74 percent of microschools have annual tuition and fees at or below $10,000, with 65 percent offering sliding scale tuition and discounts;
Among microschools that track academic growth data of students over time, 81 percent reported between 1 and 2 years of academic gains during one school year;
Children receive letter grades in just 29 percent of microschools, while observation-based reporting, portfolios, and tracking mastery are the most prevalent methods of tracking their impact;
The most important student outcomes for currently-operating microschools are growth in nonacademic learning, children’s happiness in their microschool, skills perceived as needed for future, and academic growth.
How To Get Hired During the AI Apocalypse — from kathleendelaski.substack.com by Kathleen deLaski And other discussions to have with your kids on the way to college graduation
A less temporary, more existential threat to the four year degree: AI could hollow out the entry level job market for knowledge workers (i.e. new college grads). And if 56% of families were saying college “wasn’t worth it” in 2023,(WSJ), what will that number look like in 2026 or beyond? The one of my kids who went to college ended up working in a bike shop for a year-ish after graduation. No regrets, but it came as a shock to them that they weren’t more employable with their neuroscience degree.
A colleague provided a great example: Her son, newly graduated, went for a job interview as an entry level writer last month and he was asked, as a test, to produce a story with AI and then use that story to write a better one by himself. He would presumably be judged on his ability to prompt AI and then improve upon its product. Is that learning how to DO? I think so. It’s using AI tools to accomplish a workplace task.
Also relevant in terms of the job search, see the following gifted article:
‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’— from nytimes.com by David Brooks; gifted article David talks admissions rates for selective colleges, ultra-hard to get summer internships, a tough entry into student clubs, and the job market.
Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market. They enter what I’ve come to think of as the seventh circle of Indeed hell. Applying for jobs online is easy, so you have millions of people sending hundreds of applications each into the great miasma of the internet, and God knows which impersonal algorithm is reading them. I keep hearing and reading stories about young people who applied to 400 jobs and got rejected by all of them.
It seems we’ve created a vast multilayered system that evaluates the worth of millions of young adults and, most of the time, tells them they are not up to snuff.
Many administrators and faculty members I’ve spoken to are mystified that students would create such an unforgiving set of status competitions. But the world of competitive exclusion is the world they know, so of course they are going to replicate it.
And in this column I’m not even trying to cover the rejections experienced by the 94 percent of American students who don’t go to elite schools and don’t apply for internships at Goldman Sachs. By middle school, the system has told them that because they don’t do well on academic tests, they are not smart, not winners. That’s among the most brutal rejections our society has to offer.
A wide range of roles can or will quickly be replaced with AI, including inside sales representatives, customer service representatives, junior lawyers, junior accountants, and physicians whose focus is diagnosis.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:
AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.
Why it matters: Amodei, 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.
Millions of former students and college graduates across the U.S. are weighed down with student loan debt, but with exactly how much may depend on where you live.
Student loans are the second highest form of household debt after mortgages, according to WalletHub, totaling more than $1.6 tillion, or averaging $38,000 per borrower.
High balances combined with a payoff timeline that lasts into middle age force many graduates to significantly delay or forgo other financial goals such as saving for retirement or buying a home. Paying back student loans has also become even more difficult due to high inflation putting a strain on Americans’ finances.
While we have a big student-loan crisis as a country, student-loan debts are more unsustainable in some places than others. To determine where borrowers are burdened the most, WalletHub compared the median student-loan balance against the median earnings of adults ages 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree in more than 2,500 U.S. cities.
If you are considering borrowing money for college or you’re in danger of defaulting, we advise using a student loan calculatorto determine an affordable payment amount and realistic payoff timeline.
For years, America’s approach to education has been guided by an overly simplistic formula: 4+4 — the idea that students need four years of high school and four years of college to succeed in life.
Even with this prevailing emphasis on college, around 40 percent of high schoolers do not enroll in college upon graduating, and only 60 percent of students who enroll in college earn a degree or credential within eight years of high school graduation.
While college completion has positive effects — on health, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and even happiness — it’s increasingly clear that college for all should no longer be our North Star. It’s time to scale up successful programs that create multiple pathways for students so high school is a gateway to both college and career.
I propose a different strategy: aligning high school to both college prep and in-demand vocational career pathways. Just as students who plan to go to college can get a head start through Advanced Placement programs, high schools, colleges and employers should work together to provide the relevant coursework to engage students in promising career opportunities.
The current economic upheaval has a lot of us scratching our heads and scrambling to look up terms like “trade deficit” and “reserve currency.” If only there was a place you could go where friendly voices break down what’s going on in a way that’s fun and easy to understand. There is a place. It’s called Planet Money.
On each episode of the Planet Money podcast, the hosts tell a sometimes quirky, often surprising story that helps explain a topic you might be hearing about in the news, from tariffs to GDP to memecoins.
They walk you through complex concepts using examples from everyday life, like Tupperware and scratch-off lotto tickets, and people you can relate to, like a guy who’s just looking for a fair way to distribute his chickens’ wares during the current egg shortage.
And when someone else’s story isn’t enough to illustrate an economic principle, the hosts take matters into their own hands. In the process, they’ve shot a satellite into space, started a record label, made their own vodka, and shorted the entire stock market – all to help you grasp how the things you see every day came to be.
Visit Planet Money twice a week and you won’t only better understand money – you’ll better understand the world.
Class of 2025 graduates’ expectations seem to be clashing with reality during their job search, especially when it comes to pay, job preferences and beliefs about the job market, according to an April 23 report from ZipRecruiter.
For instance, some graduates have found that the job search is taking longer than they expected. About 82% of those about to graduate expect to start work within three months of graduation, but only 77% of recent graduates accomplished that, and 5% said they’re still searching for a job.
College is often advertised as the best four years of one’s life, but many Americans now have regrets.
More than a third of all graduates now say their degree was a “waste of money,” according to a new survey by Indeed. This frustration is especially pronounced among Gen Z, with 51% expressing remorse—compared to 41% of millennials and just 20% of baby boomers.
Overall, a growing share of college-educated workers are questioning the return on investment (ROI) of their degree, Kyle M.K., a career trend expert at Indeed, told Fortune. It’s something that’s not all too surprising considering that the average cost of a bachelor’s degree has doubled in the last two decades to over $38,000, and total student loan debt has ballooned to nearly $2 trillion.
“Another 38% feel student loans have limited their career growth more than their diploma has accelerated it,” M.K. said.
“AI won’t invalidate a solid education, but it will reward those who keep upgrading their toolkit.”
Report Highlights. The average cost of college* in the United States is $38,270 per student per year, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses.
The average cost of college has more than doubled in the 21st century; the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of tuition is 4.04%.
The average in-state student attending a public 4-year institution and living on-campus spends $27,146 for one academic year.
The average cost of in-state tuition alone is $9,750; out-of-state tuition averages $28,386.
The average private, nonprofit university student spends $58,628 per academic year living on campus, $38,421 of it on tuition and fees.
Considering student loan interest and loss of income, investing in a bachelor’s degree can ultimately cost in excess of $500,000.
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From DSC: Reminds me of a graphic that Yohan Na and I created back in 2009: .
If you visit the website for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), you’ll find a “Wall of Receipts” listing more than 7,000 federal contracts it has terminated.
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One of these programs, cancelled on Feb. 10, was called Charting My Path for Future Success. It was a research-based effort to help students with disabilities make the sometimes difficult transition from high school into college or the world of work and self-sufficiency.
… Stepping stones to post-school independence
Charting My Path was built on research that shows students with disabilities who get quality transition services “are more likely to be employed after high school. They’re more likely to be enrolled in post-secondary education, and they’re more likely to identify that they have a higher quality of life,” says Catherine Fowler, a special education researcher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has been involved with Charting My Path since 2019, when the contract began.
At the heart of Charting My Path was one of the most promising, research-based services: building students’ self-determination skills by working with them to set goals, then helping create concrete plans to achieve them.
Based on the early results he saw in Newton, John Curley says he was hopeful and calls the decision to cut Charting My Path “a huge mistake. I think investing in students with disabilities is investing in all of us because they’re part of our community, right? They’re our brothers and sisters, our kids, our neighbors, our coworkers.“
From DSC: If you don’t have a child with special needs, you probably don’t care about this article. But, as with so many things with us human beings, if we know of someone special to us who has disabilities, we suddenly care a lot more. Our youngest daughter fits right into this story. It could have been her pictured in this article. Such programs are needed and it sounded like this study was doing solid work.
How does cutting this program make America great again? It doesn’t. It just makes life more difficult for the 1,600 high school juniors with disabilities that this study was helping (not to mention future students). Their pathways to a productive life just got harder, once again. I dare you to try and go figure out the spaghetti mess of how to get funding and assistance for a special needs youth graduating from high school — and all of the restrictions mentioned therein. And good luck to you if you are that individual and your parents are no longer alive.
Teens, Social Media and Mental Health — from pewresearch.org by Michelle Faverio, Monica Anderson, and Eugenie Park Most teens credit social media with feeling more connected to friends. Still, roughly 1 in 5 say social media sites hurt their mental health, and growing shares think they harm people their age
Rising rates of poor mental health among youth have been called a national crisis. While this is often linked to factors like the COVID-19 pandemic or poverty, some officials, like former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, name social media as a major threat to teenagers.
Our latest survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 and their parents finds that parents are generally more worried than their children about the mental health of teenagers today.
And while both groups call out social media’s impact on young people’s well-being, parents are more likely to make this connection.1
Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers. Roughly half of teens (48%) say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. But fewer (14%) think they negatively affect them personally.
Public schools do not work for everyone. But options have increased since 1922, when Oregon tried to ban private education. The Supreme Court shut down that scheme fast. But now, after more than 100 years, political insiders are rallying again to stop a new source of choice.
The target this time is microschooling, a Covid-era alternative that has outlasted the pandemic. Key players in the movement will gather May 8–9, 2025, at the International Microschools Conference in Washington, D.C. I will join them.
Most likely, I will meet educators running all kinds of programs in all kinds of community spaces. Microschools blur the lines between home, public, and private schooling—combining elements from all three models.
The result is a fourth category of schooling that hinges on flexibility. Some parents pool their resources and hire outside instructors. Other groups rotate teaching duties among themselves, gathering daily or perhaps only once or twice per week. These are the do-it-yourselfers. Professionals also get involved with standalone enterprises and national networks.
The number of learners earning certificates continued its record-breaking growth, reaching a new 10-year high for the third consecutive year. Both first-time certificate earners (+12.6%, +41,500) and those with a prior award returning to earn a certificate (+8.0%, +11,500) saw significant increases.
In contrast, both bachelor’s degree and associate degree earners declined for the third consecutive year. Fewer students earned an associate degree this year than in any of the last ten years, and bachelor’s degree earners declined to their lowest level since 2015-16. As a result of ongoing certificate growth and associate and bachelor’s decline, the proportion of first-time completers who earn a certificate has risen from about 1 in 9 (11.3%) in 2014-15 to about 1 in 7 (15.4%) in 2023-24.
The 2023-24 academic year marks the first time that certificate completers aged 24 and younger outnumbered those 25 and older. Certificate completers 18-20 years old grew by 19,400 (17.8%) and those under 18 (likely dual enrolled high school students) grew by 7,100 (27.2%) in 2023-24.
What’s Happening at the Social Security Administration? Here’s What People With Disabilities Need to Know. — from thearc.org by Jackie Dilworth Millions of people with disabilities rely on Social Security benefits to survive. Recent changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) may make accessing these benefits harder than ever. Long wait times, office closures and staff cuts, and policy rollbacks are already raising concerns and exacerbating customer service issues. Here’s what you need to know.
Staffing Cuts and Office Closures
In 2025, SSA has announced a dramatic reduction in staff and offices, including:
Closure of SSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, which handled reasonable accommodation requests and managed the agency’s civil rights complaints, including public complaints of discrimination on the basis of disability. This office’s statutory responsibilities have reportedly been divided and moved to other divisions within SSA.
Why does this matter? SSA workers process disability applications, answer calls, and help people navigate complex benefit rules. With fewer staff and the consolidations of regional offices, wait times could get even worse. The loss of key staff also raises concerns about SSA’s ability to modernize, maintain, and improve essential services, further limiting accessibility for beneficiaries. Modernizing SSA’s operations requires long-term investments in systems and processes that are being undercut by these changes.
What trauma-informed practice is not — from timeshighereducation.com by Kate Cantrell, India Bryce, and Jessica Gildersleeve from The University of Southern Queensland Before trauma-informed care can be the norm across all areas of the university, academic and professional staff need to understand what it is. Here, three academics debunk myths and demystify best practice
Recently, we conducted focus groups at our university to better ascertain how academics, administrators and student support staff perceive the purpose and value of trauma-informed practice, and how they perceive their capacity to contribute to organisational change.
We discovered that while most staff were united on the importance of trauma-informed care, several myths persist about what trauma-informed practice is (and is not). Some academic staff, for example, conflated teaching about trauma with trauma-informed teaching, confused trigger warnings with trigger points and, perhaps most alarmingly – given the prevalence of trauma exposure and risk among university students – misjudged trauma-informed practice as “the business of psychologists” rather than educators.
Online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, more American college students will be learning entirely online than will be learning 100 percent in person.
Online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, more American college students will be learning entirely online than will be learning 100 percent in person.
Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school should cost less than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.
