Mapping the Structural Divide — from kylesaunders.com by Kyle Saunders Institutional Resilience, Post-College Market Position, and Artificial Intelligence Exposure Across 1,556 U.S. Colleges and Universities
Where does your institution stand?
U.S. four-year colleges and universities face compounding pressures — demographic decline, fiscal stress, and artificial intelligence — that will reshape the sector over the next decade. This project maps where 1,556 institutions are structurally positioned across two dimensions, using federal data anyone can verify.
…
X-axis: Institutional Resilience
Can this institution absorb financial and enrollment shocks?
Endowment per student · Revenue diversification · Enrollment trend · Admissions selectivity
Y-axis: Post-College Market Position
How well does this institution position graduates for the labor market ahead?
Completion rate · Earnings-to-debt ratio · AI exposure (inverted) · Demographic trajectory
The reason that I claim I am not well-suited to thrive as an instructor in the age of AI is because both AI Enthusiasts and AI Resisters put a lot of thought and energy into completely redesigning their classes in response to AI. This is the one takeaway that I don’t think the Exhausted Majority has fully accepted yet—to excel as a teacher in this AI era, you need to totally revise how you teach and how you assess what students learn in your classes.
I can say this much—whatever solution our industry comes up with, it’s likely to emerge from teaching and learning centers. Contrary to what Paul Schofield wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, pedagogy experts are the best hope we have to equip today’s faculty with the tools required to succeed in this uncertain educational environment. As I always tell my students, “I was trained for 7 years to become a researcher and 2 days to become a teacher.” The idea that only disciplinary experts know how to teach and have nothing to learn from so-called “nonscholars” is so laughable that one has to wonder whether an AI agent jokingly wrote that sad opinion piece to troll the whole academe.
Last week, one of the top law schools in the United States, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, released its final policy on artificial intelligence, effective summer 2026. In the span of a breezy 1.5 pages, the school outlined the challenge AI poses to legal education and how it plans to address this problem. Despite these intentions, this AI policy is, in my estimation, the worst AI policy in higher education I have seen.
From AI Tutors to AI Study Mates— from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman New research reveals how AI can enable real learning — not just productivity gains
.
The point isn’t that AI is inherently bad for learning — it’s that the meta-analyses showing that LLMs improve assignment and performance scores are measuring the wrong thing. They’re measuring performance with the AI present, not learning that persists once it’s gone.
. From DSC: Notice that when an AI-based learning system can remember what you’ve worked on and how you are doing — where you are struggling or doing well — it can have a positive impact on your longer-term learning. That, to me, is where long-term based learner profiles come in.
Later in the article, Dr. Hardman points out that “if we want to deliver AI tooling which supports substantive learning, we need to intentionally create a new category of AI tool for ‘learning at work’ which prioritises learning and development over productivity.” While I agree with that, I do wonder if businesses will care, so long as the work gets done and gets done well. But this calls into mind the word “experience” — something that traditionally has been hard fought to get in the corporate world. But the corporate realm often doesn’t like to pay for experience (beyond key AI-based jobs) when they perceive it’s getting too expensive. Ask all those 50 and over who had or have a target on their backs.
Easy to miss: Anthropic named the Justice Technology Association as the access-to-justice partner in the launch. The cost floor just dropped (while the product got better) for consumer legal. Law Firm 2.0 gets the headlines. A2J and direct-to-consumer is the largest white space in legal.
It has been a crazy 48 hours. We released Lavern as open source.
An agentic legal system, six months in the making, 155,000+ lines of code, 67 specialist agents, nine workflows, and at least ten things inside it that you could make as a separate product.
I was a bit anxious, like I was organising a kids’ party with balloons, unsure if anyone would come.
Summary:Scammers are flooding hiring platforms like LinkedIn with AI-generated fake remote jobs to steal data. Nearly 80 percent of these scams target low-skill roles, using inflated pay and vague requirements as bait. Platforms should adopt AI-driven detection to protect vulnerable job seekers.
Market desperation has become a growth engine for fraud. People invest their hope, time and personal data into an opportunity that doesn’t exist and could use their information for financial gains, identity theft or espionage.
Until hiring platforms take greater responsibility for vetting the roles they host, the burden of staying safe falls on job seekers. Once you understand the motives and patterns scammers rely on, however, spotting them becomes much easier.
But a combination of vague descriptions, inflated pay, minimal requirements and subtle urgency is exactly what makes the system so effective.
AUSTIN, Texas (May 19, 2026) – Deans for Impact (DFI) today released the second edition of The Science of Learning, a report translating cognitive-science research into practical implications for teaching. The updated edition includes new research on memory, attention, motivation, and learning misconceptions, offering educators a research-based foundation for understanding how to support durable student learning.
First released in 2015, The Science of Learning is DFI’s most widely-used and cited resource, with more than one million downloads. Since its publication, DFI has supported nearly 300 teacher-preparation programs to make instructional quality a priority in the way teachers are prepared, directly impacting more than 110,000 teachers over the last decade.
The second edition arrives at a moment when more than 40 states have made meaningful investments in strengthening evidence-based instruction, particularly in early literacy, mathematics, and the use of high-quality instructional materials. The science of learning supports future teachers to build a comprehensive foundation for instructional decision-making that cuts across content areas and grade levels.
…
Putting college on the fast track — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus As students grow impatient, colleges try three-year bachelor’s degrees
Some colleges and the accreditors and states that oversee them are adding and approving three-year bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits than the traditional four-year kind.
Institutions facing enrollment declines hope the new three-year degrees will attract students unwilling to spend the usual amount of time and money that it takes to graduate. States need those graduates to fill jobs.
Nearly 60 universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in some disciplines. They’re calling them “applied” or “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees.
While earning bachelor’s degrees with fewer credits may appeal to some students, the idea is so new that there’s a key unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will accept them.
From DSC: Given the often high price of obtaining a degree these days…whether it’s a 4-year program or a 3-year program, the key is whether a student can get a good job coming out of that program. I think the required time doesn’t help as much as making the necessary changes to offer more responsive curricula, relevant programs, and real-world learning experiences (including apprenticeships and internships). I appreciate the experiment to lower the overall costs, but like so many other “innovations,” it’s playing at the fringes. It’s really the same old, same old — just on a shorter time frame.
At current prices, families are FORCED to consider employment prospects. They are demanding a ROI, because they have to.
I was at a meeting earlier this year with other parents and family members who were interested in a particular program at a Michigan-based university. One set of parents really wanted to know if their student would be getting a good job coming out of the program. They didn’t want to take a second mortgage out if the investment wasn’t going to pay off.
For people who are hard of hearing, sign language isn’t just a communication tool; it’s their primary language. The problem is that sign language is not taught to people with regular hearing, thus creating a barrier that’s hard to bridge. Now, a team of researchers in South Korea may have just found a surprisingly elegant solution to this age-old problem.
According to a new study published in Science Advances, the system, called WRSLT (wirelessly connected, ring-type sign language translator), can recognize and translate both American Sign Language and International Sign Language words with around 88% accuracy. And yes, it works in real time. .
For the last several months, we have had early, unbounded access to the latest frontier AI models. What we’ve seen from that vantage point has made it clear that the window for organizations to get ahead of what’s coming is shorter than most leaders realize.
We have moved past the era of incremental AI improvements into a threat landscape shift. Our testing has revealed a step-change in capability that demonstrates an intuitive understanding of software vulnerabilities. This is more than faster code generation, it is a shift from AI as an assistant to AI as an autonomous agent capable of discovering and chaining flaws at a scale that most defenders aren’t prepared for.
These capabilities will not stay confined to controlled environments for long. When Mythos first launched, we predicted a six-month window before attackers gained access. We now believe that timeline has accelerated significantly.
[On May 12, 2026, we introduced] 20+ new MCP connectors that link Claude to the software the legal industry already relies on, and 12 new plugins tailored to specific legal work and practice areas. And finally, we’re partnering with the Free Law Project, the Justice Technology Association, and others working to put legal help within reach of people who can’t currently access it. .
We have been building toward this moment, and now it’s finally arrived. Anthropic has formally launched ‘Claude For Legal’, a comprehensive offering that could reshape the legal tech world and places the LLM-maker at the heart of the market. (See below Artificial Lawyer interview with Mark Pike, Anthropic Associate General Counsel.)
Legal tech companies from Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, to Harvey and Legora, are all participants in one way or another, in what is a bold strategic move that changes the legal tech market in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. (Plus, see comments from Harvey and TR below.) And of course, Freshfields has already gone all-in with Claude, while other major firms are also deeply exploring what it can do.
Claude for Legal will manifest itself across four main paths and builds on work that has already been developed:
‘New Legal Plugins: …
New MCP Connectors: …
Open-source Ecosystem: …
Plus, Free Law Project & Justice Technology Association Partnerships: …
The Justice Technology Association (JTA), a nonprofit trade group representing mission-driven companies focused on the access to justice crisis, announced today that it has joined Anthropic as a launch partner in what Anthropic is calling its first comprehensive legal vertical initiative.
The announcement comes as part of a much-broader announcement by Anthropic of its push into the legal industry, as it just released more than 20 MCP connectors to legal tech products and 12 practice-area plugins for Claude.
“Legal services are out of reach for many people and small businesses, and the gap is widening,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “We’re working with the Free Law Project, Justice Technology Association and other legal aid and public service organizations to help make legal services more affordable and available.”
That makes this the first time that a leading AI company is explicitly naming access to justice as a foundational pillar,JTA says, with Anthropic positioning the initiative as “investing in the premise that AI should expand access to justice — making legal services more affordable and available.”
Anthropic today took its biggest step yet into the legal market, releasing more than 20 new MCP connectors linking Claude to the software that law firms and legal departments run on, along with 12 new plugins tailored to specific legal practice areas.
Today’s announcement builds on the legal plugin Anthropic released in early February for Claude Cowork — the agentic desktop tool the company introduced in January as “Claude Code for the rest of your work.”
In the months since that initial release, Anthropic says legal professionals have become the most engaged Cowork users of any knowledge-work function, a statistic that likely accelerated this deeper push.
ANTHROPIC JUST OPEN-SOURCED A COMPLETE AI LEGAL SYSTEM COVERING 10 PRACTICE AREAS. 100% FREE.
80+ NAMED AGENTS handling
– contracts
– employment
– litigation
– privacy, IP
– corporate work. All of it
We welcome back Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, to discuss his recent “Open Letter to Law Firms.” As the legal industry hits a critical inflection point, Sabastian argues that the era of “AI theater” and small-scale pilots is over.
The conversation dives deep into the Innovator’s Dilemma facing law firms, the shift toward agentic AI, and how firms must reimagine their business models to remain competitive. Sabastian highlights that legal professionals are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in trusted AI transformation, provided they embrace transparency, data integration, and shared efficiency gains with their clients.
Three Realities for the Modern Legal Firm To lead in this landscape, there are three realities every firm leader must understand:
Competition is intensifying: …
Client expectations will reshape the market: Clients are no longer asking whether firms use AI. Rather, they’re expecting to see the benefits of that transformation passed directly to them. They expect more for less but are not simply seeking lower costs – they want more insight, more speed, and more value for every dollar of their budget. And law firms, which operate at the center of data, ethics, and risk, have outsized influence over the structure and deployment of trusted AI across all industries. Some clients, like Salesforce, are even creating agentic tools to improve the law firm’s experience when working with clients. …
Unified client intelligence is at the heart of legal strategy: …
Are AI First Firms a Threat To Biglaw? — from legallydisrupted.com by Zach Abramowitz and Logan Brown Episode 49 features AI first law firm founder Logan Brown
Is Big Law about to become the Yellow Pages? Hey, I didn’t say it, but ex-Cooley lawyer turned AI first law firm Logan Brown did. The question is do I agree?
.
Instead of the traditional billable hour, they charge flat fees like $100 for a contract review or $50 to ask a lawyer a quick question via chat. She’s already got over 40 attorneys on the platform. And in a departure from the traditional partnership track, she actually chose to raise venture capital so she could scale the firm like a tech company and tackle the access-to-justice gap.
From DSC: LOVE to hear anything and everything regarding efforts to address the access-to-justice gap here in the United States!!! Along these lines, also see:
“Legal services are out of reach for many people and small businesses, and the gap is widening,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “We’re working with the Free Law Project, Justice Technology Association and other legal aid and public service organizations to help make legal services more affordable and available.”
That makes this the first time that a leading AI company is explicitly naming access to justice as a foundational pillar, JTA says, with Anthropic positioning the initiative as “investing in the premise that AI should expand access to justice — making legal services more affordable and available.”
What AI hallucinations in law actually are
In a legal context, AI hallucinations are one of two things. They’re either citations to cases or statutes that don’t exist, or citations to real authorities for propositions those authorities don’t actually support.
The first kind is the one making headlines. A lawyer or pro se litigant uses a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok to help draft a brief. The model, predicting the statistically likely next word, decides a citation belongs in a particular spot, and produces one. The reporter might be real. The volume number might fall within the right range. The Bluebook formatting is often better than what most associates produce. The case itself just doesn’t exist.
The second kind is older than AI. Lawyers have always occasionally cited a case for a proposition that the case doesn’t stand for. AI has made this kind of error easier to commit and easier to catch.
A dangerous mind — from by Jordan Furlong Generative AI is a tireless genius with no boundaries. Use it carelessly, and it can usurp your voice, overwrite your ideas, and steal your originality. Make sure you safeguard your capacity to think.
Don’t let the genius do the hard work for you. The more incisive and unique your own thinking — the more you battle and struggle and eventually succeed in getting your ideas and insights out — the more you can benefit from the AI’s complementary improvements. The great irony of Gen AI is that it actually makes your own cognitive processes your most valuable asset.
So safeguard your mind. Defend your right to think as only you can. And if you don’t want AI to replace you, then don’t send it a written invitation.
The pilot phase is over. After two years of experimentation for legal departments, 2026 will be the year AI moves from “interesting tool” to “operational infrastructure,” whether they’re ready or not. We surveyed predictions from Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and other leading legal tech analysts to identify where expert consensus is forming. The implications for AI governance, outside counsel relationships, and regulatory compliance are significant.
LinkedIn Grad’s Guide 2026: Starting your career in the AI era — from linkedin.com by Gianna Prudente To help you head off in the right direction, we’ve identified where those starting their careers are finding opportunity, based on data from millions of LinkedIn member profiles.
While all of this is happening, colleges are still catching up. Many students are graduating without having spent much time learning how AI actually fits into day-to-day work — even as employers seek out those exact skills.
“Colleges are moving into an era of, we’ll let the faculty decide, which leads to a very uneven experience for students because some faculty are really into AI and other faculty are not,” says Jeff Selingo, a higher education strategist. “Employers are the same; they don’t really know how to act around early careers.”
Taken together, new grads are entering a uniquely challenging environment: fewer traditional entry points, slower turnover and a workplace that’s evolving faster than the systems preparing people for it.
For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.
The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged.
One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks?
The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it.
This $10K AI School Promises to Future-Proof Your Career — from builtin.com by Matthew Urwin Khan Academy, TED and ETS are starting a new program to equip students and professionals with the skills to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy. Here’s what you need to know.
Summary: The Khan TED Institute is a higher-education program that will teach students and workers how to use AI through interactive learning. The program’s AI-centric curriculum is an unproven approach, though, casting doubt on whether it will actually improve learning outcomes and career prospects.
Thanks for dropping by my Learning Ecosystems blog!
My name is Daniel Christian and this blog seeks to cover the teaching and learning environments within the K-12 (including homeschooling, learning pods/micro-schools), collegiate, and corporate training spaces -- whether those environments be face-to-face, blended, hyflex, or 100% online.
Just as the organizations that we work for have their own learning ecosystems, each of us has our own learning ecosystem. We need to be very intentional about enhancing those learning ecosystems -- as we all need to be lifelong learners in order to remain marketable and employed. It's no longer about running sprints (i.e., getting a 4-year degree or going to a vocational school and then calling it quits), but rather, we are all running marathons now (i.e., we are into lifelong learning these days).
