The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 — from weforum.org
Incorporating Financial Literacy into Your Classroom Curriculum — from edcircuit.com by EdCircuit Staff
Teaching Beyond the Textbook
Table of Contents
- The Importance of Teaching Financial Literacy
- Incorporating Financial Literacy into Your CurriculumUse Real-Life Examples
- Integrate it into Other Subjects
- Use Technology
- Make it Interactive
- Start Early
- Conclusion
US College Closures Are Expected to Soar, Fed Research Says — from bloomberg.com
- Fed research created predictive model of college stress
- Worst-case scenario forecasts 80 additional closures
The number of colleges that close each year is poised to significantly increase as schools contend with a slowdown in prospective students.
That’s the finding of a new working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, where researchers created predictive models of schools’ financial distress using metrics like enrollment and staffing patterns, sources of revenue and liquidity data. They overlayed those models with simulations to estimate the likely increase of future closures.
Excerpt from the working paper:
We document a high degree of missing data among colleges that eventually close and show that this is a key impediment to identifying at risk institutions. We then show that modern machine learning techniques, combined with richer data, are far more effective at predicting college closures than linear probability models, and considerably more effective than existing accountability metrics. Our preferred model, which combines an off-the-shelf machine learning algorithm with the richest set of explanatory variables, can significantly improve predictive accuracy even for institutions with complete data, but is particularly helpful for predicting instances of financial distress for institutions with spotty data.
From DSC:
Questions that come to my mind here include:
- Shouldn’t the public — especially those relevant parents and students — be made more aware of these types of papers and reports?
. - How would any of us like finishing up 1-3 years of school and then being told that our colleges or universities were closing, effective immediately? (This has happened many times already.) and with the demographic cliff starting to hit higher education, this will happen even more now.
.
Adding insult to injury…when we transfer to different institutions, we’re told that many of our prior credits don’t transfer — thus adding a significant amount to the overall cost of obtaining our degrees.
.
- Would we not be absolutely furious to discover such communications from our prior — and new — colleges and universities?
. - Will all of these types of closures move more people to this vision here?
Relevant excerpts from Ray Schroeder’s recent articles out at insidehighered.com:
Winds of Change in Higher Ed to Become a Hurricane in 2025
A number of factors are converging to create a huge storm. Generative AI advances, massive federal policy shifts, broad societal and economic changes, and the demographic cliff combine to create uncertainty today and change tomorrow.
Higher Education in 2025: AGI Agents to Displace People
The anticipated enrollment cliff, reductions in federal and state funding, increased inflation, and dwindling public support for tuition increases will combine to put even greater pressure on university budgets.
On the positive side of things, the completion rates have been getting better:
National college completion rate ticks up to 61.1% — from highereddive.com by Natalie Schwartz
Those who started at two-year public colleges helped drive the overall increase in students completing a credential.
Dive Brief:
- Completion rates ticked up to 61.1% for students who entered college in fall 2018, a 0.5 percentage-point increase compared to the previous cohort, according to data released Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- The increase marks the highest six-year completion rate since 2007 when the clearinghouse began tracking the data. The growth was driven by fewer students stopping out of college, as well as completion gains among students who started at public two-year colleges.
- “Higher completion rates are welcome news for colleges and universities still struggling to regain enrollment levels from before the pandemic,” Doug Shapiro, the research center’s executive director, said in a statement dated Wednesday.
Addendum:
Attention Please: Professors Struggle With Student Disengagement — from edsurge.com
The stakes are huge, because the concern is that maybe the social contract between students and professors is kind of breaking down. Do students believe that all this college lecturing is worth hearing? Or, will this moment force a change in the way college teaching is done?
Adapting to the future | Educause
Institutions are balancing capacity issues and rapid technological advancements—including artificial intelligence—while addressing a loss of trust in higher education.
To adapt to the future, technology and data leaders must work strategically to restore trust, prepare for policy updates, and plan for online education growth.
From DSC:
First of all, when you look at the following posting:
What Top Tech Skills Should You Learn for 2025? — from dice.com by Nick Kolakowski
…you will see that they outline which skills you should consider mastering in 2025 if you want to stay on top of the latest career opportunities. They then list more information about the skills, how you apply the skills, and WHERE to get those skills.
I assert that in the future, people will be able to see this information on a 24x7x365 basis.
- Which jobs are in demand?
- What skills do I need to do those jobs?
- WHERE do I get/develop those skills?
And that last part (about the WHERE do I develop those skills) will pull from many different institutions, people, companies, etc.
BUT PEOPLE are the key! Oftentimes, we need to — and prefer to — learn with others!
Being a College Athlete Now Means Constant Travel and Missed Classes — from nytimes.com by Billy Witz; via Ryan Craig
Players are dealing with far-flung travel, jet lag and the pressures of trying to balance the roles of student, athlete and entrepreneur more than ever before.
Playing football this season for the U.C.L.A. Bruins means being a frequent (and distant) flier. The team began the campaign in August with a win at the University of Hawaii. Their next road games sent the Bruins to Louisiana State, then Penn State, and back across the country to Rutgers. Then, a trip to Nebraska on Saturday and a jaunt up to Washington.
Such is the life of the modern-day college athlete, with U.C.L.A. moving into the Big Ten Conference, the erstwhile standard-bearer for Midwest football that now stretches from Piscataway to Puget Sound.
In all, the Bruins will travel 22,226 miles this season — nearly enough to circumnavigate the globe. It is the equivalent of 33 round trips to the Bay Area to play Stanford or U.C. Berkeley, U.C.L.A.’s former rivals that have moved to a newly bicoastal league of their own.
Longer trips for games, extra missed classes and the effects of jet lag are heaping additional pressure on young adults trying to balance the roles of student, athlete and — in an age when they can cash in on their fame — entrepreneur.
…
The U.S.C. women’s volleyball team, which has four midweek road games, is likely to miss at least 12 days of classes.
Freshman Enrollment Appears to Decline for the First Time Since 2020 — from nytimes.com by Zach Montague (behind paywall)
A projected 5 percent drop in this year’s freshman class follows a number of disruptions last year, including persistent failures with the FAFSA form.
Freshman enrollment dropped more than 5 percent from last year at American colleges and universities, the largest decline since 2020 when Covid-19 and distance learning upended higher education, according to preliminary data released on Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit education group.
The finding comes roughly a year after the federal student aid system was dragged down by problems with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, commonly known as FAFSA, which led to maddening delays this year in processing families’ financial data to send to school administrators. That in turn held up the rollout of financial aid offers well into the summer, leaving many families struggling to determine how much college would cost.
Re: the business of higher ed, also see:
Tracking college closures— from hechingerreport.org by Marina Villeneuve and Olivia Sanchez
More colleges are shutting down as enrollment drops
College enrollment has been declining for more than a decade, and that means that many institutions are struggling to pay their bills. A growing number of them are making the difficult decision to close.
In the first nine months of 2024, 28 degree-granting institutions closed, compared with 15 in all of 2023, according to an analysis of federal data provided to The Hechinger Report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association or SHEEO.
And when colleges close, it hurts the students who are enrolled. At the minimum, colleges that are shutting down should notify students at least three months in advance, retain their records and refund tuition, experts say. Ideally, it should form an agreement with a nearby school and make it easy for students to continue their education.
Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don’t Want Them? — from insidehighered.com by Ashley Mowreader
Colleges and universities are considering new ways to incorporate generative AI into teaching and learning, but not every student is on board with the tech yet. Experts weigh in on the necessity of AI in career preparation and higher education’s role in preparing students for jobs of the future.
Among the 5,025-plus survey respondents, around 2 percent (n=93), provided free responses to the question on AI policy and use in the classroom. Over half (55) of those responses were flat-out refusal to engage with AI. A few said they don’t know how to use AI or are not familiar with the tool, which impacts their ability to apply appropriate use to coursework.
But as generative AI becomes more ingrained into the workplace and higher education, a growing number of professors and industry experts believe this will be something all students need, in their classes and in their lives beyond academia.
From DSC:
I used to teach a Foundations of Information Technology class. Some of the students didn’t want to be there as they began the class, as it was a required class for non-CS majors. But after seeing what various applications and technologies could do for them, a good portion of those same folks changed their minds. But not all. Some students (2% sounds about right) asserted that they would never use technologies in their futures. Good luck with that I thought to myself. There’s hardly a job out there that doesn’t use some sort of technology.
And I still think that today — if not more so. If students want good jobs, they will need to learn how to use AI-based tools and technologies. I’m not sure there’s much of a choice. And I don’t think there’s much of a choice for the rest of us either — whether we’re still working or not.
So in looking at the title of the article — “Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don’t Want Them?” — those of us who have spent any time working within the world of business already know the answer.
#Reinvent #Skills #StayingRelevant #Surviving #Workplace + several other categories/tags apply.
For those folks who have tried AI:
Skills: However, genAI may also be helpful in building skills to retain a job or secure a new one. People who had used genAI tools were more than twice as likely to think that these tools could help them learn new skills that may be useful at work or in locating a new job. Specifically, among those who had not used genAI tools, 23 percent believed that these tools might help them learn new skills, whereas 50 percent of those who had used the tools thought they might be helpful in acquiring useful skills (a highly statistically significant difference, after controlling for demographic traits).
Georgia Tech Aims to Take Lifetime Learning from Pastime to Pro — from workshift.org by Lilah Burke
As Americans live and work longer, many now find themselves needing to change jobs and careers several times within their lifetimes.
Now, Georgia Institute of Technology has created a new college to serve just these learners. Georgia Tech last week launched its College of Lifetime Learning, which will combine degree programs with non-degree programs, and seeks to educate 114K students by 2030. That would enable the university to double the current number of degrees granted and nondegree students served.
“What we’re hearing is that with the advancing pace of digitization taking place, changing demographics, people working longer, for example, higher ed needs to do something in addition to what it already has been doing” says Nelson Baker, interim dean of the new college.
Also see:
Is the Workplace the New College Campus? — from workshift.org by Joe Edelheit Ross
Now a quarter way through the 21st century, higher education is again in need of a reboot. Post Covid, colleges are closing one per week. More than 40M U.S. learners have started college but never finished. Nearly two-thirds of those learners would complete their degree but can’t afford to. Student debt now sits at almost $2T. Americans are losing faith in higher education.
Enter the apprenticeship degree, where students can earn a debt-free, four-year degree entirely embedded within a full-time, paid job. In the U.K., with government tax incentives, the apprenticeship-to-degree model has surged in eight years from zero to 50K new enrollments, making progress toward an expected 20% of postsecondary starts within the decade. As I have previously written, I believe the apprenticeship degree is just what American higher education needs to meet the moment.
8 Legal Tech Trends Transforming Practice in 2024 — from lawyer-monthly.com
Thanks to rapid advances in technology, the entire scenario within the legal landscape is changing fast. Fast forward to 2024, and legal tech integration would be the lifeblood of any law firm or legal department if it wishes to stay within the competitive fray.
Innovations such as AI-driven tools for research to blockchain-enabled contracts are thus not only guideline highlights of legal work today. Understanding and embracing these trends will be vital to surviving and thriving in law as the revolution gains momentum and the sands of the world of legal practice continue to shift.
Below are the eight expected trends in legal tech defining the future legal practice.
Building your legal practice’s AI future: Understanding the actual technologies — from thomsonreuters.com by
The implementation of a successful AI strategy for a law firm depends not only on having the right people, but also understanding the tech and how to make it work for the firm
While we’re not delving deep here into how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) work, we will talk generally about different categories of tech and emerging GenAI functionalities that are specific for legal.
Ex-Microsoft engineers raise $25M for legal tech startup that uses AI to help lawyers analyze data — from geekwire.com by Taylor Soper
Supio, a Seattle startup founded in 2021 by longtime friends and former Microsoft engineers, raised a $25 million Series A investment to supercharge its software platform designed to help lawyers quickly sort, search, and organize case-related data.
…
Supio focuses on cases related to personal injury and mass tort plaintiff law (when many plaintiffs file a claim). It specializes in organizing unstructured data and letting lawyers use a chatbot to pull relevant information.
“Most lawyers are data-rich and time-starved, but Supio automates time-sapping manual processes and empowers them to identify critical information to prove and expedite their cases,” Supio CEO and co-founder Jerry Zhou said in a statement.
ILTACON 2024: Large law firms are moving carefully but always forward with their GenAI strategy — from thomsonreuters.com by Zach Warren
NASHVILLE — As the world approaches the two-year mark since the original introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, law firms already have made in-roads into establishing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a part of their firms. Whether for document and correspondence drafting, summarization of meetings and contracts, legal research, or for back-office capabilities, firms have been playing around with a number of use cases to see where the technology may fit into the future.
Thomson Reuters acquires pre-revenue legal LLM developer Safe Sign Technologies – Here’s why — from legaltechnology.com by Caroline Hill
Thomson Reuters announced (on August 21) it has made the somewhat unusual acquisition of UK pre-revenue startup Safe Sign Technologies (SST), which is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs) and as of just eight months ago was operating in stealth mode.
…
There isn’t an awful lot of public information available about the company but speaking to Legal IT Insider about the acquisition, Hron explained that SST is focused in part on deep learning research as it pertains to training large language models and specifically legal large language models. The company as yet has no customers and has been focusing exclusively on developing the technology and the models.
Supio brings generative AI to personal injury cases — from techcrunch.com by Kyle Wiggers
Legal work is incredibly labor- and time-intensive, requiring piecing together cases from vast amounts of evidence. That’s driving some firms to pilot AI to streamline certain steps; according to a 2023 survey by the American Bar Association, 35% of law firms now use AI tools in their practice.
OpenAI-backed Harvey is among the big winners so far in the burgeoning AI legal tech space, alongside startups such as Leya and Klarity. But there’s room for one more, says Jerry Zhou and Kyle Lam, the co-founders of an AI platform for personal injury law called Supio, which emerged from stealth Tuesday with a $25 million investment led by Sapphire Ventures.
Supio uses generative AI to automate bulk data collection and aggregation for legal teams. In addition to summarizing info, the platform can organize and identify files — and snippets within files — that might be useful in outlining, drafting and presenting a case, Zhou said.
44% of Americans Expect Importance of College Education to Decline Over Next 10 Years, New Survey Reveals — from prnewswire.com by College Consensus
New College Consensus poll shows most Americans think traditional 4-year college best route to satisfying career, but nearly half expect importance of traditional college education to decline over next decade, with trade school offering an equal or better return on investment.
HILLSBOROUGH, N.C., Aug. 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — College Consensus, a comprehensive resource for college rankings and information, has released results of a new poll asking Americans about their confidence in higher education. Their findings can be seen at:
https://www.collegeconsensus.com/research/trust-in-higher-education/
The key takeaways of that report are that:
- Americans still largely trust traditional higher education, but not as much as they used to
- Nearly half of Americans believe traditional college education will decline in importance in the next decade
- Americans view trade school as offering almost equivalent ROI to traditional college
- Trust in community college and online college is lower than traditional, but still strong
- Technology bootcamps struggling to gain trust
The above is happening at the same time as this:
US colleges are cutting majors and slashing programs after years of putting it off — from apnews.com
It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as U.S. colleges large and small try to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal COVID relief money is now gone, operational costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are going straight to college.
The cuts mean more than just savings, or even job losses. Often, they create turmoil for students who chose a campus because of certain degree programs and then wrote checks or signed up for student loans.
“For me, it’s really been anxiety-ridden,” said Westman, 23, as she began the effort that ultimately led her to transfer to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”
Is College Worth It? Poll Finds Only 36% of Americans Have Confidence in Higher Education — from usnews.com by Associated Press
A new poll finds Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value and cost of college
Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value and cost of college, with most saying they feel the U.S. higher education system is headed in the “wrong direction,” according to a new poll.
Overall, only 36% of adults say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to the report released Monday by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That confidence level has declined steadily from 57% in 2015.
Enrollment Planning in the Specter of Closure — from insidehighered.com by Mark Campbell and Rachel Schreiber; via GSV
Misunderstandings about enrollment management and changing student needs can make a bad situation worse, Mark Campbell and Rachel Schreiber write.
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
However, we find that many institutions provide little to no information to prospective students about actual outcomes for graduates. Examples include: What does applying to graduate school look like for graduates? Employment and earning potential? Average student loan debt? What do alumni say about their experience? What data do you have that is compelling to answer these and related questions? Families increasingly ask, “What is the ROI on this investment?”
…
Another important issue relates to the unwillingness of leaders to evolve the institution to meet market demands. We have too often seen that storied, historic institutions have cultures that are change averse, and this seems to be particularly true in the liberal arts. This statement might appear to be controversial—but only if misunderstood.
To be clear, the humanities and the arts are vital, critical aspects of our institutions. But today’s prospective students are highly focused on career outcomes, given the financial investment they and their families are being asked to make. We believe that curricular offerings can place a high value on the core principles of the humanities and liberal arts while also preparing students for careers.
By contrast, curricular innovation, alterations to long-held marketing practices, openness to self-reflection regarding out-of-date programs, practices and policies—in short, a willingness to change and adapt—are all key. Finally, vital and successful institutions develop long-term strategic enrollment plans that are tactical, realistic and assessable and for which there is clarity about accountability. Putting these practices in place now can avert catastrophe down the road.
Mary Meeker wants AI and higher education to be partners — from axios.com by Dan Primack; via Robert Gibson on LinkedIn
Mary Meeker has written her first report in over four years, focused on the relationship between artificial intelligence and U.S. higher education.
Why it matters: Meeker’s annual “Internet Trends” reports were among Silicon Valley’s most cited and consumed documents.
- Each one dug deep into the new tech economy, with hundreds of pages of slides. The last one was published in 2019.
- Meeker’s new effort is a shorter attempt (16 pages!) at reconciling tech’s brave new world and America’s economic vitality, with higher ed as the connective tissue.
Excerpts from Meeker’s report:
Actions taken in the next five years will be consequential. It’s important for higher education to take a leadership role, in combination with industry and government. The ramp in artificial intelligence – which leverages the history of learning for learning – affects all forms of learning, teaching, understanding, and decision making. This should be the best of times…
Our first-pass observations on these topics follow. We begin with an overview, followed by thoughts on the unprecedented ramp in AI usage and the magnitude of investment in AI from America’s leading global technology companies. Then we explore ways that this rapidly changing AI landscape may drive transformations in higher education. We hope these add to the discussion.
AI & Universities – Will Masters of Learning Master New Learnings?
In a time of rapid technological change led by American companies, American universities must determine how best to optimize for the future. Many institutions have work to do to meet these changes in demand, per the Burning Glass Institute. As the AI challenge looms, they will need thoughtful plans that balance their rich traditions and research history with the needs of a rapidly evolving marketplace supercharged by innovation. Keeping an eye on the output and trends in various AI skunkworks, such as the team at AI Acceleration at Arizona State, may help universities determine the products and software tools that could transform the educational experience.
DC: So as the world watches how America’s judicial system works (or doesn’t work), we tell them, “Trump is above the law, at least in many circumstances.”
https://t.co/ehjBFKcA2I— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) July 2, 2024
From DSC:
I realize I lose a lot of readers on this Learning Ecosystems blog because I choose to talk about my faith and integrate scripture into these postings. So I have stayed silent on matters of politics — as I’ve been hesitant to lose even more people. But I can no longer stay silent re: Donald Trump.
I, too, fear for our democracy if Donald Trump becomes our next President. He is dangerous to our democracy.
Also, I can see now how Hitler came to power.
And look out other countries that Trump doesn’t like. He is dangerous to you as well.
He doesn’t care about the people of the United States (nor any other nation). He cares only about himself and gaining power. Look out if he becomes our next president.
Unlimited Presidential power. According to Trump vs the US, the “President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts.” Justice Sotomayor says this makes the President a “king.” This power + surveillance + AGI/autonomous weapons mean the President is now the most powerful king in the history of the world.
Democracy is only 200 years old.