Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort.

Inflation, a tough economy, and AI threats to white-collar jobs have crushed trust in elite schools, creating opportunity for community colleges and certification programs.

This week only, every donation is doubled! Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we're still well behind where we need to be. But there's good news: This week, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000 We need you right now. We need you right now. The wave of booing aimed at AI-pilled commencement speakers signals a sea change in public opinion.

When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak? In the nineteen-eighties, an office job promised security and fulfillment. For graduates starting careers today, the prospect is often tinged with dread. The workplace's sense of control can prove illusory--as it did in the era of yuppie-wrought corporate consolidation, and as it does now for graduates entering an economy destabilized by new uncertainties. This spring, across the nation's auditoriums and quadrangles, members of the class of 2026 took their seats to receive remarks from distinguished guests. The graduation speech is a thankless form: generalized, impersonal exhortation/congratulation is almost guaranteed to be forgettable, if all goes well. But this year, on at least a few American campuses, all did not go well. At the University of Arizona, Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, told the crowd that artificial intelligence "will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have," a sweeping promise that landed like a threat.

The next decade won't be Armageddon. But it will bring a lot of change. When I started this six-week-long series by asking whether my daughter would be attending college in 2035, the year she turns eighteen, I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. Nine years is a short amount of time, and something disastrous--or, I suppose, downright liberatory--would need to happen in the culture to make it unlikely for her to shuttle off to some campus after high school. Still, thinking about the future of higher education has convinced me that her path to a bachelor's degree will be very different from the one I began in 1998.

We audit alignment-induced shifts in residual-stream activations of three open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Gemma-2-9B-it, Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct) using the effective rank of the alignment modification matrix on safety-relevant inputs, rho_eps := rank_eps(M_Ds)/d, which formalizes the single-refusal-direction observation of Arditi et al. (2024) as a continuous quantity. The paper has three contributions. (1) Confound-controlled measurement: a four-variant decomposition (M_naive, M_template, M_aligned, M_DiD) separates chat-template formatting, alignment-stage shift, and the refusal-mediating direction, and recovers the Arditi refusal direction on M_DiD at |cos| in {0.77, 0.86, 0.50} (Llama/Gemma/Qwen); chat-template-controlled rho_eps is {0.0029, 0.0048, 0.0044}, and the centered SVD residual is 4-7x larger. (2) Constructive calibration on a 3-layer MLP across rho_eps in {0.008, 0.17, 0.33, 0.40} exhibits a sweet-spot vs. brittle distinction: mild rank-maximization (lambda=5) buys ablation robustness, while strong regularization at the same nominal rho_eps (lambda=50) does not. rho_eps is a diagnostic for fragility, not a target whose mechanical inflation buys robustness. (3) Limits of rank-based diagnostics: (a) not safety-specific (LRH baseline is 2-3x the safety value); (b) SVD principal ordering does not match causal ordering (Llama u_2 inert despite ranking second; cumulative ablation non-monotone at k=5); (c) the spectral-gap hypothesis required to upgrade the O(rho_eps * d) achievability bound to a matching Mirsky-route lower bound fails empirically (1/90 Llama layer-reference pairs, 0/36 MLP combinations) and structurally (kappa_lb <= 2/(eps * r)). The matching lower bound remains an open problem.

Minka Kelly uncorks a heater at 45, ABS backfires spectacularly and LSU parents vs a security guard! Robot's lifeless corpse hauled off stage after fall during disastrous Michael Jackson impression Bear cubs spar on woman's front porch in adorable viral nature video, reactions pour in Show Tiffany Stratton some respect -- a boob job doesn't mean the WWE champ is made of plastic Britney Spears stuns with a post-plea deal Instagram dance, college baseball HOT mic & is this dream normal? Landlord in a tenant's home for repairs was caught on a security camera getting it on with a woman instead Paige Spiranac continues her generational golf content influencing run in 2026, Mike Alstott is ripped & MEAT! 'World's sexiest fan' drops her World Cup anthem and here's why you never assist a bike thief Wearing only a watch, a headlamp and flip-flops isn't a great disguise when trashing a neighbor's motion light Stephen Miller: The American people rejected'third world' Democratic policies by voting for Trump Former CENTCOM commander'concerned' about Iran's residual military capabilities Wall Street titans sound alarm on Mamdani's'reckless' targeting of top employers Retired general says Iran is fighting a'war of resistance' Kevin Warsh's potential Fed chairmanship sparks economic debate on inflation Minnesota fraud mastermind sentenced to 41.5 years in prison OutKick-Culture Selena Gomez is reportedly bringing her talents to award-winning director's new four-hour X-rated movie Don't let reports that Selena Gomez is going to be starring in an X-rated movie fool you. This isn't going to be a poorly produced amateur-level movie thrown together with someone who doesn't know what they're doing. It's also not a sex tape, for the folks who can't get their act together.

Selena Gomez is reportedly bringing her talents to award-winning director's new four-hour X-rated movie Minka Kelly uncorks a heater at 45, ABS backfires spectacularly and LSU parents vs a security guard! Robot's lifeless corpse hauled off stage after fall during disastrous Michael Jackson impression Bear cubs spar on woman's front porch in adorable viral nature video, reactions pour in Show Tiffany Stratton some respect -- a boob job doesn't mean the WWE champ is made of plastic Britney Spears stuns with a post-plea deal Instagram dance, college baseball HOT mic & is this dream normal? Landlord in a tenant's home for repairs was caught on a security camera getting it on with a woman instead Paige Spiranac continues her generational golf content influencing run in 2026, Mike Alstott is ripped & MEAT! 'World's sexiest fan' drops her World Cup anthem and here's why you never assist a bike thief Wearing only a watch, a headlamp and flip-flops isn't a great disguise when trashing a neighbor's motion light Stephen Miller: The American people rejected'third world' Democratic policies by voting for Trump Former CENTCOM commander'concerned' about Iran's residual military capabilities Wall Street titans sound alarm on Mamdani's'reckless' targeting of top employers Retired general says Iran is fighting a'war of resistance' Kevin Warsh's potential Fed chairmanship sparks economic debate on inflation Minnesota fraud mastermind sentenced to 41.5 years in prison President Tiffany Hernandez said the school was'using a new AI system as our reader' and called it'a lesson learned' Kurt Knutsson discusses growing public backlash against AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt being booed at a University of Arizona commencement. He further discusses the development of artificial eggs that could revive dead species. I'll be honest with you guys, I don't know what to make of my feelings toward artificial intelligence, because my mood on the subject changes by the day.

The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It? As the number of new high-school graduates drops, colleges will close, some will merge, and others may change beyond recognition. This series on the future of higher education started with a simple question: Should I still be contributing to my children's college funds? My first attempt to answer that question centered on the growing disillusionment with higher education in general.

People attend a jobs fair in London. Only 24% of the members of public surveyed thought AI was a positive thing for humanity. People attend a jobs fair in London. Only 24% of the members of public surveyed thought AI was a positive thing for humanity. One in three university students think AI will wipe out jobs so rapidly it will trigger civil unrest, according to a survey by King's College London (KCL).