Staff Picks

"A quarter of employers surveyed said they will remove bachelor's degree requirements for some roles by the end of 2025, according to a May 20 report from Resume Templates. In addition, 7 in 10 hiring managers said their company looks at relevant experience over a bachelor's degree while making hiring decisions." MLH

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"Without knowing what proposals go unfunded, there is no way to know whether agencies are supporting a wide range of ideas or favoring a narrow theory. Are "high-risk, high reward" proposals getting a chance? Have hard-won changes in grant policies actually helped early-career researchers? Do the questions researchers ask change in response to demands from Congress or calls from citizen groups? These questions seem both valuable and straightforward. Yet metaresearchers (those who research how research is done) are unable to address such topics with any certainty. The public cannot know, for example, how many NIH grant applications come from historically Black colleges or universities, or how many researchers propose to study gain-of-function in viral genomes, without knowing what is included in all R&D grant applications, funded and not.  " MLH

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"SHEEO noted important differences in the sources of two- and four-year public institution state and local funding, despite similar levels of education appropriations per FTE: Two-year public institutions received $6,451 per FTE in state general operating appropriations, which is 69% of the four-year general operating appropriation ($9,354). Local appropriations were 115 times higher at two-year institutions ($3,712) than at four-year institutions ($32 per FTE). There were two-year local appropriations in 29 states, compared to only eight for four-year institutions, the report notes. Total state and local support at two-year institutions was $10,899, about 84% of the amount at four-year institutions ($12,986)." MLH

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"The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the renaming of its Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) to the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC). The new name reflects DOE’s sharpened focus on turning scientific breakthroughs into real-world results—supporting the full path from research and development to private sector deployment and economic impact. " --CAN

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"Omaha and Pittsburgh, despite being 1,000 miles apart and having different economic engines, are facing many of the same challenges, including workforce shortages and slowing regional growth. Each region received federal Build Back Better funding from the Biden administration to turn that around. " MLH

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"Students who attend high schools that offer a computer science course end up earning 8% higher salaries than those who don't, regardless of career path or whether they attend college, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. (The study examined the impact of giving students access to computer science classes, not of requiring them.) The effects are more significant for students who haven't historically been well represented in computer science fields, like women, students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds and Black students. Some new computer science classes have seen higher enrollment among these underrepresented groups, according to research released last month. From 2009 to 2016 a Java-programming course was the only AP Computer Science class offered. The launch of a newer, more broadly focused AP Computer Science class quadrupled the female, Black and Hispanic student test takers."

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"The Sources of U.S. Economic Growth in the Aftermath of the COVID–19 Recession" CG

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"Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC, formerly OTT) awarded more than $100,000 total in cash prizes at the Spring 2025 EPIC Pitch Competition, where startups presented their groundbreaking energy technologies. The Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) provides opportunities for the nation’s most innovative technology business incubators to continue their support of energy entrepreneurs. " -CAN

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"Beyond delivery, use cases include infrastructure inspections, emergency response, video surveillance, and environmental monitoring. A number of these applications are being tested through partnerships with public authorities, including emergency services. In one example, the fire brigade in a Swiss city was involved in shaping system functionalities for search-and-rescue and emergency response operations." MLH

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"Sandia National Laboratories serves a unique role in the nuclear security enterprise: lead systems integrator for the nuclear weapons program. The systems integrator ensures that the many complex parts of the weapon and its delivery vehicle work together flawlessly, and that system performance is optimized across all the requirements."

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"Yet the erosion of public trust in science has significance that goes well beyond any particular policy decision or agency budget. The functioning of modern societies depends on what the English sociologist Anthony Giddens termed "abstract systems": networks of institutions that use technical expertise to "organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live." From this point of view, the stark polarization of American politics around trust in science not only threatens the legitimacy of particular expert institutions, but also has potentially destabilizing consequences for society as a whole."

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"This isn't science fiction. It's ITER, humanity's most ambitious attempt to harness nuclear fusion—the clean and virtually limitless energy source that powers the Sun. Located in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, in southern France, and with a budget approaching €24 billion, ITER brings together 35 countries in an unprecedented scientific effort. The latest critical piece to arrive is the so-called central solenoid, a technological marvel built in the United States. This "magnetic heart" can generate fields powerful enough to trap the superheated plasma needed for fusion reactions. In simpler terms: it's what prevents the miniature sun inside the reactor from spiraling out of control." MLH

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"The office’s latest innovation is known as “Captain Record.” This tool was built to help SOS obtain insights from more than 100 years of documents, making unstructured data searchable for staff, said Robert Fulk, CIO of SOS. A lot of this data was previously “locked up” in PDF formats, he said. The new tool makes tens of millions of records searchable with AI, from business filings to auto dealer records to historical licensing information. These could include PDFs and handwritten documents from decades past. SOS staff can communicate in plain language to ask the model a question or find information." --CAN

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"Many recent policy actions have aimed at a reduction in the size of the federal workforce, including a reduction-in-force, a hiring freeze, buyouts, and early retirement incentives. As the federal government is the largest single US employer—an estimated over 8 million employees are either employed directly by the federal government or are supported by federal contracts and grants—these policies could have important implications for the labor market.1 In this blog post, I first document the size and characteristics of the federal workforce in September 2024, before these policies were enacted, and then explore actual and potential reductions in the full federally supported workforce. I estimate that the potential reduction in the full federal workforce, including contract and grant employees, could be as high as 1.2 million." MLH

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"Every year, American universities spend millions of dollars patenting inventions developed on their campuses. Big names such as Stanford and the University of California system lead the pack in patent activity, but hundreds of other universities are also trying to strike gold by monetizing intellectual property. The idea is simple: By investing in patents and selling or licensing them to industry, the university will profit. But in practice, this strategy rarely pays off." (gms)

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"New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine made history in 2018 when it became the first top-ranked medical program to offer full-tuition scholarships to all students, regardless of need or merit.  The number of applicants, predictably, spiked in the year that followed. But then, the share of incoming students considered “financially disadvantaged” sank to 3% in 2019, down from 12% in 2017, reports showed.  “Tuition-free schools can actually increase inequity,” said Jamie Beaton, co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, a college consulting firm.  “Tuition-free colleges experience surges in application numbers, dramatically boosting the competitive intensity of the admissions process,” he said. “This in turn can skew admissions towards middle- or higher-income applicants who may be able to access more effective admissions resources, such as tutoring or extracurriculars.”" MLH

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"Successful entrepreneurs know how to thrive amid uncertainty. They pare down to the essentials. They lean into change. And they solve problems by sidestepping traditional constraints. With that in mind, we asked four entrepreneurs in residence at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT for advice on managing risk, harnessing artificial intelligence, and launching during uncertain times. "

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" AI “agents” are coming, whether we are ready or not. While there is much uncertainty about when AI models will be able to interact autonomously with digital platforms, other AI tools, and even humans, there can be little doubt that this development will be transformative – for better or worse. Yet despite all the commentary (and hype) around agentic AI, many big questions remain unaddressed, the biggest being which type of AI agent the tech industry is seeking to develop?" MLH

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"Since the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in occupied office space in metropolitan downtowns have varied widely across the United States. This variation in the change in occupied office space across downtowns could be due to variation in the composition of employment or the desirability of working in specific downtowns. Some occupations are better suited to remote work than others, and some industries have embraced remote work more enthusiastically than others. In addition, some downtowns may be less desirable places to work due to a wide range of factors, such as the availability of public transit, parking, walkable amenities, public safety, or the quality of existing office buildings. Using detailed data on leased office space, Jordan Rappaport documents that changes in occupied office space since the pandemic have varied widely across both downtowns and neighborhoods within the same downtown. Using detailed data on the composition of employment, he finds that variations in occupation and industry can account for only a modest share of the variation in the change in occupied office space across and within downtowns. Instead, most of the variation is likely attributable to other characteristics that make some downtowns more desirable places to work than others." MLH

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"These findings, from Gallup’s annual Environment poll conducted March 3-16, come as big technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, have joined large financial institutions in pledging to greatly increase nuclear power. With artificial intelligence data centers on the rise, tech companies are finding that their energy needs will exceed what is available from other energy sources." -CAN

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