Education, teaching, academics

Dezeen’s Ellen Eberhardt describes how the renovation of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, maintains “details such as the building's fortress-like corner towers and crenellated corbeled cornices, while punching new windows into its two-foot-thick walls.” Eberhardt highlights how “the project included careful ‘cutting strategies’ and the application of new support systems to shift existing loads within the building to make room for modern academic spaces such as studios and makerspaces.”  

For The Architect’s Newspaper, reporter Fred A. Bernstein details the renovation of the Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, transforming the fortress-like storage warehouse into “light-filled classrooms and studios.” The building is “going to be a living laboratory and a teaching tool for generations of students,” shares Prof. John Ochsendorf. “Twenty years ago, MIT took me inside and asked if I could see a way to reuse the building. And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ It was hard to imagine it could be as open and light-filled as it is. That took heroics.” 

In a “radical example of adaptive reuse” and a reimagining of a historic Cambridge landmark, MIT has transformed the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning, bringing together MIT’s architecture and design programs into one connected academic hub, reports Boston Business Journal reporter Maya Shavit. “There will be new installations and new manifestations of our students’ creativity every single week,” explains Prof. John Ochsendorf. “That’s unpredictable and messy, but it’s also part of the fun of being at a place like MIT where people are constantly inventing the future.”

In an article by The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Emma Nelson, Prof. David Autor discusses low sentiment among middle-class Americans regarding the U.S. economy. “There’s a belief that if you follow the rules, if you go to school and pay your taxes and pay your bills and send your kids to college and whatever, that you’re supposed to do better than the generation before you,” says Autor. “When that does not happen is “part of when [people] feel like society’s not functioning well.” 

Principal Research Scientist John Liu speaks to Manufacturing Dive’s Nathan Owens about MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long certificate program designed to "bring experienced technicians into leadership roles with a focus on advanced manufacturing needs.” Says Liu: "We’re looking at developing this elite workforce who bridges the gap. What we’re trying to do is upskill the technician.” 

Cambridge Day’s Chloe Taft spotlights the 25th anniversary of The Fab Lab, digital fabrication network started at MIT, and its annual conference, FAB26, held this week throughout Cambridge. “We’re going to show things like rapid prototyping, making vehicles [at FAB26],” says Prof. Neil Gershenfeld. “[T]here’s examples of using the tools in the lab to make aquaponic and hydroponic systems for food, to make antennas and radios for data networks, to make shelter. You really can make almost anything today.” 

Prof. Tavneet Suri joins NPR’s Robert Smith, host of “Planet Money,” to discuss several economic and business development programs in Kenya and Nigeria, and the lessons they offer for business students and entrepreneurs. “I do think that core to the growth of an economy is this thing we call human capital, which is about the education and the health of your population,” says Suri. “It's the sort of, in quotes, "capital" that a human brings to the table.” 

Roughly 100 high school students, two from each state, attended this past weekend’s “Youth AI Festival,” organized in part by MIT RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) to discuss the need for clear AI policies for K-12 education, writes Boston Globe reporter Marcela García. “[T]he students discussed, wrote, and approved a model AI-use policy for classrooms, ending in a simulated Senate floor debate and vote at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute,” García explains.  

Prof. Justin Reich speaks to PBS reporter Hannah Grabenstein about the dangers of children using Google’s AI overview, and AI mode. “It's deeply disturbing how poorly these widely accessible tools do,” says Reich. “These are things that technology companies have to fix. And teachers and educators, until this is fixed, probably need to turn a bunch of this off.” 

Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan School of Management, speaks to Poets&Quants reporter Marc Ethier about Sloan’s new evening MBA program, designed for full-time workers. “There’s an incredibly rich population in the Boston-New England regional area who have the same grades, the same test scores, the same experience as our current MBA students,” says Locke. “The one exception is they don’t want to leave their jobs. They want to continue to work, but they want to actually get an MBA from a place like MIT Sloan. They want to accelerate their careers where they are.” 

Boston Business Journal’s Maya Shavit showcases MIT Sloan School of Management’s new evening Master of Business Administration degree, designed for full-time workers, which will welcome its first cohort in August 2027. “MIT has strong ties to so many firms and organizations in this ecosystem, but if we could actually be pumping out even more high-skilled, highly talented, ambitious future leaders in the local economy that’s only going to be good for the regional economy,” says Richard Locke, dean of MIT Sloan.  

Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter Maria Di Mento spotlights how the creation of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing allowed MIT to develop new “interdisciplinary programs to prepare students for an AI-saturated world and help them understand the social and ethical implications of digital technologies.” Prof. Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing, explains that: “MIT realized that effective education in the age of AI has to look different than it has in the past. Traditional siloing of expertise won’t work when AI is expected to touch nearly every part of people’s lives and is changing the way people in disciplines outside of computing are advancing their work.”

For Boston 25, reporter Meagan Drillinger highlights how MIT was named to Stacker’s list of the top colleges in the country for return on investment. MIT is “need-blind and full-need for undergraduate students. Six out of 10 students receive financial aid, and almost 88% of the Class of 2025 graduated debt-free,” notes Drillinger. The average starting salary for 2025 graduates entering industry positions was $145,820.  

In an interview with U.S News & World Report, Prof. Bradford Skow and Prof. Alex Byrne, two of the co-directors of the MIT Civil Discourse project, explain how the effort is aimed at helping students productively debate challenging issues using the Braver Angels format. “Lectures on how to ride a bike are useless; you learn by hopping on and pedaling,” they explain. “Lectures on civil discourse are marginally more effective, but learning how to discuss hard topics with people you disagree with ultimately requires seeing it done and doing it yourself.”

MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Arizona State University President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape. “Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work,” said Kornbluth.