Education, teaching, academics

John McDermott of The Financial Times interviews Professor Junot Díaz about his childhood, his career as an author and teaching at MIT.  

Wall Street Journal reporter Irving Wladawsky-Berger examines Prof. David Autor’s research on income inequality. “Mr. Autor estimates that the difference in the yearly earnings between a college-educated two-income family and a high school-educated two-income family has risen by $28,000 between 1979 and 2012,” he writes. 

Katie Couric speaks with Prof. Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, about the growing influence of online education and the opportunities edX has created for people around the world. EdX is a not-for-profit venture in online learning launched jointly by MIT and Harvard in May 2012.

“Economist David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the median woman with a college degree earned about $23,000 more a year than a woman who terminated her education once she earned her high school diploma,” writes Washington Post reporter Joann Weiner. 

Nitasha Tiku of The New York Times interviews Dr. Natalie Rusk of the MIT Media Lab about how to interest young girls in coding. Rusk was one of the developers of Scratch, an open-source programming platform for children.

Anant Agarwal, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor who has served as CEO of edX since its establishment, sat down with The Crimson to recount the challenges of creating courses for an online learning environment, discuss how the non-profit can become self-sustaining, and speculate about what the future might hold for edX. EdX is a not-for-profit venture in online learning launched jointly by MIT and Harvard in May 2012.

“According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000,” David Leonhardt writes in a New York Times piece about David Autor’s research on inequality. 

In an article for The Washington Post, Jim Tankersley reports on a new Science article by Professor David Autor. In the article Autor contends that inequality, driven by varying levels of education, has risen dramatically among the 99 percent.

Wall Street Journal reporter Brenda Cronin features David Autor’s new research on inequality. “Two ‘destructive’ points that Mr. Autor tries to skewer with his most recent work are the idea that prospects are dim for all but the financial elite—and the notion that too many students are giving rise to a “college bubble,” Cronin writes. 

Professor David Autor speaks with NPR’s Tom Ashbrook about the achievement gap between boys and girls in the classroom and what this may mean for the future of the American workforce.

Professors Michel Degraff and Deborah Ancona speak with NECN about MIT’s initiative to support Haiti’s development of science, technology, engineering, and math curricula. Since 2010 the initiative has hosted four workshops and trained more than 100 teachers.