An editorial column from the Los Angeles Times takes a look at the admissions factors suggested by the Harvard School of Education Graduate program and provides some good insight on the practicality of the suggestions. [read more]
The next big wave of automation came to light last week in a rather quiet way as a Google-owned computer system, Lee Sedol, a champion of one of the world’s most complex board games. As the world of artificial intelligence continues to advance millions of jobs and ways of life are going to change.
Some 10 percent of all American jobs involve driving vehicles, and most all of them will be lost, said Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University. “What are we going to do with these 3.5 million people?”
Christof Koch, president and Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science warned “This is a real issue of our time, and none of our politicians right now is even mentioning it. I’m not sure anybody even knows about this, which is rather depressing.”
Miles Brundage, a doctoral student at Arizona State University who has been studying AlphaGo, believes the far more urgent need is a real and comprehensive examination of how society and its economy will function once artificial intelligence begins wiping out millions of jobs. [read more]
According to a The Chronicle of Higher Education analysis of data released on Friday, 160 degree-granting private colleges failed the U.S. Education Department’s financial-responsibility test, which seeks to quantify the financial health of proprietary and nonprofit institutions, for the 2013-14 academic year. That’s two more than failed the year before. Of the 160 failing institutions, 94 are nonprofit and the rest are for-profit. For the previous year, 108 of the 158 failing institutions were nonprofit. [read more]
Parents of college students often forget to consider college expenses as part of their tax return. To help parents navigate the often complex considerations involved in claiming the American Opportunity Credit, the IRS has issued an informative guideline “Tax Benefits of Education.” This tax credit is not the sole tax credit program to consider, especially for parents of students not yet in college. Edvisors has published a noteworthy article to help parents understand the advantages and pitfalls of various programs.
Foreign students in science and technology will be able to extend their stay in the United States, under a new rule to be published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week. The regulation will be welcome relief to some 34,000 students — as well as to colleges and employers — who could have been forced to leave the country this spring because of a legal challenge to a program, Optional Practical Training, that allows them to work in the United States after graduation. [read more]