Business and management

Poets & Quants reporter Jeff Schmitt writes that MIT Sloan School of Management’s Assistant Dean Dawna Levenson has been honored as the “MBA Admissions Director of the Year,” by Poets & Quants. “Dawna brings a very human-first approach to MIT Sloan Admissions, deeply learning about our applicants as people and professionals, getting to know them through interviews, and understanding how they hope to make a difference in the world through their education,” says Sloan Dean Richard Locke. “She supports students throughout the admissions journey, providing guidance, helping them navigate the process, and pivoting, as needed, to support their matriculation.”  

The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), “one of the most valuable tech companies globally” that “makes almost all of the world’s advanced [computer] chips.” “Chang proposed a semiconductor ‘foundry,’ which would do for pricey chips what its predecessors had done for cheap junk. At the time, however, the market didn’t exist,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “By the end of TSMC’s first decade, the company was bringing in a billion dollars in annual revenue.”  

Prof. Emilio Castilla discusses the factors companies must consider when deploying AI to help in the hiring process, in an article by USA Today’s Greta Reich. “We should evaluate not only whether the algorithm predicts historical hiring decisions, but whether it helps identify candidates who subsequently perform well in the job,” writes Castilla. “The most exciting possibility is not simply that AI might help us find the best talent more efficiently. It is that AI might help us recognize talent that our traditional hiring practices have systematically overlooked.”  

Research Affiliate Paul Kedrosky joins The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show” to discuss how the development of AI is creating an economic bubble, where asset prices are detached from economic reality. “We’re building it [AI] out like we were the railroads, like we were electrification, like we were the canals, like we were the interstate highways. And every one of those moments has led to overbuild,” says Kedrosky. “The reality is we’ve never seen a general-purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly and was repricing labor at the same time.”  

Maxime Cohen PhD ‘15 speaks to Forbes’ Karl Moore about his latest book “Pricing in the Age of AI,” that explores how AI is transforming pricing decisions for businesses, consumers and society. “We may be entering an era of agent-to-agent commerce, in which AI systems negotiate directly with one another on behalf of consumers and businesses,” says Cohen. “This could fundamentally reshape how prices are determined and how transactions take place.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins CNBC’s “Closing Bell” to discuss how AI could cause mass job displacement due to companies deploying rapidly advancing technologies. “AI’s capabilities are real and powerful, but human jobs are also complex. I don’t think you want AI to take over air traffic controller jobs right now; you don’t want AI to do CEO jobs,” says Acemoglu. “What we are seeing when these models escape their sandboxes and create havoc—it's not that they are necessarily super intelligent, it is that they don’t have judgement and they are optimized for certain narrow metrics and when you let them loose, they are going to do lots of unforeseeable things. You don’t want that in many jobs.”  

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, graduate student Jonah Prousky shares his observations that students who use AI minimally, or not at all, for their writing, tend to score higher on their written work. “In this environment, where a professor or teaching assistant reads dozens of essays, one after another, AI-generated writing is not only easy to detect but can be terribly monotonous to read,” writes Prousky. “It’s the students who sound most like themselves, by contrast, who delight all the more.”  

Christina Qi ‘13 speaks to Entrepreneur’s Sherin Shibu about her experience starting her own hedge fund as an undergraduate, and co-founding and serving as the CEO of Databento, a market data platform. Qi encourages founders to support one another: “You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.” 

Prof. Eric So joins Bloomberg’s “Businessweek Daily” to discuss his debut book “The Collision: What AI does to us,” which explores the intersection of AI and human cognition. “I think of AI as being a force multiplier, something that can really make us productive, but too often people are focused on just really the capability enhancements of AI without thinking about the other side of the ledger which is: ‘what is it taking from us in that exchange,’” says So. “It matters how we go about using the tool.”  

A working paper co-authored by Prof. Kate Kellogg found that building organization wide AI tools created “substantial work beyond employees’ day-to-day jobs,” writes Fortune’s Bilin Lin. “That work included trial-and-error experimentation, reviewing and refining outputs with colleagues across departments, and continually adapting solutions as AI models evolved. Much of that work remained invisible to leadership,” notes Lin.  

MIT was listed as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings,” “based upon the analysis of more than 1,700 colleges and universities nationwide across 17 key measures,” writes MassLive’s Claudia Dimuro. “These measures included ‘First-year retention rates,’ ‘Earnings by major,’ ‘Faculty salaries,’ and ‘Student-faculty ratio,’ notes Dimuro.  

In a video by The Wall Street Journal, alumnus Gabe Dalporto MS ‘95, CEO of Guitar Center, explains how the soft skills he developed from studying nuclear science at MIT helped him reframe Guitar Center “as a destination for higher-end equipment and more experienced players.” Dalporto shares: “I think it’s helpful, particularly in a passion category, to have someone who shares that passion, and understands empathetically what the customer is going through. When I see people playing, it gives me joy.” 

For Boston 25, reporter Alexis Rossi details MIT’s selection as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings.” “MIT was also ranked first for undergraduate research and creative projects, second on the list of most innovative schools, and third on the list of best value schools,” writes Rossi.  

The U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings” honors MIT as the No.1 national university, writes Elizabeth Mehler for Boston.com. “The rankings are based on up to 17 weighted measures of academic quality and success, including graduation and retention rates, social mobility for low-income students, post-graduate earnings, academic peer assessment, and faculty resources,” writes Mehler. 

7 News Boston spotlights MIT being named the No. 1 national university by U.S. News and World Report for its 2027 “Best College Rankings.” The ranking highlighted MIT’s “high enrollment of just over 4,500 students in 2025, its student faculty ratio of 8-1 and its 4-1 academic calendar.”