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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.
Prof. Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, speaks to The 74’s Greg Toppo about the risk of students using AI teaching tools to cheat on their assignments. “There's a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” says Reich. “And I'm just like, 'Guys, you're putting the "Carefully teach me this stuff" button directly next to the "Do everything for me" button.’”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk” to discuss what factors into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Federal Reserve members “are looking at things like tariffs, the tax on goods coming into this country. They’re looking at the war,” says Gruber. “We have, basically, these underlying forces driving inflation. In that case, the Fed has a mandate. The Fed’s job is to balance two forces: economic growth and inflation, and the way they balance them is by trying to keep inflation near a target of two percent.”
Prof. David Autor and his team of researchers found that junior patent attorneys who used AI for assistance showed no net improvement in their skills, reports Andy Mukherjee for Bloomberg. “When researchers subsequently tested everyone on an unassisted, offline task to gauge internalized judgment, the learning gains went entirely to senior lawyers,” writes Mukherjee. “Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice,” the researchers noted.
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.”
The Boston Globe’s Chloe Craft highlights MIT being ranked No. 1 in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings.” “Take a look at the rankings of U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 lists of the nation’s best universities and liberal arts colleges, released Tuesday, and you’ll find lots of schools from New England near the top of the charts,” writes Craft. “MIT, ranked No. 1 for the first time ever.”
MIT has been named the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings,” writes Chloe Craft for The Boston Globe. MIT is proud to be “part of a strong network of excellent colleges and universities across the nation, dedicated to educating students and pursuing curiosity-driven research. America’s economic strength, scientific leadership, and national security depend on world-class education and research institutions.”
In The Wall Street Journal’s “Economics Newsletter,” reporter Greg Ip highlights a study by Prof. David Autor that found that AI did not significantly improve the performance of the 133 patent lawyers who participated. “Among junior lawyers, the performance of some got better, others got worse, and on average they were the same. Among senior lawyers, the lowest performers improved, the best didn’t,” writes Ip. “The conclusion: Lawyers don’t acquire durable new skills with AI.”
A recent study by MIT researchers found that AI chatbots easily generated misleading election-related answers, images and videos, writes Emily Condon for USA Today. “This, along with other findings from our study, suggests that in an ongoing election with little authoritative information for models to rely on, AI may not be as helpful in pushing back against unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation,” the researchers explain.
MIT alumni Tom Brown ‘10, co-founder of Anthropic, and Edwin Chen ‘08, founder of Surge AI, are highlighted among the 10 youngest billionaires on the 2026 “Forbes 400 List,” by reporter Alicia Park. Brown “was lead author of the 2020 paper introducing GPT-3, the language model that demonstrated such systems could write fluently and triggered the current investment boom in artificial intelligence,” writes Park. Chen’s Surge AI, “employs people to label data, as well as rate and correct AI-generated answers to train models.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses the impact of AI models on jobs in an article by CNBC’s Trevor Laurence Jockims. “If AI continues to be developed as an automation technology, there will be more impacts. Right now, we don’t have many easy-to-use applications relevant for a large number of tasks/industries,” says Acemoglu. “Once these are developed, the labor market effects will be multiplied.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to Scientific American’s Brianne Kane about her forthcoming book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “Social media got us into the attention economy, but chatbots are more toxic because they’re coming after the attachment economy,” says Turkle. “They’re coming after who you think you love, who you think you can count on, what you think empathy is.”
MIT researchers are leading a new project documenting what major AI systems say about elections in an effort to understand how the technology influences the democratic process, writes Tiffany Hsu for The New York Times. “AI is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” says Prof. Chara Podimata, a leader of the project.
Timothy Carney ‘66, “a diplomat who relished difficult assignments in war-torn countries and pushed against bureaucratic restrictions,” died on Aug. 10 at age 82, reports The New York Times’ Adam Nossiter. “Tim was very deeply committed everywhere he served,” says his wife, Victoria Butler. “Everywhere we went he got to know the people where we lived. He believed very strongly in soft power versus hard power. He was an old school kind of diplomat.”