Can colleges still deliver in the age of AI? One Ivy League school is investing $30 million to improve career outcomes - Jessica Dickler, CNBC

College students are increasingly worried about what an AI-driven jobs apocalypse could mean for their employment prospects. To that end, many colleges and universities are racing to recalibrate.

Even at nation’s most elite schools, the focus is shifting to career readiness. Fears that artificial intelligence will upend students’ future career plans are reverberating across college campuses. “Higher education needs to do better,” said Joseph Catrino, the inaugural director of Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design. “We need to do better for our students — we need to step up and help students be prepared.” The Ivy League college recently raised $30 million in endowed funds to support internship opportunities. Now students can access up to $6,500 during any term to help finance unpaid or underpaid internships. “This allows the student to explore and engage in a field that they normally wouldn’t be able to,” Catrino said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/what-this-ivy-league-is-doing-to-get-students-hired-in-the-age-of-ai.html

MIT president blames federal policy shifts for big drop in research on campus - Washington Post

MIT is doing less research and enrolling fewer graduate students as a result of federal actions, the university president warned Thursday. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, told the campus community in a video message, and the number of new federal research awards is also down more than 20 percent.“That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Kornbluth said.

https://universitybusiness.com/mit-president-blames-federal-policy-shifts-for-big-drop-in-research-on-campus/

Why Indiana University’s AI skills course is free - Pamela Whitten, University Businiess

Indiana University just gave away our most popular AI skills course by making it completely free and open to all, with no application or tuition required. Anyone who completes the course that we’ve come to know as GenAI 101 will earn an AI skills badge from our world-renowned Kelley School of Business at no cost.Our decision to make such a highly sought-after course available for free is rather unconventional for a major university. Tuition is one of the ways we pay the bills, yet we know that the ability to wisely work alongside artificial intelligence is too important of a skill to lock behind a paywall. When our faculty developed and launched GenAI 101 eight months ago, we could not fully predict the continuing and accelerating appetite for AI literacy among corporations, small businesses, state agencies, and universities across the country. They asked us to share it, and we have now done so by making the class freely available to anyone.

https://universitybusiness.com/why-indiana-universitys-ai-skills-course-is-free-pamela-whitten/

For Whom the Bell (Curve) Tolls? Classes That Yield Too Many A’s! - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

We are seeing colleges and universities across the country cracking down on grade inflation. There are multiple points of pressure that tend to inflate grading at both the institutional and individual faculty member levels. The flaw is not inherent in AI; rather, it is in the failure of faculty members to apply the technology in a way that cultivates learning among all students and accurately assesses mastery of the course content. Fortunately, we are now equipped by AI to effectively and efficiently implement mastery learning and supplant the age-old assembly-line model with a framework designed to enable all students, over time, to achieve mastery of the desired learning outcomes. The mastery learning model instead ensures that students do not progress through the course without achieving mastery of each module: “Mastery learning (or, as it was initially called, ‘learning for mastery’; also known as ‘mastery-based learning’) is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/online-trending-now/2026/05/27/whom-bell-curve-tolls-classes-yielding-many

AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists - Joshua Dzieza, the Verge

“It’s a huge burden on the peer-review system, which is already at the limit,” Degen said. “There’s just too many papers being published and there’s not enough peer reviewers, and if the LLMs make it so much easier to mass produce papers, then this will reach a breaking point.” Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/930522/ai-research-papers-slop-peer-review-problem

Institutions Prepare for New Accreditation Regulations = Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed

As the second week of accreditation negotiations gets underway, experts say the operational cost of the new regulations may be high for institutions—but the payoff could be worth it. As the Department of Education heads into its second week of negotiations over accreditation policies, the proposed regulations remain largely unchanged, higher education experts say. That has triggered concerns among institutions and their accreditors about the operational burdens that the sweeping regulatory proposal could impose. The draft—first released in mid-April and updated on May 11—could dramatically change how accreditors oversee colleges and what institutions need to do to comply.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/accreditation/2026/05/18/institutions-prepare-new-accreditation-regulations

First UK universities to offer LLE short courses announced - Tom Williams, Times Higher Education

Just under 60 English universities will be able to offer short courses that qualify for student loans when the new lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) is introduced later this year. The Department for Education has announced the first institutions approved through the new system, with those on the list able to offer single modules for study in several priority areas. Ministers have billed the move as a “radical” change to the student finance system, intended to allow people to return to education in later life or stagger their learning over a longer period.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/first-universities-offer-lle-short-courses-announced

We now have clashing views on the value of college - Matt Zalaznick, University Business

Americans’ outlook on the value of college is split between a belief in the power of a degree and serious doubts about affordability. Degree-seekers, graduates and employers think costs put a crucial credential out of reach for many potential students, according to a new survey by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. “Americans haven’t lost faith in the value of college, but they’re increasingly unsure they can afford to take part,” said Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “That gap between belief and access should be a wake-up call.”

https://universitybusiness.com/we-now-have-clashing-views-on-the-value-of-college/

The AI assembly line: Strategic imperatives for CEOs - Gianmarco Cilento, Steffen Fuchs , and Varun Marya; McKinsey

Just as Ford’s production line transformed physical labor, agentic AI—systems that can act autonomously rather than just responding to prompts—is now reshaping cognitive work, including engineering design, supply chain planning, and risk assessment. (We will refer to agentic AI simply as “AI” throughout this article.) With AI, companies no longer need to depend solely on the judgment and availability of a small number of experts to make complex decisions or create sophisticated products. Instead, knowledge becomes broadly accessible to anyone with the right AI capabilities, accelerating decision-making, product customization, and other tasks once limited to experts.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/industrials/our-insights/the-ai-assembly-line-strategic-imperatives-for-ceos

Landscape of Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: A Review - Sharin Jacob, Heather Miceli and Hannah Schneider, Digital Promise

This literature review explores the rapid integration of artificial intelligence in higher education, examining both institutional influences and instructional practices. It highlights how governance frameworks, resource allocation, and faculty attitudes shape access and responsible technology adoption. Pedagogically, the paper emphasizes the necessity of embedding AI literacy, critical evaluation, and ethical reasoning into curricula to prevent student overreliance on AI tools. Ultimately, institutions must balance innovation with accountability by carefully aligning AI tools with educational values to advance authentic learning.

https://digitalpromise.dspacedirect.org/items/e8d4304c-22c2-496e-a029-e3d468a28249

Students prefer personalized, AI-generated educational videos over non-personalized, human-recorded videos - Bill Tomlinson, etc all; Nature

Personalization is a well-established driver of student engagement, yet delivering individualized instruction at scale remains a challenge in online education. Recent advances in generative AI make scalable personalization feasible, but AI-generated educational videos are often perceived as inferior to human-recorded content. This tension raises the question: how does the value of personalization compare to that of human presence? We investigated this question through a field deployment in two offerings of a large undergraduate online course (493 respondents). AI-generated personalized videos served as the primary instructional modality, alongside a smaller set of non-personalized human-recorded and AI-generated videos. At the end of the course, students ranked preferences across personalized and non-personalized formats and human-recorded versus AI-generated content. In a direct comparison, students preferred AI-generated personalized videos over human-recorded non-personalized videos (mean rank 2.26 vs. 2.69; Wilcoxon signed-rank test, ).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-52798-9

The Third Wave of Online Education: Why AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Could Disrupt Universities, Corporate Training, and Workforce Development - Tim King, Solutions Review

The Third Wave of Online Education Has Begun. Artificial intelligence is beginning to fundamentally reshape education. Not simply classroom technology. Not digital homework systems. Not video-based e-learning platforms. Education itself. During a recent episode of Inside Jam, Solutions Review President Doug Atkinson sat down with Jonathan Cornelissen to discuss what may become one of the defining transformations of the next decade: the rise of AI-powered adaptive learning systems capable of personalizing education at scale. The discussion explored the evolution of online learning, enterprise AI upskilling, workforce disruption, higher education economics, AI-native tutoring systems, and the growing realization that traditional educational models may no longer align with the pace of technological change.

https://solutionsreview.com/the-third-wave-of-online-education-why-ai-powered-adaptive-learning-could-disrupt-universities-corporate-training-and-workforce-development/

The fierce battle over AI in schools The AI arms race has hit the classroom. - Chase DiBenedetto, Mashable

New York City, with the largest public school district in the country, was breaking ground on a novel, AI-themed high school when district leadership abruptly pulled the plug last month. They cited mounting parental concern and nationwide backlash to what has been labeled rapid, unsafe adoption of AI. Because there has been a rapid adoption of AI among students across the country. Used properly, the tech could transform learning, many argue, and fill gaps in an overburdened education system. But others worry it'll be a generational misstep that could worsen learning development. Mashable spoke with a dozen stakeholders — parents, child safety advocates, AI literacy experts, tech leaders, and a state representative proposing stronger EdTech regulation — to lay out what is at stake when you add AI to the equation. 

https://mashable.com/article/ai-k-12-classrooms-ban-debate

The AI industry is still in flux, and university programs are trying to keep up - Marketplace

Welcome to May — the job market is currently awash in fresh graduates looking for that first post-college job, and it’s not an easy task. The unemployment rate for young college graduates jumped to 5.6% at the end of last year, entry-level job postings in the U.S. are down by a third since 2023, and grads are even up against artificial intelligence outsourcing. At the same time, some universities, and the students within, are making a big bet on AI to secure their future. When Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, unveiled a new program in 2022 called “AI and decision-making,” students showed up. Professor Asuman Ozdaglar is an engineering professor and a deputy dean of academics at MIT. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to discuss how universities are staying ahead of the curve with the labor market, and how professors think about teaching for an industry that’s still changing so rapidly. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/05/12/an-artificial-intelligence-major-is-gaining-popularity-at-mit

Student AI use is fuelling grade inflation – Berkeley study - Nathan M Greenfield, University World News

Over the past month, Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Magazine, the (conservative) National Review and Nature have published articles decrying grade inflation. Together, they pointed to the ‘usual suspects’: spineless professors; coddled students demanding to be treated like the customers administrators say they are; and the general decline in rigorous academic standards. In his just-published paper “Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation”, Dr Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, adds a new perpetrator: the effect of students using artificial intelligence to help write essays or code when working outside of professorial supervision. Chirikov’s study of eight years of course syllabi and grades at a research-intensive university in Texas found that courses that were more exposed to AI assistance (meaning they had a larger share of tasks in which AI assistance is stronger) saw a marked increase in higher grades after the advent of ChatGPT in 2022.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260514074518988

5 Things to Know About the Changing Cybersecurity Landscape in Higher Education - UMass Amherst

Recent incidents affecting institutions nationwide, including the widely used Canvas learning management system, have reinforced the importance of cybersecurity not only as a technical priority, but as a shared community responsibility. For Jeremy Pelegrin, Chief Information Security Officer at UMass Amherst, the conversation around cybersecurity today extends far beyond firewalls and software updates. It’s about protecting teaching and research, strengthening digital trust, and helping the university community develop habits that support a safer digital environment for everyone. “We have reached a point as a society where cybersecurity must be a responsibility for every person on the UMass campus,” Pelegrin said. “As we navigate through a changing landscape of threats and compliance requirements, it’s really about developing good cyber habits that can be applicable regardless of where the world is going to lead us.” As technology, artificial intelligence, and online threats continue to evolve, UMass Amherst is approaching digital safety as an ongoing partnership across campus. Here are five things the community should know about how the landscape is changing and how the university is adapting alongside it.

https://www.umass.edu/it/news/5-things-know-about-changing-cybersecurity-landscape-higher-education

Assessing students when artificial intelligence is ubiquitous - Michelle Seref, Times Higher Education

If we continue to prioritise memorisation in an age of wall-to-wall information, we send the wrong message to our students and employers. Michelle Seref offers advice on assessment that builds critical thinking skills. For much of higher education’s modern history, assessment has followed a familiar formula: a midterm and a final exam, with a heavy emphasis on whether students can retain and reproduce information. That model made sense in a world where knowledge was scarce and expertise lived primarily in textbooks and lectures. That world no longer exists. With students’ early access to technology, they can find most information from Google, YouTube and, now, AI chatbots. The rapid rise of generative AI hasn’t made assessment obsolete, but it has made its misalignment impossible to ignore. The real question is no longer what students know, but how they think, decide, adapt and apply judgement. Yet many assessments still measure recall rather than application.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/assessing-students-when-artificial-intelligence-ubiquitous

AI and the Employment Outlook for College Grads - Jim A. Jorstad, GovTech

It’s that time of the year when graduation ceremonies take place at colleges and universities throughout the country. Students will fill auditoriums, gymnasiums and stadiums, each with their own dreams and hopes of landing that ideal job they’ve been working toward. Some will have taken certification courses, served as researchers or graduate assistants, or participated in internships. Hopefully, they received the necessary education and training to be successful in their careers of choice. But they're among the first graduating classes to have had most of their college experience upended by artificial intelligence. What will be the impact of AI? Are students graduating with the necessary AI skills, and what kind of employment environment are they entering? I want to focus specifically on IT-related jobs, although many of the same hiring trends can be applied to other disciplines. Let’s consider what factors are affecting the job market, and what graduates may experience during their job and career search.

https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/opinion-ai-and-the-employment-outlook-for-college-grads

The Case for Data Centers in Space- McKinsey

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on the potential role orbital data centers could play in meeting growing AI compute demand—and the technical and economic uncertainties that remain. Philip Johnston, a McKinsey alumnus and cofounder of orbital compute infrastructure provider Starcloud, believes that space-based systems could become a meaningful part of the future compute landscape. He recently spoke to McKinsey Partner Luca Bennici about how the space-based data center technology is evolving, the challenges involved, and what needs to happen for orbital data centers to become a viable complement to terrestrial infrastructure. The interview transcript has been edited for clarity and style.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-case-for-data-centers-in-space

‘Student Guide to AI’ returns for third year with a new focus: Human capabilities - Elon University News Bureau

“Human Wisdom for the Age of AI: A Field Guide to Cultivating Essential Skills”, a publication by Elon University, the American Association of Colleges and Universities and The Princeton Review, is provided to students and institutions free of charge. The new publication, “Human Wisdom for the Age of AI: A Field Guide to Cultivating Essential Skills,” helps students cultivate the human skills they need to thrive in a digital world, whether working with AI technologies or learning independently of those tools. The guide includes engaging and fun exercises on curiosity, critical and deep thinking, creativity, ethical perspectives, communication and relational skills, among others. Like the 2024 and 2025 editions, this year’s guide is provided to students and institutions free of charge and is available for download at: www.studentguidetoai.org. The guide draws on 10 voices across centuries and cultures — from Aristotle, Cicero and Descartes to Mencius and Ptahhotep — whose enduring insights into human judgment, creativity, ethics and wisdom take on new urgency as AI reshapes how we learn and work.

https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2026/05/12/student-guide-to-ai-returns-for-third-year-with-a-new-focus-human-capabilities/

AI risk to university jobs despite staff believing roles are safe - Juliette Rowsell, Times Higher Ed

University workers generally do not believe that their jobs will be taken by artificial intelligence in the short term but experts have warned against complacency, saying that automation may still be used as “justification” to cut roles anyway. While respondents to Times Higher Education’s UK University Redundancy Survey expressed widespread concern about the impact of the tens of thousands of job losses across the UK sector, concerns over the effect of AI remain low. Asked: “Do you fear you will be made redundant within the next three years due to the rise of AI?” more than half (55 per cent) disagreed, with 17 per cent of these strongly disagreeing. Just under 5 per cent strongly agreed and 14 per cent said they agree, while a fifth (21 per cent) neither agreed or disagreed.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ai-risk-university-jobs-despite-staff-believing-roles-are-safe