Jeremy Caplan’s post on LinkedIn:
Or see Jeremy’s post on substack — i.e., from wondertools.substack.com.
Jeremy Caplan’s post on LinkedIn:
Or see Jeremy’s post on substack — i.e., from wondertools.substack.com.
From DSC:
I wish I had learned about the important financial, legal, and medical things (that are covered in the gifted article below) in high school!
How to Help Your Aging Loved Ones Plan for the Future— a gifted article from nytimes.com by Elie Levine
Learn as much as you can about setting up the financial, legal and medical components of late-in-life care — and do it earlier than you might think.
Making end-of-life plans for your loved ones can feel like a burden. It is, almost by definition, complicated, and it might require having difficult conversations and sorting through a seemingly endless stream of forms and terminology. But it’s essential to your family’s well-being — and it’s worth doing earlier than you might think.
The first thing to know: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to planning. But think of this as a starter kit that covers how to handle your parents’ current or future health challenges, and how they’ll pay for medical care. (Knowing about their medications, current finances and living situation can also help you prepare for an emergency medical situation.) Below are some of the questions to consider and discuss with your loved ones.
Which Jobs Are Most at Risk From AI? New Anthropic Data Offers Clues. — from builtin.com by Matthew Urwin
Anthropic set out in its latest study to predict how artificial intelligence could impact the labor market. Instead, its findings raise more questions than answers for tech workers as the U.S. government refuses to regulate the AI industry.
Summary:
In its latest labor market study, Anthropic found that artificial intelligence poses the greatest threat to software jobs, women and younger professionals. As the Trump administration takes a hands-off approach to AI, tech workers may be left to grapple with these findings on their own.
Matthew links to:
Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence — from anthropic.com
Key findings
More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
As one Vermont college finishes its last semester, an estimated 442 others may be in trouble
A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.
More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk, according to the forecast, by Huron Consulting Group, which analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand and other measures. Many are, like Sterling, small and rural.
“We have too many seats. We have too many classrooms,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron. “So over the coming five to 10 years, this shakeout is going to take place.”
You Can’t Future-Proof Your Career From AI, But You Can Do This — from builtin.com by Liz Tran
Agility has become the most important skill to cultivate in today’s job market. Here’s how to get started.
Summary: Job seekers facing future panic should prioritize agility over information consumption. Build it by focusing on 30-day action experiments, reframing resumes around durable skills like problem-solving and embracing uncertainty through stretch applications and real-world feedback.
…
The antidote is what I call AQ — the agility quotient — which is your capacity to face change, disappointment and uncertainty without losing your footing. Unlike IQ, which measures what you know, AQ measures how fast you adapt when the rules change. Right now, it’s the most important career asset you have. Here’s how to build it.
What Is Agility Quotient (AQ)?
AQ is a measure of an individual’s capacity to adapt quickly when rules, industries or circumstances change. Unlike IQ, which focuses on existing knowledge, AQ emphasizes the ability to face uncertainty and disappointment without losing one’s footing, prioritizing action and iteration over exhaustive planning.
From DSC:
I have been proposing that the AI-based learning platform of the future will be constantly doing this — every single day. It will know what the in-demand skills are — at any given moment in time. It will then be able to direct you to resources that will help you gain those skills. Though in my vision, the system is querying actual/open job descriptions, not analyzing learning data from enterprise learners. Perhaps I should add that to the vision.
Coursera’s Job Skills Report 2026: Top skills for your students — from coursera.org
The Job Skills Report 2026 analyzes learning data from more than 6 million enterprise learners to identify the future job skills organizations need most. It’s designed for HR and L&D leaders; data, IT, and software & product development leaders; higher education administrators; and government agencies seeking actionable insights on workforce skills trends and AI-driven transformation.
…
Drawing on data from 6 million enterprise learners across nearly 7,000 organizations, the Job Skills Report 2026 guides you through the skills reshaping the global economy. This year’s analysis spans Data, IT, and Software & Product Development—and the Generative AI skills becoming essential for every role.
From DSC:
The types of postings/articles (such as the one below) make me ask, are we not shooting ourselves in the foot with AI and recent college graduates? If the bottom rungs continue to disappear, internships and apprenticeships can only go so far. There aren’t enough of them — especially valuable ones. So as this article points out, there will be threats to the long-term health of our talent pipelines unless we can take steps to thwart those impacts — and to do so fairly soon.
To me…vocational training and jobs are looking better all the time — i.e., plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, and more.
Can New Graduates Compete With AI? — from builtin.combyRichard Johnson
The increasing adoption of AI automation is compressing early-career jobs. How should new graduates get a foothold in the economy now?
Summary: AI is hollowing out entry-level roles by automating routine tasks, eliminating a rung on the career ladder. New graduates face intense competition and a rising skill floor. While firms gain short-term productivity, they risk a long-term talent shortage by eliminating junior training grounds.
Conversations about AI have covered all grounds: hype, fear and slop. But while some roll their eyes at yet another automation headline, soon?to?be graduates are watching the labor market with a very different level of urgency. They’re entering a world where the old paradox of needing experience to get experience is colliding with a new reality: AI is absorbing the standardized, routine tasks that once defined entry?level work. The result isn’t just a shift in job descriptions or skill-requirements, but rather a structural reshaping of the career pipeline.
Entry-level workers face an outsized disruption to their long-term career trajectories. They have the least buffer to adapt given their lack of relevant job market experience and heightened financial pressure to secure a job quickly with the student-debt repayment periods for recent graduates looming.
Momentum early in one’s career matters, and the first job on a resume shapes future compensation bands and opportunities. It also serves as a signal for perceived specialization or, at minimum, interest. Losing that foothold has compounding effects to one’s career ladder.
Also relevant/see:
New Anthropic Institute to Study Risks and Economic Effects of Advanced AI — from campustechnology.com by John K. Waters
Key Takeaways
Law Firm AI Adoption: So Many Choices — from abovethelaw.com by Stephen Embry
Firms need to recognize reality, define what their legal professionals need, and then determine how to adopt and govern the use of AI tools.
It’s tough to be a law firm managing partner in the age of AI. So many choices, so little time. It’s like the proverbial kid in the candy store who has so many choices that they either can’t pick out anything or reach for too much. We see evidence of the first option in 8am’s recent outstanding Legal Industry Report, authored by Niki Black.
8am’s Legal Industry Report
One thing that stood out in the report was the discrepancy between use of AI by individual legal professionals and what firms are doing when it comes to AI adoption and guidance. Almost 75% of those who responded said they were using general purpose AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude for work purposes. That’s pretty significant.
Legalweek: It’s time to re-engineer how legal work is delivered — from legaltechnology.com by Caroline Hill
AI for good
While focusing on the risks of AI going wrong, it is only fair to mention the conversations I had around using AI for good. Two in particular stand out.
The first is the news from Everlaw that its Everlaw for Good Program has, over the past year, supported more than 675 active cases across 235 organisations, and expanded its support to a growing network of non-profit organisations.
The program extends Everlaw’s technology to organisations working to advance access to justice. In a recent survey by Everlaw, 88% of legal aid professionals said they are optimistic about AI’s potential to help narrow the justice gap.
“Mission-driven organizations are increasingly handling complex investigations and litigation with limited resources,” said Joanne Sprague, head of Everlaw for Good. “Expanding access to powerful, easy-to-use technology helps level the playing field so these teams can uncover critical evidence, take on more complex matters, and yield stronger results for the communities they serve.”
LawNext on Location: Visiting Everlaw’s Headquarters For A Conversation with AJ Shankar, Founder and CEO — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi
The bulk of our conversation focuses on generative AI, and how Everlaw has approached it differently than much of the market. Rather than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI deliberately throughout the platform — document summarization, coding suggestions, deposition analysis, fact extraction — always grounding responses in the actual documents at hand and citing sources so users can verify the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a question and get a synthesized, cited answer drawn from an entire document corpus in about a minute, is the feature AJ calls a “new era” for discovery — one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift.
Faster, thinner: Colleges are swiftly trimming a B.A. degree to three years — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
Needing to fill seats and facing demands for faster routes to jobs, more colleges are shortening degree programs
That’s an option being made available by colleges and universities with astonishing speed — especially in the notoriously slow-moving world of higher education: an entirely new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. Three-year degrees have existed, but they simply jammed those 120 credits into fewer semesters.
At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, will convert all of its bachelor’s degrees into the new, reduced-credit, three-year kind, it announced in February. Nearly 60 other universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched them in some disciplines. States including Indiana have required or are considering requiring their public universities to add reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees. Even graduate and professional schools are being pressed to shorten the duration of degrees.
Even more than employers, consumers have lost patience with the time and expense it takes to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocates and politicians pushing schools to offer them. More than half of students who start down the conventional four-year path today take even longer than four years, according to the Department of Education.
Also from Jon Marcus, see:
2026 Survey of College and University Presidents — from insidehighered.com, Liaison, & Jenzabar
Download and explore exclusive insights from the 2026 Survey of College and University Presidents to see how these campus leaders are responding to financial volatility, political interference, rapid advances in AI, and where they believe the biggest risks and opportunities lie as they look toward 2030.
In this year’s survey, presidents share perspectives on:
The Rungs of the Career Ladder We Removed — from by Dr. Michelle Weise
On the slow, quiet disappearance of learning HOW to work
There used to be a time when starting a job meant being a little lost. You sat in on meetings you didn’t run. You watched someone else handle the difficult client, draft the tricky email, navigate the room when the room shifted. You made your first draft of something, and someone returned it bleeding red ink. And somehow — through the mess and the margin notes — you learned.
That time is vanishing.
In just the first seven months of 2025, generative AI adoption was linked to thousands of job cuts. But the headline number misses the quieter, more consequential story: it’s not just fewer jobs. It’s the disappearance of the work that teaches you how to work.
So here’s the uncomfortable question: if genAI is absorbing the entry-level doing, where does that formation happen now?
We have to answer that. Not theoretically. Practically. Because the ladder hasn’t disappeared — but we’ve removed the bottom rungs. And no employer is going to drop a newly minted graduate into a mid-career role and hope they figure it out.
The Future of Learning Looks Like Workforce Infrastructure — from workshift.org by Bruno V. Manno
For years, “ed tech” was an umbrella term grouping schools, online platforms, courses, credentials, and software under one idea: technology applied to education. That shorthand made it easier for investors, policymakers, and institutions to talk about innovation without rethinking how learning fits into the economy. Today, it no longer explains what’s happening.
That’s the central insight of “The European Learning & Work Funding Report” by Brighteye Ventures, a research and advisory firm tracking investment at the intersection of learning, work, and productivity. The report’s seventh edition shows that learning is no longer funded primarily as education. It is increasingly funded as part of how work gets done.
Across Europe, and increasingly the U.S., capital is flowing not toward courses or credentials but toward systems that are closer to production, including hiring platforms, staffing firms, clinical decision tools, payroll systems, and compliance software. These are not educational products, though learning is embedded throughout them.
In these systems, learning is not the point. Outcomes are.
Build hybrid institutions that erase boundaries. Stop forcing learners to navigate disconnected systems. Create partnerships that blend K-12 schools, community colleges, training providers, and employers into one integrated system, so students move through one coherent system, not four separate bureaucracies.
Sharif El-Mekki on Growing Educators of Color Through Pleasure, Duty and Honor — from gettingsmart.com by Shawnee Caruthers and Sharif El-Mekki, Founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development.
Key Points
His mantra, “We Need Black Teachers” is more than a rallying cry, but a deep desire to give voice to the over 8 million black learners that need to see themselves in their classrooms and community.
L&D Global Sentiment Survey 2026 — from linkedin.com by Donald H. Taylor
“But what’s happening right now is exponential.” — from linkedin.com by Josh Cavalier
Excerpt:
I need to be honest with you. I’ve been running experiments this week with Claude Code and Opus 4.6, and we have reached the precipice in the collapse of time required to produce high-quality text-based ID outputs.
This includes performance consulting reports, learning needs analyses, action mapping, scripts, storyboards, facilitator guides, rubrics, and technical specs.
I just mapped the entire performance consulting process into a multimodal AI integration architecture (diagram image). Every phase. Entry and contracting. Performance analysis. Cause analysis. Solution design. Implementation. Evaluation. Thirty files. System specifications for each. The next step is to vet out each “skill” with an expert performance consultant.
Then I attempted a learning output: an 8-module course built with a cognitive scaffold that moves beyond content delivery to facilitate deliberate practice, meaning-making, and guided reflection within the learner’s own context.
The result:
AI and human-centered learning — from linkedin.com by Patrick Blessinger
Democratizing opportunities
AI adaptive learning can adapt learning in real-time. These tools have the potential to provide a more personalized learning experience, but only if used properly.
The California State University system uses ChatGPT Edu (OpenAI, 2025). Students use it for AI-assisted tutoring, study aids, and writing support. These resources provide 24/7 availability of subject-matter expertise tailored to students’ learning needs. It is not a replacement for professors. Rather, it extends the reach of mentorship by reducing access barriers.
However, we must proceed with intellectual humility and ethical responsibility. Even though AI can customize messages, it cannot replace the encouragement of a teacher or professor, or the social and emotional aspects of learning. It’s at the intersection of humanistic values and knowledge development that education must find its balance.