👩🏻‍🎓  The new higher ed?

👋  Good morning. Hope your day is a walk in the pahk. Sorry, our Boston accent was showing. If you have one, too, it might be your time to shine: Boston Logan International Airport is looking for its new “voice of Logan,” to record airport announcements to shower down on its 43m annual travelers. They want a wicked good voice that sounds “distinctly Boston,” so we’d imagine it would help to mention Dunkin’ and be a liiittle rude. 

NEWS FLASH 

🪚  Institutional knowledge shouldn’t be scrapped: When longtime machinists retire, they take all their specialized knowledge with them, from how certain metals are cut to expensive mistakes to avoid. Now, two founders in their 20s are building Neuramill, an “intelligence layer for high-precision manufacturing," to capture all that wisdom before it disappears. The company’s software reads a design file to map out how parts should be made, with a machinist approving every plan.

💔  Swipe left: Anthropic uncovered a network of ~28 AI-powered dating apps, across which 4.7k+ fake personas exchanged 2.4m messages with 25k human users in just two weeks. The real users were charged real money for “coins” to keep their chats going with what they believed to be real women. As if dating isn't already hard enough. 

🗑️  Big brother is taking out the trash: We didn’t think it could get worse than your HOA, but Dallas is outfitting its garbage trucks with City Detect, AI cameras that assign “blight scores” to homes and send warning letters to residents about things like grass height and dirty chimneys. The cameras flagged code violations on 21k+ properties, according to an NBC investigation, and detections were heavily concentrated in zip codes with the lowest average incomes.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Popping the question: Ring Pop is collaborating with celebrity event planner Mindy Weiss on a special Wedding Collection of candies, including three new flavors and an upscale, understated look with a pearl finish. Or as upscale and understated as a massive candy diamond can get. 

• “Stop spending money on coffee every day,” they said. Well, take this, haters: We were investing. Starbucks’ limited-edition glass Snoopy cup is selling for as much as $200, 5x the original price, on resale site StockX.

   

• Health from home: Evvy raised $40m to help women sequence their vaginal microbiomes from home and spot common conditions that are often underdiagnosed. The startup already serves 100k+ patients and 3k medical professionals, and has a database of 150k+ patient samples. 

• All downhill from here: Chinese startup Heygo just raised a multimillion-dollar fundraising round to develop its AI ski coaching hardware kit, which clips sensors onto ski boots and gives real-time feedback across 38 countries. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM 

Microsoft wants your opinion on AI

The company just dropped a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct and is opening a six-week public consultation on how its frontier models should be trained, deployed, and constrained.

The hard lines: models can't resist shutdown, hide their reasoning, generate their own goals, or facilitate weapons of mass harm.

Oh, and no communicating in formats humans can't understand.

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

Could taking the fun out of college make kids want to go?

For generations, a college degree held the promise of a well-paying job and financial stability — but, boy, have times changed!

Today, thanks to the rising cost of tuition, a bachelor’s degree feels more like a path to debt than a ticket to employment, which is why many Gen Zers are choosing not to enroll.

• Average federal student loan debt hovers around $40.5k per borrower. 

• Since 2016, 150+ colleges and universities have shuttered or merged, with college enrollments expected to fall 13% by 2041. 

Startup Greenway Institute thinks its novel approach to higher ed could convince prospective students otherwise.

What it’s proposing: college, minus the frills — no dining halls, sports events, Greek life, state-of-the-art gyms, or extracurricular activities.

What they’ll get instead: “A degree. A job. No debt.”

Following a successful prototype semester last spring, Greenway is now planning to open its first campus in Vermont next fall, focusing solely on engineering.

How it works

With fewer overhead costs, tuition is priced at just $25k a year, a bargain compared to the national average of ~$38k — even more so compared to the $65.5k average for private universities.

• Students would live and learn on campus for the first two years. Then, for the final two, they’d go off to work at jobs that would pay ~$50k while still receiving faculty support.
  
• This way, rather than learn theory alone, students would get hands-on work experience and graduate with little to no debt.
  
• They’d be responsible for cooking their own meals and cleaning up after themselves throughout, so they’d also get a little lesson in adulting.
  
• As for the social stuff, one founding faculty member told Fast Company that the lack of on-campus dining and extracurriculars actually helped pilot students bond by forcing them to cook, grocery shop, and organize their own outings together.

A college makeover?

Whether the model will be able to translate to other fields of study is unclear for now.

What is clear is that the model American colleges are currently operating on isn’t working, and Greenway isn’t the only one working to find a solution:

• It’s one of several dozen institutions around the world that are working on reimagining higher ed for the 21st century.

If things go smoothly next school year, Greenway plans to eventually scale up to 10-20 campuses nationwide to graduate 10k+ students a year.

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Let your audience rest: Check out the four page tweaks that could prevent 22k unsubscribes. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of job seekers that legal recruiter Reder Sheikh helped find employment for who listed their hobbies in their resumes, a strategy white-collar workers are increasingly using to stand out in a competitive job market filled with AI-tailored CVs, per The Wall Street Journal.

While mentioning your personal quirks can help capture the attention of a weary-eyed hiring manager, there’s still a method to it — Sheikh suggests choosing one that might speak to professionally beneficial qualities and being very specific. So, saying you like to cook probably won’t get you hired, but “perfecting restaurant-quality scrambled eggs” just might.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1976, NASA unveiled its first space shuttle, the Enterprise, which cost nearly $10B to develop and took almost a decade.

🤖  Game: Spot the human impersonating a bot.

🤯 Whoa: Watch Los Angeles grow up from 1880 nothingness into today’s megalopolis. 

🕸️  That’s fun: You’re a spider — build your web.

🐱  Aww: An orange kitten.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Being smart is not about how much knowledge you have. It is about how you use the knowledge you have. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley and Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Recovering English major" Friedman.

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