Author: Errica Jensen

The named building, the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and the press release with the donor’s picture prominently displayed above the legacy quote are examples of a specific type of philanthropy that makes a big statement. The actions of MacKenzie Scott, on the other hand, are essentially the opposite of all of that. Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Kamala Harris were all educated at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which received a $80 million gift in November 2025. This is one of the biggest single donations in the school’s 158-year history. Scott didn’t say anything in public. No gala took place. The university…

A group of eight and nine-year-olds sat around tables covered in large sheets of paper, markers in hand, on a Tuesday morning in April in a classroom on the third floor of DREAM Charter School in East Harlem. They were working on a task that the New York City Department of Education had yet to complete: writing the rules for artificial intelligence. The hand-drawn borders, block lettering, and sporadic misspellings on the posters they created represented concepts that policy staff and education researchers had been discussing for months in conference rooms. “Use your brain first.” “Don’t copy and paste.” “Check…

A small company founded on Ivy League credentials is making moves that the biggest alternative asset managers on Wall Street have noticed and are not entirely comfortable with in a glass-and-brick building somewhere close to Harvard Square, where the air still carries the unique blend of coffee and institutional ambition that defines Cambridge on a weekday morning. When compared to the trillion-dollar balance sheets of Blackstone or Apollo, Evolution Capital Management, a Harvard spinout, has surpassed $4 billion in assets under management. However, when you take into account the market it currently operates in, this milestone may seem insignificant. The…

A comparative literature professor made a decision that her colleagues are still debating somewhere on the UCLA campus, in one of those long institutional hallways lined with office doors and departmental bulletin boards that look the same in every university building in America. She fed a UCLA-developed AI system years’ worth of her own course materials, including lectures, reading guides, contextual notes, and the cumulative intellectual labor of a career. A textbook was produced by the system. Now, students engage with the course materials. For the time being, the professor continues to facilitate discussions. The contextualizing work previously performed by…

A child in a Nashville third-grade classroom stared at the same paragraph for the majority of October. Not clearly struggling—not in the way that a busy teacher overseeing twenty-three other pupils would notice right away. Silently, she read the same four lines again, her lips moving slightly as her finger traced the words with a patience that appeared to be focused from a distance. It wasn’t. It was bewilderment. For the majority of American educational history, it would have taken an additional six months for that distinction to become official. This would have happened after more unsuccessful reading assessments, more…

Melania Trump entered the White House with a humanoid AI-powered robot on the second day of her Fostering the Future Together summit. First spouses and tech executives gathered in the East Room to hear the machine introduce itself. Even by the standards of an administration that has never been afraid to stage a moment, it was an unusual scene by any measure. And depending on your stance on the issue of AI in education, it was either a very direct illustration of what people are concerned about or an encouraging look at what’s to come. For the majority of this…

A 7,000-word document published on Substack started circulating early on February 23, 2026, somewhere in the glass-walled conference rooms and open-plan offices that line the streets close to the New York Stock Exchange. The majority of Wall Street traders were unaware of Citrini Research, the company that produced it. By the afternoon, shares of Uber, Mastercard, American Express, and Blackstone were all declining, and the Dow had fallen more than 800 points. The author of the document had referred to it as a scenario. Not a forecast. Apparently, the distinction did not reassure the market. What Citrini Research had written…

Being correct when it was uncomfortable is the only way to gain a certain level of credibility. Genuinely, specifically, early—not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, nor hedged with enough qualifications to mean nothing either way. The kind of call that appears in a January research note, is courteously disregarded throughout the spring, and then reappears in August when the S&P 500 is declining and editors are frantically trying to find someone who anticipated it. In the summer of 2025, a few analysts were in a similar situation. Mike Wilson of Morgan Stanley, Julian Emanuel of Evercore, and a…

There is a version of the AI story that is frequently recounted: a group of San Francisco-based founders wearing hoodies, a few billion dollars from Sequoia, an internet-breaking product launch, and an incomprehensible valuation. It’s an interesting tale. It’s also beginning to feel lacking. It’s possible that the next big AI company won’t be located within twenty miles of Caltrain. It might originate from a Detroit manufacturing floor where a fifty-year-old engineer has been silently gathering the kind of specific, messy, irreplaceable data that no language model trained on the open internet will ever have. The engineer has been staring…

On any given afternoon, Stanford’s main quad appears to be just like any other prestigious university campus. Professors carrying coffee cups, students moving between buildings, and the soft buzz of a nearby lecture. Nothing particularly noteworthy. However, upon closer inspection, something different begins to emerge. Take note of the seed investor offices situated next to academic buildings, the startup pitch competitions displayed on bulletin boards in between class schedules, and the effortless, almost informal manner in which students discuss starting businesses in the same way that students elsewhere discuss finding internships. According to Forbes 2026 data, Stanford has 86 billionaire…