Remarkably, in this highly partisan era of American history, there is a newly formed, nonpartisan association with the stated purpose of “partnering with governors, employers and training partners to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy.” This is the first large-scale, independent entity formed to address the challenge that is top of mind of many of us in higher education and associated fields who are concerned with the anticipated impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce. It is good news!
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Wednesday, July 8, 2026
The Apprenticeship Wish List - Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed
Apprenticeships are growing. But experts say that without more funding, updated laws and better data, the U.S. is still far from the system they know is possible. The No. 1 thing missing, they say, is money. The most recent House Appropriations Committee bill to fund labor, health and human services, and education proposes $290 million for apprenticeships, up $5 million from 2026. That’s on top of the $145 million to support a pay-for-performance incentive program announced earlier this year. But apprenticeship researchers and advocates say that scaling participation to that one million number is a distant dream without long-term investments in apprenticeship infrastructure and pay for instruction, staff, wages and employer incentives, where applicable.
Teaching, AI, and the Human Core of Education : The Future Worth Defending - Armand Doucet
For teachers, their unions, and the policymakers who shape the conditions in which they work, the question is no longer whether AI will shape education, but how that shaping will be governed. The purpose of this report is to take stock of that reality: to identify what has changed, what remains essential, and what education systems must now do differently if AI is to be integrated responsibly, based on needs and governed in the public interest. Its central claim is straightforward. AI is not disrupting the purpose of education. It is disrupting the conditions under which that purpose can be realized. What follows therefore examines what has changed, what has not, and what must now be intentionally rebuilt, protected, and governed.
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Judge Tosses ED’s ‘Professional’ Degree Definition, Likely Aiding Student Borrowers - Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed
The ruling says the Education Department violated Congress’s instructions by adding criteria strictly limiting which degrees qualify for higher federal student loan borrowing caps. Afederal judge has tossed out the Education Department’s rule that strictly limited graduate students’ access to higher federal student loan borrowing limits, a victory for universities, health-advocacy groups and others who argued the policy could stop students from earning advanced nursing degrees and pursuing other crucial professions. The ruling, released late Wednesday night, centers on the definition of “professional” degree in Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and how the department narrowed that definition when it issued its rule implementing the law. Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called the department’s approach “misguided."
The symbiotic enterprise - McKinsey
At scale, this transformation gives rise to a new enterprise model: the symbiotic enterprise, in which humans, AI agents, and intelligent robots each contribute according to their respective strengths within flatter organizations and under a new economic model, with technology becoming a primary cost driver. Beyond productivity, the symbiotic enterprise fundamentally changes the economics of growth by enabling organizations to innovate faster, adapt continuously, unlock new revenue opportunities, and scale through software rather than labor. Traditional advantages such as expertise, workforce scale, coordination complexity, and market frictions erode, lowering barriers to entry and enabling customer re-insourcing and AI-native competitors to challenge incumbents.
Amazon is joining RAISE US as a founding member to help workers prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. - Amazon
Amazon is partnering with RAISE US to help American workers develop skills for AI-era jobs. RAISE US brings together companies, policymakers, and educators to address the workforce impacts of AI. The coalition will further extend Amazon's reach to support communities and workers with the skills they need. Today Amazon is announcing that we’ve joined RAISE US as a founding member to develop the workforce of the future for our employees and communities. RAISE US is a new bipartisan coalition that brings together companies, policymakers, and leaders to accelerate the transition to the jobs of the future. AI is transforming how we live and work at a pace few of us could have predicted. At Amazon, we see this every day—in the AI-powered tools that help our customers, the systems that optimize our logistics network, and the generative AI services we offer through AWS.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-new-views/amazon-joins-raise-us-ai-workforce
Monday, July 6, 2026
Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact - Jeffery Gottlieb, et al; Pew Research
About half of U.S. adults now report using AI chatbots, up substantially from the summer of 2024.1 This includes roughly one-in-four who use these tools on daily basis. Some people are bringing AI into their homes. About a third of Americans say they have a smart speaker, and smaller shares have a doorbell or thermostat with AI features. But Americans —including younger adults— are deeply skeptical of AI. More adults predict that AI will have a negative rather than positive impact on them and on society. And majorities think AI is advancing too quickly and will put their personal information at risk.
Universities must help shut down the illicit AI detection economy - Benjamin Luke Moorhouse and James Mian Jia, Times Higher Education
Many institutions now treat the AI-likelihood scores they generate as evidence in academic misconduct procedures, and some universities are setting explicit thresholds above which disciplinary action may follow. However, the role of these tools is not always articulated clearly to students (or sometimes even to instructors). And this generates anxiety – and a black market in managing it. Students are naturally worried about the degree to which their use of AI will be deemed appropriate by markers and whether declaring certain AI uses may lead to academic integrity investigations and, potentially, disciplinary action. Moreover, while “academic integrity tools” advertise their systems as highly accurate, cases of false positives are frequently shared on social media. Many students will be aware that even the US Declaration of Independence has been flagged as AI-generated. And the tools have been found to be particularly prone to error when assessing texts written by non-native speakers of English – a particular issue in Hong Kong.
Would You Trust AI for Ethical Advice? - Knowledge at Wharton
The scholars said the study reveals shifts in how people think about AI. The studies were conducted in 2023 and 2025, and the scholars said they would be curious to see whether results would change if they redid the experiments now. Despite all the improvements to large language models like ChatGPT, Terwiesch said there’s still something unnerving about taking advice from a machine. “There is some human desire in us that makes us want to listen to music generated by other humans, read a book written by a person. You are looking for somebody who has suffered, who has loved, who has experienced life. How can a computer that has never been alive relate to the human struggle?” he said. “I think this is a natural hesitation, which makes the [results] more remarkable.”
Friday, July 3, 2026
New Study In Texas May Have Shown How To Better Measure College ROI - Michael B. Horn, Forbes
With the release of a value-added earnings outcomes study in Texas that measured the economic outcomes of 935,767 students who enrolled in 86 public institutions in Texas between 2008–09 and 2018–19 and pursued a bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree, or certificate, the Postsecondary Commission, which accredits institutions that produce strong economic returns for their students, alongside Mathematica, have made meaningful progress in showing the field how to responsibly and credibly measure ROI (full disclosure: I am on the Postsecondary Commission’s advisory board). The release of the study also shows how much more work governments have to do to create the underlying infrastructure to make this kind of work possible everywhere in the country. The broader move to focus on higher education outcomes has been a welcome development for a sector that doesn’t boast stellar results.
Advertising, training fairs, free tuition: How one state is trying to get more men into college - Rachel Fradette, Hechinger Report
Michigan, like many other states, says it has a shortage of skilled workers, a gap that risks hurting its economy. Only 51.6 percent of working-age adults over 25 have a degree or other training beyond high school, state data shows, the lowest of any Midwestern state. The number of men in particular who are going to college has been falling steadily, despite evidence that people with postsecondary credentials tend to earn more than their peers with only a high school diploma and are more likely to be employed.
California gave every student in prison a laptop. How community colleges are using them - Ella Carter-Klauschie, Cal Matters
California prisons have given 30,000 laptops to incarcerated students. Inmates say using technology prepares them to enter the workforce. As community colleges start replacing correspondence courses by mail with online-only classes, students and professors debate whether this type of learning is any more effective. In the past three years, the prison system spent $23.2 million to distribute 30,000 laptops to all incarcerated students. Almost half of those went to the 13,000 inmates enrolled in community college, who are increasingly doing their coursework online. The growth of online learning marks a shift away from correspondence courses, where inmates receive assignments in physical packets, fill them out, and mail them back to colleges, with limited feedback. While some community colleges still offer those types of courses, the laptops are starting to replace the packets.
Thursday, July 2, 2026
The emerging transcript built for skills, not courses - Elcino Donadel, University Business
University Business caught up with Amber Garrison Duncan, the “Godmother of LERs,” to better understand what federal and state participation in talent marketplaces means for higher education. Duncan is executive vice president at the Competency-Based Education Network, a nonprofit organization advancing skills-based learning across education, government and industry. During our interview, Duncan was attending the National Governors Association’s Skills in the States Annual Convening. At the event, public and national employers from 22 states discussed actionable strategies to sustain skills-based hiring practices in the wake of AI-driven labor market disruptions.
Panelists say state, colleges must meet workforce needs as AI use grows - Matthew McFarland, News Tribune
The use of artificial intelligence will continue to grow at higher education institutions around the state, a panel of AI and education experts said Thursday. As part of a statewide forum on AI and data centers at the Missouri University of Science & Technology in Rolla, two Missouri education administrators and the CEO of a Cape Girardeau nonprofit focused on AI training took part in a panel on workforce development. Their message, overwhelmingly, was that higher education must adapt to AI, not fight it. "Are you going to stop fire? Are you going to stop the wheel? Are you going to stop the industrial revolution? You're not going to stop AI," said Hal Higdon, chancellor of Ozarks Technical Community College. "Fighting is futile, but learning to use it responsibly is the way."
Personalized talent cultivation and academic prediction framework for higher education based on the HA-GNN-LSTM architecture - Qi Gong & Jing Shi, Nature
To address the dilemma of homogeneous talent training and the efficiency bottleneck of human resource management in universities, this study proposes an innovative personalized training framework integrating artificial intelligence, big data, and deep learning. Based on the 18-dimensional full-cycle behavior dataset of 5,000 students and OULAD dataset, a multimodal heterogeneous data fusion pipeline is constructed. The simulation results demonstrate that, under established constraints and historical sample distributions, advisor allocation response time could be reduced by 60% and resource idle rate could be decreased by 63.4%. These findings indicate the framework’s potential for optimizing educational resource allocation. However, its managerial benefits require further validation through subsequent real-world deployment and long-term follow-up studies.
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Reform education to conform to Artificial Intelligence - Technical universities urged - Alberto Mario Noretti, Graphic Online
The call was made by the Rector of Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences in Netherlands, Professor Dr. Ron S.J. Tuninga, when he delivered the Seventh Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture at Ho Technical University (HTU) on Wednesday (June 17). He explained that rapid advances in machine learning, robotics, block chain, quantum computing, cybersecurity and digitalisation were fundamentally reshaping the future of work and the skills required in modern industries. “The focus should shift from memorisation to judgement, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving,” Professor Tuninga said, adding that higher-order cognitive skills would become increasingly valuable as AI assumes routine cognitive functions.
Will ChatGPT Kill the Self-Help Book Market - Emma Jacobs, Financial Review
Pippa Wright, publishing director at Penguin Life, has a word of caution: non-fiction “has always been boom and bust. At the point it goes up, everyone says, ‘No one is interested in fiction, they want answers.’ And then romantasy goes up and everyone wants escapism.” According to NielsenIQ BookData for the UK, although sales have declined from their 2022 peak, they remain significantly higher than in 2015. Wright thinks one kind of self-help has “probably gone”: the “prescriptive book with five bullet points, with information that is summarised very easily... If it can be summarised in a paragraph, then why buy the book?”
https://www.afr.com/technology/will-chatgpt-kill-the-self-help-book-market-20260621-p608ow
Studying the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Undergraduate Research at the U.S. Military AcademyPeer-Review - John Scudder1, et al; Journal of Military Learning
At the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York, where academic integrity and pedagogical rigor are foundational, initial guidance on generative AI was introduced in 2023. While it emphasized the importance of integrity and instructor-specific policies, the use of generative AI remained decentralized and varied across disciplines (Reeves, 2023). Given this context, faculty members across five academic programs initiated a collaborative, multiyear research project to track the adoption, utility, and implications of generative AI in student-driven research activities. This study aims to document and analyze the technological engagement and ethical considerations among cadets from the class of 2024 through the class of 2029.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Healthcare, Manufacturing, Recycling and Education - Tech Business News
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a future-facing technology sitting inside research labs. It is now being used in doctor’s offices, classrooms, factories, recycling plants, semiconductor research facilities and government departments. The real shift is not just that AI can generate text, images or code. The bigger change is that AI systems are now being connected to daily decision-making, physical infrastructure and professional workflows. That makes the technology more useful, but also more difficult to manage. Across industries, AI is being used to detect disease, support teachers, predict machine failures, sort waste, discover new semiconductor materials, analyse risk, automate service desks and assist with policy planning. At the same time, it is raising hard questions about bias, privacy, security, accountability and whether people can understand how an AI system reached its answer.
Re-educating graduates for the competitive job market - Amber Wang, University World News
As another record number of university graduates enter China’s job market this month, authorities are increasingly encouraging both students and unemployed graduates to be “re-educated” through vocational and skills-based training. Across China, cities and provinces are offering “technician class” programmes aimed at improving employment outcomes among young people. With strong backing from local governments, initiatives typically combine vocational education with internships and job placement opportunities in strategic industries. Local authorities in Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Anhui, together with vocational institutions, have recently launched a range of full-time training programmes as well as shorter subsidised skills courses.
Can microcredentials drive new demand for higher ed? - Alcino Donadel, University Business
Higher education leaders, employers and students agree that microcredentials are critical for strengthening enrollment, improving workforce readiness and modernizing curriculum amid rapid AI-driven change. A new Coursera survey of more than 3,500 respondents worldwide found broad support for embedding industry-recognized credentials into degree pathways as institutions face mounting pressure to improve career outcomes and adapt curricula more quickly. In many cases, U.S. respondents expressed greater confidence in microcredentials than their global peers in India, the United Kingdom and other countries.
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