This month saw results from a yearlong global study of "potential negative risks that generative AI poses to student". The study (by the Brookings Institution's Center for Universal Education) also suggests how to prevent risks and maximize benefits: After interviews, focus groups, and consultations with over 500 students, teachers, parents, education leaders, and technologists across 50 countries, a close review of over 400 studies, and a Delphi panel, we find that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing generative AI in children's education overshadow its benefits.
"At the top of Brookings' list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children's cognitive growth," reports NPR — "how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems." The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains... As one student told the researchers, "It's easy. You don't need to (use) your brain." The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically...

Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, "is undermining students' emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health," the report says. One of the many problems with kids' overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic — it has been designed to reinforce users' beliefs... Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, "complaining about your parents and saying, 'They want me to wash the dishes — this is so annoying. I hate my parents.' The chatbot will likely say, 'You're right. You're misunderstood. I'm so sorry. I understand you.' Versus a friend who would say, 'Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don't know what you're complaining about. That's normal.' That right there is the problem."
AI did have some advantages, the article points out: The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: "generating parent emails ... translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans" — and more. The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year...

AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia. But "AI can massively increase existing divides" too, [warns Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report's authors and a senior fellow at Brookings]. That's because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate... "[T]his is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."
The report calls for more research — and make several recommendations (including "holistic" learning and "AI tools that teach, not tell.") But this may be their most important recommendation. "Provide a clear vision for ethical AI use that centers human agency..."

"We find that AI has the potential to benefit or hinder students, depending on how it is used."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems -- a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the new law is designed primarily to foster growth in the domestic AI sector, while also introducing baseline safeguards to address potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI technologies. Officials described the inclusion of legal safety obligations for frontier AI as a world-first legislative step.

The act lays the groundwork for a national-level AI policy framework. It establishes a central decision-making body -- the Presidential Council on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy -- and creates a legal foundation for an AI Safety Institute that will oversee safety and trust-related assessments. The law also outlines wide-ranging support measures, including research and development, data infrastructure, talent training, startup assistance, and help with overseas expansion.

To reduce the initial burden on businesses, the government plans to implement a grace period of at least one year. During this time, it will not carry out fact-finding investigations or impose administrative sanctions. Instead, the focus will be on consultations and education. A dedicated AI Act support desk will help companies determine whether their systems fall within the law's scope and how to respond accordingly. Officials noted that the grace period may be extended depending on how international standards and market conditions evolve. The law applies to three areas only: high-impact AI, safety obligations for high-performance AI and transparency requirements for generative AI.

Enforcement under the Korean law is intentionally light. It does not impose criminal penalties. Instead, it prioritizes corrective orders for noncompliance, with fines -- capped at 30 million won ($20,300) -- issued only if those orders are ignored. This, the government says, reflects a compliance-oriented approach rather than a punitive one. Transparency obligations for generative AI largely align with those in the EU, but Korea applies them more narrowly. Content that could be mistaken for real, such as deepfake images, video or audio, must clearly disclose its AI-generated origin. For other types of AI-generated content, invisible labeling via metadata is allowed. Personal or noncommercial use of generative AI is excluded from regulation. "This is not about boasting that we are the first in the world," said Kim Kyeong-man, deputy minister of the office of artificial intelligence policy at the ICT ministry. "We're approaching this from the most basic level of global consensus."

Korea's approach differs from the EU by defining "high-performance AI" using technical thresholds like cumulative training compute, rather than regulating based on how AI is used. As a result, Korea believes no current models meet the bar for regulation, while the EU is phasing in broader, use-based AI rules over several years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's no secret that students worldwide use AI chatbots to do their homework and avoid learning things. On the flip side, students can also use AI as a tool to beef up their knowledge and plan for the future with flashcards or study guides. Google hopes its latest Gemini feature will help with the latter. The company has announced that Gemini can now create free SAT practice tests and coach students to help them get higher scores. As a standardized test, the content of the SAT follows a predictable pattern. So there's no need to use a lengthy, personalized prompt to get Gemini going. Just say something like, "I want to take a practice SAT test," and the chatbot will generate one complete with clickable buttons, graphs, and score analysis.

Of course, generative AI can go off the rails and provide incorrect information, which is a problem when you're trying to learn things. However, Google says it has worked with education firms like The Princeton Review to ensure the AI-generated tests resemble what students will see in the real deal. The interface for Gemini's practice tests includes scoring and the ability to review previous answers. If you are unclear on why a particular answer is right or wrong, the questions have an "Explain answer" button right at the bottom. After you finish the practice exam, the custom interface (which looks a bit like Gemini's Canvas coding tool) can help you follow up on areas that need improvement. Google says support for the SAT is just the start, "with more tests coming in the future."

AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: "There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training," said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. "I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill."

Karp, who holds a PhD in philosophy, used himself as an example of the type of "elite" white-collar worker most at risk of disruption. Vocational workers will be more valuable "if not irreplaceable," he said, criticizing the idea that higher education is the ultimate benchmark of a person's talents and employability.

Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology's promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that "GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated" to the cost of energy in using AI.

He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. "The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better."

"I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors," Nadella said.

U.S. college graduates "have historically found jobs more quickly than people with only a high school degree," writes Bloomberg.

"But that advantage is becoming a thing of the past, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland." "Recently, the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers, indicating that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended," Cleveland Fed researchers Alexander Cline and BarıÅY Kaymak said in a blog post published Monday. The study follows the latest monthly employment data released on Nov. 20, which showed the unemployment rate for college-educated workers continued to rise in September amid an ongoing slowdown in white-collar hiring... The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.
There is a caveat. "Young college graduates maintain advantages in job stability and compensation once hired..." the researchers write. "The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes."

Their research includes a graph showing how the "unemployment gap" first increased dramatically after 2010 between college-educated and high school-educated workers, which the researchers attribute to "the prolonged jobless recovery after 2008". But that gap has been closing ever since, with that gap now smaller than at any time since the 1970s.

"Young high school workers are riding the wave of the historically tight postpandemic labor market with well-below-average unemployment compared to that of past high school graduates, while young college workers are experiencing unemployment rates rarely observed among past college cohorts barring during recessions." The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access. If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends. The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes. These details suggest a nuanced shift in employment dynamics, one in which college graduates face greater difficulty finding jobs than previously but maintain advantages compared with high school graduates in job stability and compensation once hired.
Two key quotes:

• "Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers."

• "Developments related to AI, which may be affecting job-finding prospects in some cases, cannot explain the decades-long decline in the college job-finding rate."

A researchers' propensity for risky projects is passed down to their doctoral students -- and stays with trainees after they leave the laboratory, according to an analysis of thousands of current and former PhD students and their mentors. From a report: Science involves taking risks, and some of the most impactful discoveries require taking big bets. However, scientists and policymakers have raised concerns that the current academic system's emphasis on short-term outcomes encourages researchers to play it safe. Studies have shown, for example, that risky research is less likely to be funded. Anders Brostrom, an economist studying science policy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his colleagues decided to examine the role of doctoral education in shaping risk-related behaviour -- an area that Brostrom says has been largely overlooked.

"We often focus on thinking about how we can change the funding systems to make it more likely for people to take risks, but that's not the only lever we have," says Chiara Franzoni, an economist at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. This study is "refreshing" because "we've discussed policy interventions a lot, but we haven't discussed training," she adds. [...] The team found that students' risk-taking dispositions matched those of their supervisors. This link was stronger when students and their supervisors communicated frequently, and weaker when students were also mentored by scientists outside their lab.

Anthropic's fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company's consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI completes tasks entirely) or augmentation (where humans and AI collaborate). The split came out to 52% augmentation and 45% automation on Claude.ai, a slight shift from January 2025 when augmentation led 55% to 41%.

The share of jobs using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks has risen from 36% in January to 49% across pooled data from multiple reports. Anthropic's researchers also found that AI delivers its largest productivity gains on complex work requiring college-level education, speeding up those tasks by a factor of 12 compared to 9 for high-school-level work.

Claude completes college-degree tasks successfully 66% of the time versus 70% for simpler work. Computer and mathematical tasks continue to dominate usage, accounting for roughly a third of Claude.ai conversations and nearly half of API traffic.

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained "old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor's file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs." (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University's Flux Research Group).

Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape: At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school.

The new UNIX operating system would've been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as "a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system." Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11...

The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.'s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell's tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Distribution. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work.

Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he's why the university still has it today. "He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping," Ricci said...

The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university's new engineering building that's set to open in January 2027. That's why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. "I thought we'd find some old stuff, but I didn't think it'd be anything like this," he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau's office.
Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape: "When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that's what we saw here," [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. "We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today."
Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. "The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it," Duerig said. "People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing." One of the museum's directors said the tape's recovery marked a big day for the museum "One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history," Ricci said. "And it was really cool that we were able to share that."

Duerig said while there weren't many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. "There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard... In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this [after a four-hour review] and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020.

In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program. Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software.

On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software...!

As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important.
Kelling notes he's part of a tech team of just two people reponsible for "63 different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community..."

The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members -- i.e., their ideologies -- forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics -- i.e., identities -- with which ideology is presumed to correlate.

This paper uses new data on the viewpoints and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two results. The first is that the priorities of board members have large causal effects across many domains. For example, the effect of electing an equity-focused board member on test scores for low-income students is roughly equivalent to assigning every such student a teacher who is 0.3 to 0.4 SDs higher in the distribution of teacher value-added. The second is that observing policy priorities is crucial. Identity turns out to be a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained by differences in policy priorities. Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant, showing that who serves on the board and what they prioritize can have far-reaching consequences for students.

Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college "very important" dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is "not worth the cost," up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story.

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bachelor's degrees in 2023, up from 1.6 million in 2010, and the fraction of 25-year-olds holding a bachelor's degree has steadily increased for the past 15 years. The economic case remains strong. The average bachelor's degree holder earns about 70% more than a high-school graduate of similar work experience, and after factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20% since 2015.

Even after accounting for student-debt payments, college graduates net about $8,000 more annually than those without degrees. Part of the disconnect may stem from misunderstanding how college pricing works. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe everyone pays the same tuition, though fewer than 20% of families actually pay the published sticker price.

New York City's statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall has been largely successful at getting students to focus in class and socialize at lunch, but teachers across the city have discovered an unexpected side effect: many teenagers cannot read analog clocks. "The constant refrain is 'Miss, what time is it?'" said Madi Mornhinweg, a high school English teacher in Manhattan, who eventually started responding by asking students to identify the big hand and little hand themselves.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said the ban has helped move foot traffic more swiftly through hallways and gotten more students to class on time -- they just don't know it because they can't read the wall clocks. The city's education department says students learn clock-reading in first and second grade. A 2017 Oklahoma study found only one in five children ages 6-12 could read analog clocks, and England began replacing classroom analog clocks with digital ones in 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia's world-first ban on social media platforms for under-16s, which came into force in December. It includes Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Le Monde and France Info reported on Wednesday that a draft bill was now complete and contained two measures: a ban on social media for under-15s and a ban on mobile phones in high schools, where 15- to 18-year-olds study. Phones have already been banned in primary and middle schools. The bill will be submitted to France's Conseil d'Etat for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones. The government wants the social media ban to come into force from September 2026.

Le Monde reported the text of the draft bill cited "the risks of excessive screen use by teenagers," including the dangers of being exposed to inappropriate social media content, online bullying, and altered sleep patterns. The bill states the need to "protect future generations" from dangers that threaten their ability to thrive and live together in a society with shared values. Earlier this month, Macron confirmed at a public debate in Saint Malo that he wanted a social media ban for young teenagers. He said there was "consensus being shaped" on the issue after Australia introduced its ban.

"The more screen time there is, the more school achievement drops the more screen time there is, the more mental health problems go up," he said. He used the analogy of a teenager getting into a Formula One racing car before they had learned to drive. "If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don't want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car."

Starting in July 2026, every public school district in California will be required to have policies on the books that restrict or prohibit students from using smartphones during the school day, thanks to Assembly Bill 3216 that Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law back in 2024.

The legislation also mandates that districts update these policies every five years. Newsom had previously signed related legislation in 2019, though that earlier law merely affirmed that school districts have the authority to regulate smartphone use rather than requiring them to do so.

A group of researchers is calling on universities to treat consulting work as a strategic priority, arguing that bureaucratic obstacles and inconsistent policies have left a massive revenue stream largely untapped even as higher education institutions face mounting financial pressures. (Consulting work refers to academics offering their advice and expertise to outside organizations -- industry, government, civil society -- for a fee. It's one of the most direct and scalable ways academics can shape the world beyond campus, and the projects are typically shorter in duration and easier to set up than alternatives like spin-out companies.)

Writing in Nature, the authors found that fewer than 10% of academic staff at nine UK universities engaged in consulting work, and the number of academic consulting contracts across the country fell 38% over the past decade -- from around 99,000 in 2014-15 to fewer than 62,000 in 2023-24.

Academic consulting in the UK is currently worth roughly $675-810 million annually, a figure that represents just 0.6% of the country's $124 billion management consulting market. The authors examined policies at 30 universities and surveyed 76 fellows from a UK Research and Innovation programme. Two-thirds of the surveyed institutions had publicly available consulting policies, and two outright prohibit private consulting. Permitted consulting time ranged from unlimited to 30 days or fewer per year, institutional charges varied from 10-40% of fees, and contract approval timelines stretched from 24 hours to several months.

Private consultancy firms are moving into this space, capturing opportunities that universities neglect. Small-scale projects under $6,750 are commonly sidelined by university contract offices because they represent too small an income for strained institutional resources. The authors propose standardized policies across institutions, shared consulting income with departments, and faster approval processes -- reforms similar to those already implemented for university spin-out companies.

On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement.

"The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement: The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and will now switch its focus to a member drive thanks in part to these donations... The donation will support the organization's technical team and infrastructure capacity, as well as strengthen its campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy initiatives, and future opportunities. The FSF is seeking donations until year-end after which they aim to gain 100 associate members through its year-end fundraising ending January 16.
The FSF's executive director said the donations prove "that software freedom is recognized more and more as a principal issue today, at the core of several other social movements people care about like privacy, ownership, and the right to repair...

"We are proudly supported by a large variety of contributors who care about digital rights. All donations matter, whether $5 or $500,000."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country's poorest big city. But Fernandez found the program's cost-of-living stipend lacking -- "A lot of us got on food stamps," she says -- and the coursework insufficient for landing a coding job. "I didn't have the experience or portfolio," says the 25-year-old, who is now a flight attendant and preparing to apply to law school. "Coding is not something I got back to."

Since 2021, the academy has welcomed over 1,700 students, a racially diverse mix with varying levels of tech literacy and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, have completed its 10-month course of half-days at Michigan State University, which cosponsors the Apple-branded and Apple-focused program. WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and spoke with officials and graduates for the first in-depth examination of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years -- almost 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and the university's regular students. As tech giants begin pouring billions of dollars into AI-related job training courses across the country, the Apple academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities.

[...] The program gives out iPhones and MacBooks and spends an estimated $20,000 per student, nearly twice as much as state and local governments budget for community colleges. [...] About 70 percent of students graduate, which [Sarah Gretter, the academy leader for Michigan State] describes as higher than typical for adult education. She says the goal is for them to take "a next step," whether a job or more courses. Roughly a third of participants are under 25, and virtually all of them pursue further schooling. [...] About 71 percent of graduates from the last two years went onto full-time jobs across a variety of industries, according to academy officials. Amy J. Ko, a University of Washington computer scientist who researches computing education, calls under 80 percent typical for the coding schools she has studied but notes that one of her department's own undergraduate programs has a 95 percent job placement rate.

Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions;

(ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers would have a different pedagogy, and thus standardization is harder to achieve vs that in other internet categories;

(iii) Education is fragmented - it includes various fields (schools, undergrad courses, medicine, engg, management, etc.), each with their own curriculum, and the same being vastly different across countries globally; this makes scalability difficult beyond a few certain specializations and regions.

Additionally, we believe the ability for online education to capture a sizable value share of supplemental education is limited since the perceived value of offline, including that from community, in-person engagement and doubt solving, rigour, etc., is typically higher.

However, we note that before China's double reduction policy in 2021, TAL and EDU had market caps of up to US$50 bn; these companies were mostly domestic focused and on the K-12 tutoring segment, which has large volumes. Similarly in India, Byju's reached a peak valuation of US$20 bn+ (link; again, focused on K-12), before issues around governance etc. impacted the business.

Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety -- a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the school's high-profile location in Los Angeles.

Similar systems are spreading to campuses nationwide as schools try to stop mass shootings that killed 49 people on school property this year, 59 in 2024, and 45 in 2023. A 2023 ACLU report found that eight of the ten largest school shootings since Columbine occurred at schools that already had surveillance systems, and 32% of students surveyed said they felt like they were always being watched. The technology has a spotty track record, however.

Gun detection vendor Evolv, used by more than 800 schools including Beverly Hills High, was reprimanded by the FTC in 2024 for claiming its AI could detect all weapons after it failed to flag a seven-inch knife used to stab a student in 2022. Evolv has also flagged laptops and water bottles as guns. Rival vendor Omnilert flagged a 16-year-old student at a Maryland high school reaching for an empty Doritos bag as a possible gun threat; police held the teenager at gunpoint.

Not every school is buying in. Highline Schools in Washington state cancelled its $33,000 annual ZeroEyes contract this year and spent the money on defibrillators and Ford SUVs for its safety team instead.