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The research on homeschooling, the academic, social, and long-term outcomes for children in home schools..

Posted September 1, 2021 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

About 4 to 5 million children in the United States (or approximately 8 to 9% of school-age children) were homeschooled in March 2021. This statistic increased dramatically during the pandemic: Only 2.5 million (or 3 to 4% of school-age children) were homeschooled in spring 2019.

The most common reason cited for homeschooling (before the pandemic) was concern about the local school environment, including safety and negative peer pressure . Many parents also choose to homeschool due to dissatisfaction with the educational quality of local schools, or for religious reasons.

However, many parents and caregivers considering homeschooling may be especially concerned about how homeschooling might impact their child’s academic progress and social development. Does the research find any differences between children who were homeschooled versus children in conventional school?

Academic Performance

Homeschooled students tend to score higher on tests of academic skills when compared to children in public schools across most studies. However, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from these studies since most do not control for important family demographic factors and compare self-selected homeschooling families’ test scores (from tests proctored by parents) to national averages. Interestingly, children in a “structured” homeschool program — that is, a homeschool program with organized lesson plans — tend to score higher on academic tests than children from conventional schools, while children in “unstructured” homeschool environments without organized lesson plans tend to score lower than children in conventional schools.

Social Skills

The findings on social skills seem to be more mixed. Some studies have found no difference in social skills between children in homeschool environments versus conventional schools, some studies have found that homeschooled children score higher on measures of social ability, and some have found that homeschooled children score lower on overall social skills. Not surprisingly, homeschooled students who have had more opportunities for peer interactions tend to show improved social skills.

Long-Term Success

Most studies find that homeschooled children tend to have higher college GPAs than children from conventional schools. In addition, most studies have found no difference between homeschooled and conventional students in college graduation rates. However, most homeschooled students do not attend competitive four-year colleges and one study found that homeschooled students may have lower math GPAs in college than children from conventional schools. Children who are homeschooled may also be more likely to work in a lower-paying job.

Limitations of this Research

It is important to note that this research is difficult to interpret because families that choose to homeschool are different from families who do not in many other ways — for example, they may have parents with higher income or educational levels — and these factors likely contribute to the results as well. For instance, we cannot conclude that homeschooling will improve your child’s test scores since homeschooled children may have more educated mothers and it may be the mother’s educational level that drives the higher test scores, not homeschooling itself.

Almasoud, S., & Fowler, S. R. (2016). The difference in the academic achievements of homeschooled and non-homeschooled students. Home School Researcher, 32(1), 1-4.

Cogan, M. F. (2010). Exploring academic outcomes of homeschooled students. Journal of College Admission, 208, 18-25.

Coleman, R. E. (2014). The homeschool math gap: The data. Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

Drenovsky, C. K., & Cohen, I. (2012). The impact of homeschooling on the adjustment of college students. International Social Science Review, 87(1/2), 19-34.

Kunzman, R., & Gaither, M. (2020). Homeschooling: An updated comprehensive survey of the research. Other Education, 9(1), 253-336.

Martin-Chang, S., Gould, O. N., & Meuse, R. E. (2011). The impact of schooling on academic achievement: Evidence from homeschooled and traditionally schooled students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue Canadienne Des Sciences du Comportement, 43(3), 195.

McKinley, M. J., Asaro, J. N., Bergin, J., D'Auria, N., & Gagnon, K. E. (2007). Social Skills and Satisfaction with Social Relationships in Home-Schooled, Private-Schooled, and Public-Schooled Children. Online Submission, 17(3), 1-6.

Medlin, R. G. (2006). Homeschooled Children's Social Skills. Online Submission, 17(1), 1-8.

Montes, G. (2006). Do Parental Reasons to Homeschool Vary by Grade? Evidence from the National Household Education Survey, 2001. Online Submission, 16(4), 11-17.

Montes, G. (2015). The social and emotional health of homeschooled students in the United States: A population-based comparison with publicly schooled students based on the national survey of children’s health, 2007. Home School Researcher, 31(1), 1-9.

Pearlman-Avnion, S., & Grayevsky, M. (2019). Homeschooling, civics, and socialization: The case of Israel. Education and Urban Society, 51(7), 970-988.

Ray, B. D. (2017). A systematic review of the empirical research on selected aspects of homeschooling as a school choice. Journal of School Choice, 11(4), 604-621.

Redford, J., Battle, D., & Bielick, S. (2017, April). Homeschooling in the United States: 2012. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved August 1, 2017, from. (NCES 2016-096.REV) https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2016096rev

Sikkink, D., & Skiles, S. (2015). Homeschooling and young adult outcomes: Evidence from the 2011 and 2014 Cardus Education Survey. The Cardus Religious Schools Initiative.

Cara Goodwin, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in translating scientific research into information that is useful, accurate, and relevant for parents.

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Homeschooling – home education or home-based education – has grown from nearly extinct in the United States in the 1970s to over 3.0 million school-age students. NHERI focuses on homeschooling research, homeschool facts, homeschool fast facts, and in-depth scholarly articles.

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The Academic and Social Benefits of Homeschooling

Homeschooling works. The roughly 2 million children who currently learn at home join a millennia-old practice supported by many government officials, scholars, college officials, and employers.

While mainstream America has embraced homeschooling as a viable and positive educational option—and as 55 million K-12 students and their parents have been thrust into “crisis-teaching at home”—the angst of some academics over homeschooling has abruptly emerged.

Professors Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard University and James Dwyer of William and Mary School of Law organized a summer meeting to “focus on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or no oversight.” In a highly controversial article in Harvard Magazine , Erin O’Donnell advanced Bartholet’s arguments in favor of a homeschooling ban.

Yet, what does the evidence tell us about homeschool educational and social outcomes? Is there any sound corpus of evidence that homeschooled children are actually educationally deprived or maltreated? And what worldview drives anti-homeschoolers such as Bartholet and Dwyer?

Most reviews of homeschooling research reveal generally positive learning outcomes for children.

Joseph Murphy and Brian Ray provide quite optimistic reviews, while other appraisals present positive, albeit more tentative , conclusions. A one-of-its-kind review of only peer-reviewed research by Ray revealed that 11 of the 14 peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement found that homeschool students significantly outperformed conventionally schooled children. Both of the publicly available state-provided data sets showed higher-than-average test scores for homeschooled children.

A similar pattern emerges for the social, emotional, and psychological development of the homeschooled.

The clear majority of peer-reviewed studies show that homeschoolers often have better parent-child relationships and friendships than conventionally schooled children. Homeschoolers are happy, satisfied, and civically engaged .

A growing body of research indicates that graduates of home-based education excel. Eleven of the 16 peer-reviewed studies on success into adulthood (including college) showed that homeschoolers had better results for political tolerance, college GPA, and college retention than students in conventional schools. After reviewing the relevant literature, Gloeckner and Jones concluded that the “comparative results of the studies reported in this review, combined with the data collected from college admission officers provide evidence that homeschooling is an effective alternative path to college for the children of many families.”

Homeschoolers are not being educationally deprived, maltreated, or abused. On the contrary, the research literature suggests that rates of abuse (e.g., physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect) are lower among homeschoolers than institutionally schooled children.

Although there are certainly cases when homeschoolers are abused (and such cases should be prosecuted), banning homeschooling is not the answer, nor will it improve education or make children safer.

As a society we do not, for example, close public schools when a child is abused there. When scholars like Bartholet, Fineman and Worthington, and Dwyer and Peters advocate for a total or presumptive ban on homeschooling, they do so without solid support from the empirical literature. When Bartholet and others advocate for forcing children to enter the public school system, they are ignoring evidence that only approximately 40 percent of conventionally schooled students are at, or above, proficiency in reading and mathematics.

Certainly, many public educators are engaged in terrific efforts to provide high-quality education, but it is also clear that the public school system has significant limitations.

Why, then, do some academics want more government control and restrictions on homeschooling? We think it is not hard to perceive: They do not approve of the values and beliefs of the parents who choose to homeschool.

One of us partially addressed the answer in a scholarly journal some years ago. Ray identified four classes of negativity toward parent-led home-based education. Some scholars make theoretical arguments that government schools are the gold standard of education that advances the common good, while private schooling is bad for society. A second group argues that homeschooling is an attempt to “cocoon” one’s children from ideas and people that the parents disdain. Another category holds that homeschooling harms children philosophically, psychologically, religiously, physically, and educationally. And the fourth group goes against homeschooling by theorizing why the state should have more domination over children and their parents.

In the end, however, all of those categories of opposition are founded on different values, beliefs, and presuppositions than those at the core of parent-led homeschooling. Dwyer and Peters , for example, presuppose that “[t]he state must have the ultimate authority to determine what children’s interests are” and that the state is the entity that shall decide over what aspects of a child’s life his parents have authority.

In a similar vein, Bartholet argues that the state, not the parent, shall have the ultimate authority to decide what and how children shall be taught. Parents, in her world, must prove to the state that they deserve permission to educate their children outside of the government’s control. Fineman’s philosophical zeal is so clear that anything other than state-funded and state-controlled education must be banned by the government.

These kinds of ideas simply stem from their philosophical and religious worldviews. It is “natural” for them to conclude that the civil government must control children’s teaching, training, and indoctrination. It is natural because their worldviews cannot comprehend or tolerate a worldview such as classical liberalism or Christianity that holds the state should not control boys’ and girls’ educational formation, unless parents are abusive.

While the relevant research has limitations , scholarly research shows that homeschooling has positive outcomes for children. There is certainly no body of clear evidence that homeschooling undermines children’s academic and social development and should be restricted. Certain academics’ agitation over homeschooling appears to be based on their perspective that the state—and not parents—should control the education of all children.

Compared to conventional students, homeschool graduates are more likely to

• have higher college GPAs,
• be politically tolerant,
• be agreeable and conscientious,
• have a more positive college experience, and
• be self-employed.

In summary, opponents of homeschooling lack empirical data for their arguments, and judges and governmental officials consistently hold that parents have the right to educate their children at home.

Those arguing for state domination lost their major battles in legislatures, courts, and the public mind in the 1980s and 1990s. Homeschooling advocates have strong support in protecting their freedom to educate outside state-run systems.

College personnel, employers, and independent business advocates should be glad about homeschooling. It is a form of free enterprise. It costs taxpayers less than public schooling and its graduates are well-equipped to be the next generation of entrepreneurs, leaders, parents, householders, creators, and everyday citizens. In summary, we agree with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s analysis of this issue: “The risk to children is not from homeschooling. The risk is from radical leftist scholars seeking to impose their values on our children.”

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., is president of the National Home Education Research Institute and is internationally known for his research on homeschooling.

Carlos Valiente, Ph.D., is a Professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University.

May 13, 2020 › Academics , Politicization

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An Introduction to Homeschooling

Homeschooling is an educational option that allows parents to teach their children at home instead of sending them to school. There are today a wealth of resources and opportunities available to homeschooling families, and in a landscape of increasing school choice homeschooling has become more and more accepted by the public at large. Parents choose homeschooling for a variety of reasons. Modern homeschooling began in the 1970s and 1980s, championed by progressive educational reformers hoping to free children’s inner creativity and conservative evangelical leaders concerned about the environment of public schools. There are now around two million children being homeschooled, and in the early twentieth century homeschooling has become increasingly diverse, both in terms of race and class and in terms terms of parental motivations. See Homeschooling Numbers and and Homeschool Demographics .

Parents choose homeschooling for a wide variety of reasons. Some parents have concerns about the social environment or academic quality of local public schools. Some want to ensure that their children are educated in accordance with their religious beliefs. Some believe their children will learn better through child-directed learning outside of a classroom setting. Some have children who were bullied in school or have health problems or demanding practice schedules. A growing number of families enjoy the flexibility homeschooling offers, and many children may find that homeschooling is a good fit for their natural learning styles or personalities. If there is one thing that can be said about parental motivations for homeschooling, it is that they are anything but monolithic. For more, see Reasons Parents Homeschool .

While homeschooling is legal throughout the United States, the level of oversight for homeschools varies from state to state. Most states require parents to notify state or local education officials of their intent to homeschool, and half of all states have some form of assessment requirement. Most states have days of instruction or subject requirements and a smaller number of states have parent qualification and bookkeeping requirements. Some states require none of the above. The patchwork and often woefully inadequate nature of homeschool oversight means that there are few protections in place safeguarding the interests of homeschooled children. For more, see  Current Policy .

Research has shown that children who are homeschooled can succeed academically, especially when given support and resources from their parents. Many homeschool parents are driven and motivated, and are extremely involved in their children’s education. They educate themselves as they go along and seek out resources, tutors, or classes for those subjects they may not be able to teach themselves. In many ways these parents are more facilitators or coordinators than teachers. However, while homeschooled children can succeed academically, that success is not guaranteed. In cases where homeschool parents are not driven and motivated or do not place as much importance on their children’s academic progress, homeschooled children may struggle academically or even not receive any education at all. For more, see Academic Achievement .

Homeschooled children are typically involved in an array of social activities, including homeschool cooperatives, dance and music lessons, church and Sunday school, field trip groups, and other classes, clubs, and groups outside of the home. With the networking potential of the internet and the greater social acceptance of homeschooling, the opportunities available to homeschool families have grown in recent years. If parents put in the effort to find social outlets for their children, homeschooled children can be well socialized and can integrate well into society. In contrast, if parents do not ensure that their children have adequate opportunities to meet their social needs, homeschooled children may be lonely, develop social phobias, or have difficulty integrating into society. For more, see Homeschooling & Socialization .

An increasing number of states allow homeschooled children to enroll in public school part time to take individual classes or to participate in public school athletics and other extracurricular activities. Some studies have found that as many as 20% of homeschooled students enroll in public school part-time.  Some states have public school at home or public or charter correspondence programs that allow children to be taught at home while receiving benefits from enrollment in public school. “Cybercharters” have become popular among some homeschoolers, and a number of charter schools have developed programs where children come to an actual school for classes once or twice a week and are otherwise educated at home. In an increasingly educationally diverse world, homeschooling offers a variety of flexible and creative options.

Feedback from the first generation of homeschooled students, now in their 20′s and 30′s, indicates that those who are homeschooled responsibly frequently do well in college and professional life while those who were neglected or subjected to an abusive homeschooling environment often face low-wage job prospects, poor integration and connection with their communities, and struggles with poverty and dependency that could have easily been prevented. For more, see Homeschool Outcomes and Abuse and Neglect . The quality of a child’s homeschool experience depends almost entirely on the parents’ dedication to providing a functional, nurturing environment with optimal conditions for education and healthy child development.

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Quantum computers hold the promise of being able to quickly solve extremely complex problems that might take the world’s most powerful supercomputer decades to crack.

But achieving that performance involves building a system with millions of interconnected building blocks called qubits. Making and controlling so many qubits in a hardware architecture is an enormous challenge that scientists around the world are striving to meet.

Toward this goal, researchers at MIT and MITRE have demonstrated a scalable, modular hardware platform that integrates thousands of interconnected qubits onto a customized integrated circuit. This “quantum-system-on-chip” (QSoC) architecture enables the researchers to precisely tune and control a dense array of qubits. Multiple chips could be connected using optical networking to create a large-scale quantum communication network.

By tuning qubits across 11 frequency channels, this QSoC architecture allows for a new proposed protocol of “entanglement multiplexing” for large-scale quantum computing.

The team spent years perfecting an intricate process for manufacturing two-dimensional arrays of atom-sized qubit microchiplets and transferring thousands of them onto a carefully prepared complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip. This transfer can be performed in a single step.

“We will need a large number of qubits, and great control over them, to really leverage the power of a quantum system and make it useful. We are proposing a brand new architecture and a fabrication technology that can support the scalability requirements of a hardware system for a quantum computer,” says Linsen Li, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this architecture.

Li’s co-authors include Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS, leader of the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group, and member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); senior author Dirk Englund, professor of EECS, principal investigator of the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and of RLE; as well as others at MIT, Cornell University, the Delft Institute of Technology, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation. The paper appears today in Nature .

Diamond microchiplets

While there are many types of qubits, the researchers chose to use diamond color centers because of their scalability advantages. They previously used such qubits to produce integrated quantum chips with photonic circuitry.

Qubits made from diamond color centers are “artificial atoms” that carry quantum information. Because diamond color centers are solid-state systems, the qubit manufacturing is compatible with modern semiconductor fabrication processes. They are also compact and have relatively long coherence times, which refers to the amount of time a qubit’s state remains stable, due to the clean environment provided by the diamond material.

In addition, diamond color centers have photonic interfaces which allows them to be remotely entangled, or connected, with other qubits that aren’t adjacent to them.

“The conventional assumption in the field is that the inhomogeneity of the diamond color center is a drawback compared to identical quantum memory like ions and neutral atoms. However, we turn this challenge into an advantage by embracing the diversity of the artificial atoms: Each atom has its own spectral frequency. This allows us to communicate with individual atoms by voltage tuning them into resonance with a laser, much like tuning the dial on a tiny radio,” says Englund.

This is especially difficult because the researchers must achieve this at a large scale to compensate for the qubit inhomogeneity in a large system.

To communicate across qubits, they need to have multiple such “quantum radios” dialed into the same channel. Achieving this condition becomes near-certain when scaling to thousands of qubits. To this end, the researchers surmounted that challenge by integrating a large array of diamond color center qubits onto a CMOS chip which provides the control dials. The chip can be incorporated with built-in digital logic that rapidly and automatically reconfigures the voltages, enabling the qubits to reach full connectivity.

“This compensates for the in-homogenous nature of the system. With the CMOS platform, we can quickly and dynamically tune all the qubit frequencies,” Li explains.

Lock-and-release fabrication

To build this QSoC, the researchers developed a fabrication process to transfer diamond color center “microchiplets” onto a CMOS backplane at a large scale.

They started by fabricating an array of diamond color center microchiplets from a solid block of diamond. They also designed and fabricated nanoscale optical antennas that enable more efficient collection of the photons emitted by these color center qubits in free space.

Then, they designed and mapped out the chip from the semiconductor foundry. Working in the MIT.nano cleanroom, they post-processed a CMOS chip to add microscale sockets that match up with the diamond microchiplet array.

They built an in-house transfer setup in the lab and applied a lock-and-release process to integrate the two layers by locking the diamond microchiplets into the sockets on the CMOS chip. Since the diamond microchiplets are weakly bonded to the diamond surface, when they release the bulk diamond horizontally, the microchiplets stay in the sockets.

“Because we can control the fabrication of both the diamond and the CMOS chip, we can make a complementary pattern. In this way, we can transfer thousands of diamond chiplets into their corresponding sockets all at the same time,” Li says.

The researchers demonstrated a 500-micron by 500-micron area transfer for an array with 1,024 diamond nanoantennas, but they could use larger diamond arrays and a larger CMOS chip to further scale up the system. In fact, they found that with more qubits, tuning the frequencies actually requires less voltage for this architecture.

“In this case, if you have more qubits, our architecture will work even better,” Li says.

The team tested many nanostructures before they determined the ideal microchiplet array for the lock-and-release process. However, making quantum microchiplets is no easy task, and the process took years to perfect.

“We have iterated and developed the recipe to fabricate these diamond nanostructures in MIT cleanroom, but it is a very complicated process. It took 19 steps of nanofabrication to get the diamond quantum microchiplets, and the steps were not straightforward,” he adds.

Alongside their QSoC, the researchers developed an approach to characterize the system and measure its performance on a large scale. To do this, they built a custom cryo-optical metrology setup.

Using this technique, they demonstrated an entire chip with over 4,000 qubits that could be tuned to the same frequency while maintaining their spin and optical properties. They also built a digital twin simulation that connects the experiment with digitized modeling, which helps them understand the root causes of the observed phenomenon and determine how to efficiently implement the architecture.

In the future, the researchers could boost the performance of their system by refining the materials they used to make qubits or developing more precise control processes. They could also apply this architecture to other solid-state quantum systems.

This work was supported by the MITRE Corporation Quantum Moonshot Program, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Center for Quantum Networks, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program.

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There’s even more evidence that a college degree is worth it.

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Boston, MA - May 23: Clara Maffei (left) hugs Riley Edwards after receiving her diploma at the ... [+] commencement of the class of 2024 at UMass Boston. (Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The debate about whether going to college is worth it ought to be over.

College is worth it.

A college degree pays off better than any investment most of us will ever have the chance to make. And that’s just the financial side of the equation. The more valuable rewards of a college education aren’t found in actual bank accounts.

Despite this, college skepticism still runs strong, fueled in part by those in line to profit from the alternatives they are happy to sell. Even though the evidence in favor of college is convincing, it somehow does not get nearly as much attention as the manufactured skepticism. As the quote, likely misattributed to Mark Twain, says, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Especially, I would add, where profit and the lie are traveling together.

To help tamp down this skepticism and to set the record straight, it’s important to amplify the data showing the robust returns of a college degree. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of college-affirming research to share.

A recent example came earlier this month from the Economic Policy Institute, written by Katherine deCourcy and Elise Gould.

The Top 10 Richest People In The World June 2024

Nsa warns iphone and android users to turn it off and on again, aurora alert should you prepare to see the northern lights this week.

Their research shows that young workers with a college degree have already economically recovered from the disruption and displacement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, they say bluntly, “The labor market for young college graduates today is stronger than it was before the pandemic and has been for quite some time.”

The numbers are indeed strong, the paper finds. “As of March 2024, 65.2% of young college graduates are ‘employed only’ (not enrolled in further schooling), while only 10.0% are “idled” (not enrolled and not employed, which includes the unemployed). The share of young graduates who are ‘employed only’ has been above its pre-pandemic level (64.3% in February 2020) in every month since February 2023.”

For clarity, “idled” does not mean struggling to find work. It can mean that. But, as the paper authors say, idled can also include those who are not working in order to start families or have disabilities that are keeping them from payrolls. So, the 10% figure is soft. But even at full value, among workers between 21 and 24 years old with only a four-year college degree and not in school, the ratio of employed to idled is a lopsided 65-to-10.

EPI data show that the underemployment rate for this cohort — 21 to 24 with a four-year degree only — is just 5.4%.

This mirrors the most recent federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on employment showing a healthy, resilient, and historically strong employment environment. The overall national unemployment rate is just 3.9%. For those with a “bachelor’s degree and higher,” the unemployment rate is a microscopic 2.2%. For comparison, for those with a high school diploma only, without any college education, the unemployment rate is nearly double, at 4%, and sits just above the national average.

The EPI work also shows that young college-educated workers experienced actual wage growth — took home more money, even when adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living.

But mostly, the EPI report highlights the very quick economic recovery that college graduates have experienced, post-pandemic — employment and wages have rebounded faster and further than in any recent period of recovery. EPI finds that the historic rate of recuperation for college graduates, and others, was the result of active federal policy.

“These findings highlight the tremendous role that large fiscal relief and recovery packages, including expanded unemployment insurance coverage and aid to state and local governments, had on healing the labor market after the pandemic recession. Unlike previous business cycles, young workers were not left behind by policy,” the report reads.

Though the strong labor market and salary rewards were likely the result of targeted policies, the underlying case remains — in nearly every economic condition, a college degree pays off. Getting that important parchment from a credible nonprofit or public school puts more money in your paycheck and makes it more likely that you will get one.

For the people who will actually look at the evidence, the EPI report is strong, but not alone. The jury is back on this question. A college degree is well worth the cost, the effort, and the time it takes to get it.

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AI image misinformation has surged, Google researchers find

Fake images generated by artificial intelligence have proliferated so quickly that they’re now nearly as common as those manipulated by text or traditional editing tools like Photoshop, according to researchers at Google and several fact-checking organizations.

The findings offer an indication of just how quickly the technology has been embraced by people seeking to spread false information. But researchers warned that AI is still just one way in which pictures are used to mislead the public — the most common continues to be real images taken out of context.

In a paper released online this month but not yet peer-reviewed, the researchers tracked misinformation trends by analyzing nearly 136,000 fact-checks dating back to 1995, with the majority of them published after 2016 and ending in November 2023. They found that AI accounted for very little image-based misinformation until spring of 2023, right around when fake photos of Pope Francis in a puffer coat went viral.

“The sudden prominence of AI-generated content in fact checked misinformation claims suggests a rapidly changing landscape,” the researchers wrote.

The lead researchers and representatives for Google did not comment in time for publication.

Alexios Mantzarlis, who first flagged and reviewed the latest research in his newsletter, Faked Up , said the democratization of generative AI tools has made it easy for almost anyone to spread false information online.

“We go through waves of technological advancements that shock us in their capacity to manipulate and alter reality, and we are going through one now,” said Mantzarlis, who is the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s graduate campus in New York City. “The question is, how quickly can we adapt? And then, what safeguards can we put in place to avoid their harms?”

We go through waves of technological advancements that shock us in their capacity to manipulate and alter reality, and we are going through one now.

-Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech

The researchers found that about 80% of fact-checked misinformation claims involve media such as images and video, with video increasingly dominating those claims since 2022.

Even with AI, the study found that real images paired with false claims about what they depict or imply continue to spread without the need for AI or even photo-editing. 

“While AI-generated images did not cause content manipulations to overtake context manipulations, our data collection ended in late 2023 and this may have changed since,” the researchers wrote. “Regardless, generative-AI images are now a sizable fraction of all misinformation-associated images.”

Text is also a component in about 80% of all image-based misinformation, most commonly seen in screenshots.

“We were surprised to note that such cases comprise the majority of context manipulations,” the paper stated. “These images are highly shareable on social media platforms, as they don’t require that the individual sharing them replicate the false context claim themselves: they’re embedded in the image.”

Cayce Myers, a public relations professor and graduate studies director at Virginia Tech’s School of Communication, said context manipulations can be even harder to detect than AI-generated images because they already look authentic.

“In that sense, that’s a much more insidious problem,” Myers, who reviewed the recent findings prior to being interviewed, said. “Because if you have, let’s say, a totally AI-generated image that someone can look at and say, ‘That doesn’t look quite right,’ that’s a lot different than seeing an actual image that is captioned in a way that is misrepresenting what the image is of.”

Even AI-based misinformation, however, is quickly growing harder to detect as technology advances. Myers said traditional hallmarks of an AI-generated image — abnormalities such as misshapen hands, garbled text or a dog with five legs — have diminished “tremendously” since these tools first became widespread.

Earlier this month, during the Met Gala, two viral AI-generated images of Katy Perry (who wasn’t at the event) looked so realistic at first glance that even her mom mistakenly thought the singer was in attendance.

And while the study stated AI models aren’t typically trained to generate images like screenshots and memes, it’s possible they will quickly learn to reliably produce those types of images as new iterations of advanced language models continue to roll out.

To reliably distinguish misinformation as AI tools grow more sophisticated, Mantzarlis said people will have to learn to question the content’s source or distributor rather than the visuals themselves.

“The content alone is no longer going to be sufficient for us to make an assessment of truthfulness of trustworthiness veracity,” Mantzarlis said. “I think you need to have the full context: Who shared it with you? How was it shared? How do you know it was them?”

But the study noted that relying solely on fact-checked claims doesn’t capture the whole scope of misinformation out there, as it’s often the images that go viral that end up being fact checked. It also relied only on misinformation claims made in English. This leaves out many lesser-viewed or non-English pieces of misinformation that float unchecked in the wild.

Still, Mantzarlis said he believes the study reflects a “good sample” of English-language misinformation cases online, particularly those that have reached a substantial enough audience for fact-checkers to take notice.

For Myers, the bigger limitation affecting any study on disinformation — especially in the age of AI — will be the fast-changing nature of the disinformation itself.

“The problem for people who are looking at how to get a handle on disinformation is that it’s an evolving technological reality,” Myers said. “And capturing that is difficult, because what you study in May of 2024 may already be a very different reality in June of 2024.”

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

• Current Students

Journal Highlights Math Research by Professor and Student

The paper , "Modulation instability and wavenumber bandgap breathers in a time layered phononic lattice," is the result of a yearslong collaboration of Chong, Wallace, and two researchers at CalTech. 

Their project focused on how pressure waves can be manipulated by materials. It began in 2021 with a theoretical component—which Wallace worked on for her honors theses, " Instability in a Time-Modulated Lattice .” She is now wrapping up a master's degree in applied mathematics at Columbia University.

Wallace said she reached out to Chong in 2021 to inquire whether she could assist him with a research project. She had excelled in his ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations classes, Chong said, and he was just launching a new research program. So he invited her to work as his research assistant in the summer, a partnership that extended through her senior year.

The work Wallace completed in the first stage of the research program was followed by numerical and experimental simulations, conducted by Chong and his Caltech teammates, which was then backed up with rigorous mathematical proofs in a follow-up paper. “It is a nice spectrum that goes from Evy's analytical computations to computer simulations, the laboratory, and to mathematical proof,” Chong said.

New Insights

Their April 11 paper is garnering attention because it opens new ground in the field of physical energy. Their project specifically focused on understanding how pressure waves are affected by media that varies over time. (Pressure waves, of which the most commonly known is a sound wave, are set off when a mass or object is compressed or decompressed by an external force, such as an explosion.)

Traditionally, researchers have experimented with pressure waves using media that vary in space while they remain constant in time.

For those who are not familiar with his field, Chong came up with a helpful analogy to explain his research, comparing the time-varying media he and Wallace studied to a floor, and the waves passing over the media to a person walking across that floor. “A traditional floor might have a pattern of alternating spots of rough and smooth areas,” he began. “As you’re walking across the floor, how your feet touch the ground will affect how you walk along it.” 

In contrast, a medium that changes over time resembles a wacky floor in an amusement park fun house. Rather than having both smooth and rough patches, it is entirely smooth one moment before shifting to a rough surface, switching back and forth between these two patterns. “How you walk through that medium will be different than walking across a traditional floor,” Chong said. 

Wallace's original calculations showed exactly where this system would be unstable, which is desirable. When a system is stable, “it means the amplitude of the wave doesn't grow,” Chong said, whereas an unstable system results in a wave that amplifies quite a bit.

“What Evy did was to tell us exactly what material parameters would be needed for that to happen, an exact formula for when and under what circumstances you get interesting instability,” he said. “Having a formula that exact is quite rare. Usually you have to approximate it or do some numerical simulations.”

By the way, the materials they studied aren't linoleum or wood panels or anything most of us would recognize as typical flooring materials.  “Our experiment consists of magnets,” Chong said. They looked at variables such as the distance and strength of magnets, as well as the effect of dampening from air friction. “Each of those properties has a parameter that you can tune, so having a formula saying this combination of parameters leads to amplification is very helpful.”

What is of particular interest to researchers working in this area is how to maintain the force of a wave or signal, because over time, all waves degrade. Each electrical circuit, for example, needs an amplifier to work, Chong said. 

“So when talking about the applications of our work, our system would act as an amplifier,” he added. “Based on what Evy did, you would know exactly how to make the material so that the wave would amplify.”

Possible applications

Though Chong and his team are working on a basic research level, in the long term, understanding the systems they are studying could lead to innovations in “acoustic logic,” Chong explained, which is like the logic underlying electrical circuits, but which don't use electricity but rather pressure waves. They could even help create a situation where “acoustic circuits” could operate with the use of ambient vibrations only, and thus avoid detection from sensors.

“We’re still doing work that is more fundamental,” Chong said. “But understanding how these systems behave could contribute to that the much-longer project of having a goal like that.”

Wallace's undergraduate work with Chong led to a research collaboration with a Columbia faculty member. With him, Wallace expanded Chong's one-dimensional study to two dimensions.

Starting this type of high-level research at Bowdoin, Wallace said, “synthesized everything I had learned at Bowdoin and learned about math in general.” She continued, “Doing research allowed me to take what I learned out of the classroom and apply it to something I could see in the the real world, and see how it would be very important and relevant.”

The journal, which is open access, and Bowdoin College provided support to cover the publication fees via the Fletcher Family Research Grant. Wallace's research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant and the Bowdoin Kaufman Family Fellowship .

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