In response to Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy's dramatic budget cuts to the state's only public institution of higher education, the University of Alaska's engineering colleges in Fairbanks and Anchorage are preparing to cut faculty members and slash a number of programs. "Dozens of engineering faculty, researchers, and staff could see their positions eliminated, and even tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. Students may not be able to finish their degrees in the programs or locations in which they started," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Many engineering students have already lost merit-based scholarships promised to them via the Alaska Performance Scholarship program." From the report: On 28 June, Gov. Dunleavy vetoed US $130 million in state funding for the University of Alaska system for the fiscal year that began on 1 July -- a step he said was necessary to contend with the state's $1.6 billion budget deficit, inflicted in large part by sluggish oil prices. Those cuts came on top of a $5 million reduction proposed by Alaska's legislature. Overall, state funding for the University of Alaska has been reduced by $136 million [PDF], or 41 percent, for the fiscal year that began 1 July. That translates to a 17 percent reduction to the University of Alaska's total operating budget. Citing reputational damage caused by these cuts, the University of Alaska's Board of Regents expects tuition, grant funding, and charitable donations to also drop, adding to a total loss of more than $200 million [PDF] in funding for the current fiscal year.

The University of Alaska is now widely expected to declare financial exigency [PDF], an emergency status that would allow administrators to take extreme measures to reduce costs by closing campuses, slashing salaries and programs, or laying off tenured faculty. However, closing the university's flagship Fairbanks campus would still not be enough to cover the shortfall. In response to budget cuts in previous years, the university has already suspended or discontinued more than 50 degree programs and certificates, including its MS in Engineering Management program.

The California Energy Commission has awarded nearly $70 million to state schools to replace more than 200 diesel school buses with new, all-electric school buses. Electrek reports: The commission approved the funding this week. A total of $89.8 million has now been earmarked for new electric buses at schools in 26 California counties, as the commission's School Bus Replacement Program works toward this goal. A study published in Economics of Education Review last month showed diesel retrofits had positive results on both respiratory health and test scores. Eliminating emissions from these buses completely will do even more to protect children from dangerous emissions while cutting air pollution. The new buses will eliminate nearly 57,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and nearly 550 pounds of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions annually.

The exact number of buses going to California school districts is unclear -- the energy commission only says "more than 200." If the entirety of the $70 million went to just 200 buses, that'd be $350,000 per bus. But while the exact cost of each bus is unknown, the commission does estimate that "schools will save nearly $120,000 in fuel and maintenance costs per bus over 20 years." Some estimates have noted that electric school buses tend to cost about $120,000 more than diesel buses -- if that's the case here, the price will be equal in the end, with added health benefits. Funding for the electric buses is supplied by the voter-approved California Clean Energy Jobs Act, and the commission's Clean Transportation Program will provide the charging infrastructure to support the buses.

Texbook publishing giant Pearson will soon be publishing a lot fewer textbooks. It said this week it's ending regular revisions of all print textbooks in its higher-education category. As Pearson faces mounting pressure from the resale market, the move signals a growing shift in the publishing industry to a "digital-first" model. From a report: Instead of revising all 1,500 of its active titles every three years according to the print schedule, the British education publisher said it will focus on updating its digital products more frequently, offering artificial intelligence capabilities, data analytics and research. Pearson is billing the decision as a way to help drive down college costs for students. But the company and the education publishing industry as a whole have been criticized for years for the rising prices of textbooks. That has pushed a majority of students into secondhand textbook markets like Chegg or spurred them to forego buying class materials altogether. The average cost of college textbooks rose about four times faster than the rate of inflation over the last decade. "Our digital first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues," Fallon said in a statement. "By providing better value to students, they have less reason to turn to the secondary market. Pearson's e-books can cost about $40 on average and go up to $79 for additional learning tools like homework assistance. That compares to prices that can go as high as $200 or $300 for a print textbook, according to Pearson CEO John Fallon, though students can still rent one for $60 on average.

dcblogs writes: The Master of Science in Analytics was created in North Carolina State University in 2006. Today, there are about 280 colleges and universities that offer a similar graduate degree and in total, they will produce about 10,000 analytics master graduates in 2019. "The demand is there, but the supply [of data scientists] is catching up quickly," said Michael Rappa, who founded the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. Graduates of these programs are typically called data scientists, a relatively new term that's often cited as one of the most in-demand occupations in the U.S. These programs aren't completely unique. Graduates with degrees in statistics, for instance, were forerunners of the shift to analytics. Despite the increase in graduates, the entry level salaries remain strong, typically beginning at $80K plus. Amazon recently cited data scientists as a second fastest internal growing occupations.

IQ test scores have been increasing for 100 years, reports a senior journalist at BBC Future. He also writes that there's evidence "that we may have already reached the end of this era -- with the rise in IQs stalling and even reversing."

But this raises an even larger question: did a century of increasing scores on IQ tests bring benefits to society? You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are, but it's not quite this simple... Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as "95% fat-free" sounds healthier than "5% fat", for instance -- a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages. People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias -- our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That's a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.

Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias -- the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses -- a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.) Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of "temporal discounting", which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That's essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.

Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills -- such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people's degrees. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction," and suggests "we might also make a more concerted and deliberate effort to improve those other essential skills too that do not necessarily come with a higher IQ..."

"Ideally, we might then start to see a steep rise in rationality -- and even wisdom... If so, the temporary blip in our IQ scores need not represent the end of an intellectual golden age -- but its beginning."

"Schools in the central German state of Hesse [population: 6 million] have been told it's now illegal to use Microsoft Office 365," reports ZDNet: The state's data-protection commissioner has ruled that using the popular cloud platform's standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers "to possible access by US officials".

That might sound like just another instance of European concerns about data privacy or worries about the current US administration's foreign policy. But in fact the ruling by the Hesse Office for Data Protection and Information Freedom is the result of several years of domestic debate about whether German schools and other state institutions should be using Microsoft software at all.

Besides the details that German users provide when they're working with the platform, Microsoft Office 365 also transmits telemetry data back to the US. Last year, investigators in the Netherlands discovered that that data could include anything from standard software diagnostics to user content from inside applications, such as sentences from documents and email subject lines. All of which contravenes the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the Dutch said...

To allay privacy fears in Germany, Microsoft invested millions in a German cloud service, and in 2017 Hesse authorities said local schools could use Office 365. If German data remained in the country, that was fine, Hesse's data privacy commissioner, Michael Ronellenfitsch, said. But in August 2018 Microsoft decided to shut down the German service. So once again, data from local Office 365 users would be data transmitted over the Atlantic. Several US laws, including 2018's CLOUD Act and 2015's USA Freedom Act, give the US government more rights to ask for data from tech companies.
ZDNet also quotes Austrian digital-rights advocate Max Schrems, who summarizes the dilemma. "If data is sent to Microsoft in the US, it is subject to US mass-surveillance laws. This is illegal under EU law."

A ransomware attack in New York City's Monroe College has shut down the college's computer systems at campuses located in Manhattan, New Rochelle and St. Lucia. The attackers are seeking 170 bitcoins or approximately $2 million dollars in order to decrypt the entire college's network. Bleeping Computer reports: According to the Daily News, Monroe College was hacked on Wednesday at 6:45 AM and ransomware was installed throughout the college's network. It is not known at this time what ransomware was installed on the system, but it is likely to be Ryuk, IEncrypt, or Sodinokibi, which are known to target enterprise networks. The college has not indicated at this time whether they will be paying the ransom or restoring from backups while gradually bringing their network back online. "The good news is that the college was founded in 1933, so we know how to teach and educate without these tools," Monroe College spokesperson Jackie Ruegger told the Daily News. "Right now we are finding workarounds for our students taking online classes so they have their assignments."

nightcats writes: A German capitalist wants to promote everything from psychological research, applied clinical uses of psychedelics, and even peace in the Mideast, with the help of lab-grown magic mushrooms. "Today, with a net worth of roughly $400 million accrued through various enterprises, [Christian] Angermayer is one of the driving forces behind the movement to turn long-shunned psychoactive substances, like the psilocybin derived from so-called magic mushrooms, into approved medications for depression and other mental illnesses," reports Scientific American.

The strangest and most daring idea mentioned in the Scientific American piece by Meghana Keshavan relates to a bizarre project for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Angermayer, interested in expanding his web of psychedelics holdings, recently asked [Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit focused on research and education around the substances] if he might invest in his nonprofit, MAPS -- particularly its efforts to legalize therapeutic use of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy," reports Scientific American. "Doblin demurred. MAPS is purely donation-based, and unlike Compass, intends to stay that way."

"But their talk shifted to one of the highest priority projects at the nonprofit: An exploration of psychedelics in conflict remediation. Along with researchers at Imperial College London, MAPS plans on bringing Israelis and Palestinians together to take ayahuasca and, working with negotiation experts, sift through their respective traumas. The idea is that finding common ground in their spiritual and mystical experiences might help coax political reconciliation between the warring factions."

theodp writes: TechCrunch reports that Google kicked off the 2019 Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference in style with the announcement of Code with Google, a new coding resource for teachers which collects Google's own free course curriculum on teaching computer science and coding. Google also announced a $1 million grant to the teachers group alongside the unveiling of Code with Google. To hear Google tell it, Code with Google -- much like bacon -- makes everything better. An English and Language Arts teacher, blogs Google Education VP Maggie Johnson, "didn't know much about computer science, but wanted her students to get familiar with coding because it can help with other skills, such as critical thinking and collaboration. So she tried a [Google] CS First activity where students coded different endings [video] to the story they read in class. Melissa says that, in a short time, 'the kids were problem solving, troubleshooting, and helping one another. It was incredible to hear the conversations about coding and the other concepts we were learning in the room.'" Johnson is also on the Board of tech-bankrolled Code.org, which reported it had spent $91.4 million (thru Dec. 2018) to get CS into K-12 schools (Google is a $3+ million Code.org Gold Sponsor). Not too surprisingly, one of the CSTA 2019 keynotes will be delivered by employees of Platinum Conference Sponsor Google, including a former CSTA Executive Director (CSTA is currently led by Code.org's former Director of State Government Affairs -- it's a small K-12 CS world!).

Internships have long been an opportunity for inexperienced workers to try out different industries and build valuable contacts. For companies, it is a way to attract future talent. But increasingly interns are being asked to sign noncompete, nondisclosure and forced arbitration agreements, restrictions once reserved for higher-ranking employees [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Advocates say legal covenants for interns help safeguard trade secrets such as customer lists in an era when it is easy to download information and share it, for instance on social media or with a competitor. But critics argue the agreements hamper young people's job opportunities and mobility even before they get a foot on the career ladder. [...] Ms. Dunne's [anecdote in the story] noncompete agreement stated that she couldn't work for a competitor in software or banking within 15 miles of Wilmington for a year after leaving TekMountain. Ms. Dunne said she was given the agreement on her first day. "I had no idea what I signed, they didn't explain it to me."

After leaving TekMountain, she did a separate three-month internship with nCino, a financial technology company in Wilmington. In a May 7 letter, TekMountain's parent, CastleBranch, laid out her obligations under the noncompete agreement, described the confidentiality of its proprietary information as "very serious," and asked for details about her relationship with nCino. Ms. Dunne said she didn't respond. The noncompete "eliminated a good portion of the companies in town in the industry I wanted to be in," said Ms. Dunne, who is relocating to the Washington, D.C., area for a new job. "I have to leave all of my friends behind and start over."

Microsoft's original co-founder Paul Allen was honored posthumously with a lifetime achievement award for philanthropy this week at the Forbes Philanthropy summit.

Bill Gates remembers Allen as "one of the most intellectually curious people I've ever known," adding "I wish more people understood just how wide-ranging his giving was," and shared his remembrances at the ceremony: Later in life, Paul gave to a huge spectrum of issues that seem unrelated at first glance. He wanted to prevent elephant poaching, improve ocean health, and promote smart cities. He funded new housing for the homeless and arts education in the Puget Sound region. In 2014 alone, he supported research into the polio virus and efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa -- all while standing up an amazing new institute for studying artificial intelligence.

If you knew him, the logic in Paul's portfolio is easy to see. He gave to the things that he was most interested in, and to the places where he thought he could have the most impact. Even though Paul cared about a lot of different things, he was deeply passionate about each of them.
There's a picture of a young Bill Gates in the eighth grade watching Paul Allen on a teletype terminal. "The only way for us to get computer time was by exploiting a bug in the system."

"We eventually got busted, but that led to our first official partnership between Paul and me: we worked out a deal with the company to use computers for free if we would identify problems. We spent just about all our free time messing around with any machine we could get our hands on." One day -- when Paul and I were both in Boston -- he insisted that I rush over to a nearby newsstand with him. He wanted to show me the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. It featured a new computer called the Altair 8800, which ran on a powerful new chip. I remember him holding up the cover and saying, "This is happening without us!"

Paul always wanted to push the boundaries of science. He did it when we were testing the limits of what a chip could do at Microsoft, and he continues to do it today -- even after he's gone -- through the work of the Allen Institute. When I first heard he was creating an organization to study brain science, I thought, "Of course...."

I wish Paul had gotten to see all of the good his generosity will do. He was one of the most thoughtful, brilliant, and curious people I've ever met....

I will miss him tremendously.

U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia. From a report: Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies. Universities have been advised to monitor students and scholars associated with those entities on American campuses, according to three administrators briefed at separate institutions.

FBI officials have also urged universities to review ongoing research involving Chinese individuals that could have defense applications, the administrators say. "We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to," Fred Cate, vice president of research at Indiana University, tells NPR. "It's not a question of just looking for suspicious behavior -- it's actually really targeting specific countries and the people from those countries." In a statement responding to NPR's questions, the FBI said it "regularly engages with the communities we serve. As part of this continual outreach, we meet with a wide variety of groups, organizations, businesses, and academic institutions. The FBI has met with top officials from academia as part of our ongoing engagement on national security matters."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of employees report having regrets when it comes to their advanced degrees, according to a PayScale survey of 248,000 respondents this past spring that was released Tuesday. Student loan debt, which has ballooned to nearly $1.6 trillion nationwide in 2019, was the No. 1 regret among workers with college degrees. About 27% of survey respondents listed student loans as their top misgiving, PayScale said. College debt was followed by chosen area of study (12%) as a top regret for employees, though this varied greatly by major. Other regrets include poor networking, school choice, too many degrees, time spent completing education and academic underachievement. "Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their degrees," the report adds. "About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets."

Those with the most regrets include humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation. "About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education," report says. "About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same." Somewhere in the middle were 66% of business graduates, 67% of health sciences graduates and 68% of math graduates who said they regretted their education.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan on Monday to erase the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan tab, intensifying the higher education policy debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. From a report: The Democratic presidential candidate's legislation -- dubbed "The College for All Act" -- will release all 45 million Americans from their student debt and be paid for with a new tax on Wall Street transactions. The proposal goes further than fellow Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren's plan, which caps student debt forgiveness at $50,000 and offers no relief to borrowers who earn more than $250,000. Outstanding education debt in the U.S. has eclipsed credit card and auto debt. Today the average college graduate leaves school $30,000 in the red, up from $10,000 in the 1990s, and 28% of student loan borrowers are in delinquency or default. Sanders' plan would make two- and four-year public colleges and universities tuition- and debt-free. Trade schools and apprenticeship programs would be tuition-free, as well.

theodp writes: Amazon Future Engineer students across the country are graduating from high school," reports the Amazon Day One blog, "and to celebrate, Amazonians visited select classrooms to meet some of the students and to check out their impressive computer science progress and end of year projects [TV coverage of an 'Amazon graduation'].

Amazon Future Engineer "is a four-part, childhood-to-career program aimed at inspiring and educating 10 million students from underrepresented and underserved communities each year to try computer science and coding. Amazon strives to achieve this by inspiring millions of children through coding camps and Code.org's Hour of Code program, funding computer science courses in high schools across the country, providing 100 students with four-year college scholarships in computer science, and offering Amazon internships to scholarship recipients."

The importance of CS education to Amazon is highlighted in a new Washingtonian story, The Real Story of How Virginia Won Amazon's HQ2, which reports, "Northern Virginia's ultimate proposal was centered around an effort to provide Amazon -- or any other tech firm that wanted to come -- with all the educated workers it needed, now and in the future. [Virginia Economic Development Partnership CEO Stephen] Moret's team proposed increasing tech education from kindergarten through 12th grade, expanding university offerings to produce up to 17,500 new bachelor's degrees in computer science and related fields, and building a tech campus that could produce the same number of master's degrees."

And in a recent Brookings Institution fireside chat, Moret noted, "we analyzed substantially all of the LinkedIn profiles of HQ1 — the Seattle workforce... And if you look at the tech occupations — that was the space they were the most concerned about — literally half of all the people at Amazon Seattle headquarters that are working in some kind of tech occupation, half of them have at least one degree in computer science. So, that was a really big data point for us; and that really shaped a lot of how we built our package.

83-year-old former U.S. Senatior Ron Paul has published a new editorial on Zero Hedge: Last week, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill amendment to repeal the prohibition on the use of federal funds to create a 'unique patient identifier.' Unless this prohibition, which I originally sponsored in 1998, is reinstated, the federal government will have the authority to assign every American a medical ID.

This ID will be used to store and track every American's medical history.

A unique patient identifier would allow federal bureaucrats and government-favored special interests to access health information simply by entering an individual's unique patient ID into a database. This system would also facilitate the collection of health information without a warrant by surveillance state operatives...

The unique patient identifier system puts the desires of government bureaucrats and politically powerful special interests ahead of the needs of individual patients and health care providers. Instead of further intervening in health care and further destroying our privacy and our liberties, Congress should give patients control over their health care by giving them control over health care dollars through expanding access to Health Savings Accounts and health care tax credits. In a free market, patients and doctors can and will work tighter to ensure patients' records are maintained in a manner that provides maximum efficiency without endangering privacy or liberty.

The data market has become the engine of the internet, and privacy policies we agree to but don't fully understand help fuel it. From a report: To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps. Facebook's privacy policy, for example, takes around 18 minutes to read in its entirety -- slightly above average for the policies I tested. Then I tested how easy it was to understand each policy using the Lexile test developed by the education company Metametrics. The test measures a text's complexity based on factors like sentence length and the difficulty of vocabulary. To be successful in college, people need to understand texts with a score of 1300. People in the professions, like doctors and lawyers, should be able to understand materials with scores of 1440, while ninth graders should understand texts that score above 1050 to be on track for college or a career by the time they graduate. Many privacy policies exceed these standards.

[...] The vast majority of these privacy policies exceed the college reading level. And according to the most recent literacy survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, over half of Americans may struggle to comprehend dense, lengthy texts. That means a significant chunk of the data collection economy is based on consenting to complicated documents that many Americans can't understand. [...] Airbnb's privacy policy, on the other hand, is particularly inscrutable. It's full of long, jargon-laden sentences that obscure Airbnb's data practices and provides cover to use data in expansive ways. Things weren't always this bad. Google's privacy policy evolved over two decades -- along with its increasingly complicated data collection practices -- from a two-minute read in 1999 to a peak of 30 minutes by 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: A New York school district will move forward with its facial recognition pilot program next week, despite an explicit order from the New York State Education Department that it wait until a standard for data privacy and security for all state educational agencies is finalized. On Friday, the Lockport school district said it was "confident" that the data collection policy for its facial recognition system was sound enough that it could begin testing it on campuses June 3.

"[State Education Department] representatives previously communicated to the District their recommendation that the System not become operational until the dialogue between the District and SED with regard to student data security and privacy is complete," the statement, sent by district director of technology Robert LiPuma to BuzzFeed News, said. "However, the District's Initial Implementation Phase of the System (which will commence June 3, 2019 and continue through August 31, 2019) will not include any student data being entered into the System database or generated by the System." Reached by phone, JP O'Hare, a representative of the New York State Education Department, would not say whether the department knew Lockport planned to go ahead with its facial recognition test in spite of the department's request for a delay. Lockport said that its facial recognition system should not be a privacy concern because it "does not compile information on and track the movements of all District students, staff and visitors." Instead, the system is "limited to identifying whether an individual whose photograph has been entered into the System database is on District property (i.e., is visible on one of the District's security cameras)." But it also said the individuals who may be entered into the database included those who are prohibited from being on District property, "such as suspended students or staff."

"Some student loan borrowers are packing their bags and fleeing from the U.S. to other countries, where the cost of living is often lower and debt collectors wield less power over them," reports CNBC: Chad Haag considered living in a cave to escape his student debt. He had a friend doing it. But after some plotting, he settled on what he considered a less risky plan. This year, he relocated to a jungle in India. "I've put America behind me," Haag, 29, said. Today he lives in a concrete house in the village of Uchakkada for $50 a month. His backyard is filled with coconut trees and chickens. "I saw four elephants just yesterday," he said, adding that he hopes never to set foot in a Walmart again. More than 9,000 miles away from Colorado, Haag said, his student loans don't feel real anymore. "It's kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really exist?" he said...

Although there is no national data on how many people have left the United States because of student debt, borrowers tell their stories of doing so in Facebook groups and Reddit channels and how-to advice is offered on personal finance websites. "It may be an issue we see an uptick in if the trends keep up," said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.... Struggling borrowers should enter into one of the government's income-based repayment plans instead, in which their monthly bill will be capped at a portion of their income, he said. Some payments wind up being as little as $0 a month.

But the fact that people are taking this drastic measure should bring scrutiny to the larger student loan system, said Alan Collinge, founder of Student Loan Justice. "Any rational person who learns that people are fleeing the country as a result of their student loan debt will conclude that something has gone horribly awry with this lending system," Collinge said.
Haag tells CNBC that because of his student loan debt, "I have a higher standard of living in a Third World country than I would in America." The average student now has around $30,000 in debt when they graduate, according to the article (which is nearly double the inflation-adjusted average of $16,000 in the early 1990s) -- while inflation-adjusted salaries "have remained almost flat over the last few decades."

One 39-year-old even tells CNBC, "I feel that college ruined my life." (He's been living overseas since 2011 -- first in China, then Ukraine -- and hasn't checked his student loan account in nearly eight years.) Another graduate teaching English in Japan told CNBC that they wanted to return to the U.S. -- but their student debt is now over $100,000.

"The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The commercial rollout of Waymo's driver-less taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix with a population of 260,000 people, has more than a thousand customers already signed up -- including the mayor, reports Forbes: Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel. But that may be more about public relations than technical necessity. During a recent trip, the human in the driver's seat didn't take her hands off her lap during a trip from the library to a shopping mall a few miles away in light, late morning traffic. "Part of it's just education and getting people really comfortable right out of the gate," a Waymo spokeswoman said. There's another piece of the Arizona program that's closer to Waymo's long-term plans of full autonomy. A few hundred people are getting rides in Pacificas with no safety driver through its Early Rider program, an earlier test rollout. Unlike Waymo One users, Early Riders have to sign nondisclosure agreements and aren't allowed to discuss the program.

Early Riders are also a way for the company to observe how people adapt to a robotic service and the options they want. Recently Waymo integrated Google Play music into the Waymo One app to let riders automatically listen to their preferred songs and artists. Video streaming, games and other in-vehicle options that leverage Google's many services are likely additions, though Waymo won't verify that... "Beyond the initial shock of not seeing a person in the vehicle, which we're getting used to, protocols are being established," says Chandler Police Chief Sean Duggan. "As a police officer, one of the first questions that gets asked is 'who gets the ticket? How do you contact whomever?'" There have been a "half a dozen" collisions involving a Waymo vehicle, Duggan says, but not ones where the Waymo vehicle was at fault. In fact, the department hasn't issued any citations to Waymo in the past couple of years...

Ahead of the commercial launch, there were reports that the vans irritate local commuters because they take too long to make left turns and of assaults on Waymo vans including rock throwing, a slashed tire and even an individual who aimed a gun at one. "People tend to be frustrated when a vehicle is actually obeying the law" by stopping completely at intersections and making turns cautiously, Dugan said. "That happens regardless of if it's self-driving or a person."
Forbes describes Waymo's presence in Chandler as "a test case for the entire industry," citing an interesting perspective from Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. "The view for companies like Waymo is 'we have to be able to show functional safety. Otherwise, we can't protect our decisions in a court of law, where this will all end up long term.'"

"Elon is working mostly on the deep neural net side where a good chunk of it is a black box. Documenting, defending that in court is going to be tough."