be gobbled up by robots in the next few years? Are you an engineering grad, economist, physicist, or policy analyst looking to become an expert in a new, but fast-developing discipline? If so, the Colorado School of Mines has the perfect answer for you: You should totally take up space mining.
No, we’re not kidding. While the idea of extracting water, minerals or even metals from an asteroid sounds like the stuff of far-future science-fiction, it’s likely to actually happen in the coming decades — and Colorado School of Mines’ newly launched “Space Resources” course will help you get in on the ground floor.
High School failed me. As a high school dropout, I knew I was taking a risk by rejecting the ‘normal route’ and knew I always wanted to be in the business world. During one assignment in my computer class, I did not show up in a suit and tie for the presentation. The teacher docked me for not ‘dressing proper’, which I found puzzling. After all, this class was about desktop publishing – why should this be an issue? It should be about the substance of my work and not some preconceived, superficial notion about how I looked. For me, it has always been about the substance and not the suit.
The good news is that federal aid for colleges has reached its high-water mark. The bad news is that millions of young adults feel they have no choice but to enroll in a four-year University, something that brings with it an inordinate amount of debt for many students.
No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting? By Jacob Mikanowski
On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English … This is America.” A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a “fiesta” protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.
A Chinese student had his enrollment at a university suspended because of his father’s bad social credit score. The father, surnamed Rao, had failed to repay a $29,900 loan and was added to a debtor blacklist that prevented a university from accepting his son. State media reported that the incident also caused Rao’s social credit score to drop.
China is expected to roll out a national social credit system in 2020, but it remains to be seen if citizens will actually be given a “trustworthiness” score or if they’ll just be subjected to more blacklists.
A futurist says the industry may have nowhere to go but down. What does the slide look like?
Maybe higher education has reached its peak. Not the Harvards and Yales of the world, but the institutions that make up the rest of the industry—the regional public schools who saw decades of growth and are now facing major budget cuts and the smaller, less-selective private colleges that have exorbitant sticker prices while the number of students enrolling in them declines.
A recent analysis of American debt revealed a startling shift: Borrowers between the ages of 45 and 74 now owe more money in education-related debt, on average, than do younger college graduates.
People under age 35 with student debt owe $32,900 on average, according to data from the Fed’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. That debt number is higher for every other 10-year age bracket up to age 75: It peaks at $37,000 for 45- to 54-year-olds, but even 65- to 74-year-old borrowers owe an average $35,400.
A lot of kids at age 17 or 18 are often not clear, about what career would fit them best. Add to that is a changing world, that would make things even more confusing. The job opportunities that exist now were absent ten years ago and so it is quite likely that what you train for now might not be enough sooner or later.
At one point degrees were the sole motivating factor for higher education. There was prestige in the number of degrees you ‘gathered’ or what degree, for that matter, you attained. Although degrees continue to be relevant, somehow they no longer are a defining factor for some jobs at the entry level.
Not long after Nelly Spigner arrived at the University of Richmond in 2014 as a Division I soccer player and aspiring surgeon, college began to feel like a pressure cooker. Overwhelmed by her busy soccer schedule and heavy course load, she found herself fixating on how each grade would bring her closer to medical school. “I was running myself so thin trying to be the best college student,” she says. “It almost seems like they’re setting you up to fail because of the sheer amount of work and amount of classes you have to take at the same time, and how you’re also expected to do so much.”
At first, Spigner hesitated to seek help at the university’s counseling center, which was conspicuously located in the psychology building, separate from the health center. “No one wanted to be seen going up to that office,” she says. But she began to experience intense mood swings. At times, she found herself crying uncontrollably, unable to leave her room, only to feel normal again in 30 minutes. She started skipping classes and meals, avoiding friends and professors, and holing up in her dorm. In the spring of her freshman year, she saw a psychiatrist on campus, who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, and her symptoms worsened. The soccer team wouldn’t allow her to play after she missed too many practices, so she left the team. In October of her sophomore year, she withdrew from school on medical leave, feeling defeated. “When you’re going through that and you’re looking around on campus, it doesn’t seem like anyone else is going through what you’re going through,” she says. “It was probably the loneliest experience.”
Will teacherbots applied with artificial intelligence be doing our job one day? Will they do it better than us? Jude Barback takes stock of some of the recent thinking around the future of education.
Like a lot of children, my sons, Toby, 7, and Anton, 4, are obsessed with robots. In the children’s books they devour at bedtime, happy, helpful robots pop up more often than even dragons or dinosaurs.
So, you want to learn to speak and write a new language, huh? Not just “hello” and “thank you,” but really learn it well enough that you could live in the country of origin? Hope you’re ready to commit. If you’re a Native English Speaker, these are the languages that will take the most and least time to become proficient in.
