Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Educations, speaks with TecHR reporter Sudipto Ghosh about how professional development programs help professionals update their skills. “Upskilling is now a fundamental part of doing business and survival,” explains Pant. “Employers need to keep their work forces current as in-demand skills evolve, and it makes sense for them to turn to higher education for help in that regard.”
U.S. News & World Report contributor Linda Childers spotlights how the Sloan School of Management is integrating virtual reality tools into its curriculum. Prof. John Sterman explains that a climate simulation game “teaches our business students skills such as improvising, negotiating and public speaking,” adding that, “it reinforces how their decisions can have consequences that last for decades.”
New York Times reporter Natasha Singer spotlights how MIT and Georgetown Law are offering a joint course in privacy law and technology as part of multi-university effort focused on technology and the public good. “Everybody who is researching, working at these big companies believes that what they’re doing is good,” says third year student Rachel Wei. “But we have to understand the other side of the issue.”
A storytelling robot developed by MIT researchers could be used to help boost language skills in young children and could help prepare children for learning in school, report Donna Lu for New Scientist. “If a child doesn’t start kindergarten ready to learn, it is very difficult and very expensive for them to catch up,” explains Prof. Cynthia Breazeal.
Wall Street Journal reporter Alicia Wallace spotlights MIT’s AI executive education course, which “aims to make a technologically complicated topic accessible by the pacing of the course and by providing examples of practical applications.”
Prof. Bill Aulet speaks with Financial Times reporter Seb Murray about how business schools can help prepare students to become entrepreneurs and highlights MIT’s delta v program, an educational accelerator that allows business school students to work with engineers, designers and scientists to create companies. “Entrepreneurship is about creation, leadership,” says Aulet. “We need programs that convene heterogeneous teams.”
Writing for the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff highlights Prof. David Autor’s research showing the bleak economic outlook for Americans without college degrees. Aronoff argues the most important less from this work is that, “the economic issue that matters most — maybe the only issue that really matters at all — is education.”
Financial Times reporter Andrew Jack spotlights MIT alumnus Socrates Rosenfeld, who founded a cannabis distribution startup that has become the subject of a new case study taught at MIT. “We try to create live cases where the answer is not known in advance,” explains Prof. Scott Stern. “They were looking at an industry with a good degree of uncertainty.”
At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Prof. David Autor presented new research showing that middle-skill jobs for Americans without college degrees are becoming increasingly rare in dense areas, reports Jeanna Smialek and Peter Coy for Bloomberg News. “It’s not clear where the land of opportunity is for non-college adults,” says Autor.
Reporting for WBUR’s CommonHealth, Carey Goldberg highlights new classroom kits developed by MIT researchers that allow kids to learn and experiment with the building blocks of DNA. "I just think it's really important that microbiology education is accessible for everyone," says graduate student Ally Huang, "and that everyone, regardless of their resources, has access to things like this."
The Wall Street Journal highlights a working paper co-authored by graduate student Charles Rafkin that shows how Americans with the lowest levels of education face a number of disadvantages. Rafkin and his co-author write that, “death rates for the least educated have dramatically diverged from death rates of other groups, in virtually all middle-age race and gender groups.”
New York Times reporter Ellen Rosen highlights how MIT is preparing students for the industries and jobs of the future through the AIM Photonics Academy and Manufacturing USA. “Community colleges across the country, with the help of companies and research institutions like MIT, are beginning to shape their curriculums to expose students to new theories and technology while teaching longstanding core manufacturing fundamentals,” explains Rosen.
Spencer Buell of Boston magazine reports that Massachusetts colleges are among the best in the country according to U.S. News and World Report’s latest rankings, with MIT being named the number three school in the country.
MIT was named one of the top three colleges in the country on U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of the best colleges, reports Felicia Gans for The Boston Globe. Gans notes that, “MIT was also ranked first for best engineering programs.”
In an article for Wired, Prof. Joi Ito writes that our educational system needs to be more inclusive of different learning styles. “We need to revamp our notion of ‘education’ and shake loose the ordered and linear metrics of the society of the past,” Ito declares.