PCO Update by UPCEA

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 countr...

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,...

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-p...

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 firewal...

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 c...