Your college major can have a profound impact on your income.

Within four years of graduation, some majors stand to earn as much as $256,539, while others make less than $10,000 per year, according to a new report from The HEA Group, a research and higher education consulting firm.

The top-earning majors are in so-called STEM fields, or degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Half of the top 10 majors with graduates making the most money are subsets of engineering.

Michael Itzkowitz, the founder and president of The HEA Group, analyzed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education from more than two million students who received federal financial aid and graduated in 2015 or 2016. Their earnings were measured in 2019 and 2020.

Here are the 10 highest-paying college majors, four years after graduation:

The majors with the highest earning potential tend to provide specialized, technical training in an in-demand field, like health care or technology, says Itzkowitz.

Nuclear engineering majors earn the most, with a median annual salary of $131,454. Increasing calls for clean, renewable energy has spurred demand for nuclear engineers amid challenges with wind and solar power.

Engineers, in general, are needed in a wide variety of industries, including manufacturing, cybersecurity, construction and agriculture, says Itzkowitz. Chemical engineers and industrial engineers, which have consistently been two of the highest-paying college majors over the past few years, are also two of the occupations projected to grow the most by 2031, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Biology is another major that can open doors to a wide range of high-paying opportunities, and not just in the medical field, Itzkowitz says.

"While many biology majors may have ambitions to go to medical school, some do not, and have no trouble finding jobs with competitive salaries, like a biotechnologist or research scientist, right after college," says Itzkowtiz.

Similarly, veterinary medicine is a field that includes a wide range of majors, from veterinary technicians to "pre-vet" programs for veterinarians, a job that requires a doctor of veterinary medicine degree in addition to a bachelor's degree. The U.S. Department of Education's data does not include the salaries for people who are currently enrolled in advanced degree programs, like medical and business school.

The non-engineering majors in the top 10 are biomathematics, marine transportation, veterinary medicine, computer science and operations research, which typically focuses on the development and application of mathematical or simulation models to solve problems with operational systems.

Jeff Levy, an independent educational consultant in Santa Monica, warns students not to pick a major solely because of its potential salary. As he previously told CNBC Make It, "There's no way of knowing, with 100% certainty, which professions will pay the best in 5, 10 years."

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Top 10 colleges to attend if you want to make a lot of moneyHarvard and Yale didn't make the list

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The 10 fastest-growing jobs over the next 5 yearssome pay over $100,000

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These are the highest-paying college majors, 4 years after graduationmany pay over $100,000 - CNBC

A few years into photography, Paola Prez is spending the next few days photographing future graduates and it's all free.Prez said she got the idea for the photoshoots after not getting any photos herself when she was graduating."I, myself come from a low-income background first generation ... It's a very important milestone to hit, but not everyone is able to say, 'Oh, I want to take photos. Here's $200,' trying to take them," Prez said.The real estate photographer knows a graduation photoshoot can cost a couple of hundred dollars adding up total graduation costs, including the cap and gown and other expenses. This made her decide she would help out others who might be in the same boat.Prez chose Sacramento State's arboretum for her photoshoots not by accident. Like the 1,400 species of trees from around the world in it, she hopes it represents a thriving future for graduates.One of her first sessions was with Francisco Javier Ortiz, who's in his last year studying computer science. As he took his graduation photos, Ortiz reminisced about migrating to the U.S. from Mxico in 2004.One step closer to his next step in life, these photos have a deeper meaning, as Ortiz is also making history in his home: He is the first in his family to graduate from college in the United States."So that's kind of nice, and I kind of like, get to show because I have a younger brother and I get to kind of be a role model," Ortiz said.He added that the photos will be a surprise to his parents.The university's first commencement ceremonies are taking place this weekend.

A few years into photography, Paola Prez is spending the next few days photographing future graduates and it's all free.

Prez said she got the idea for the photoshoots after not getting any photos herself when she was graduating.

"I, myself come from a low-income background first generation ... It's a very important milestone to hit, but not everyone is able to say, 'Oh, I want to take photos. Here's $200,' trying to take them," Prez said.

The real estate photographer knows a graduation photoshoot can cost a couple of hundred dollars adding up total graduation costs, including the cap and gown and other expenses. This made her decide she would help out others who might be in the same boat.

Prez chose Sacramento State's arboretum for her photoshoots not by accident. Like the 1,400 species of trees from around the world in it, she hopes it represents a thriving future for graduates.

One of her first sessions was with Francisco Javier Ortiz, who's in his last year studying computer science. As he took his graduation photos, Ortiz reminisced about migrating to the U.S. from Mxico in 2004.

One step closer to his next step in life, these photos have a deeper meaning, as Ortiz is also making history in his home: He is the first in his family to graduate from college in the United States.

"So that's kind of nice, and I kind of like, get to show because I have a younger brother and I get to kind of be a role model," Ortiz said.

He added that the photos will be a surprise to his parents.

The university's first commencement ceremonies are taking place this weekend.

View original post here:

Sacramento-area photographer offers free photo sessions to graduating students - KCRA Sacramento

Credit: Kiel Mutschelknaus/Columbia Engineering

New York, NYMay 4, 2023The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today that it is awarding $20 million to establish the AI Institute for ARtificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI), an interdisciplinary center led by Columbia University that will draw together top researchers across the country to focus on a national priority: connecting the major progress made in artificial intelligence (AI) systems to the revolution in our understanding of the brain.

ARNI is a collaboration between Columbia, Baylor College of Medicine, City University of New York, Harvard, Princeton, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mila Quebec AI Institute, Tuskegee University, the University of Pennsylvania, and UTHealth Houston. Industry partners include Amazon, DeepMind, Google, IBM, and Meta, and outreach partners include the Neuromatch Academy and the New York Hall of Science. In addition to receiving NSF funding, ARNI is funded by a partnership between NSF and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (R&E).

By bringing together the amazing progress being made in AI systems and our growing understanding of the brain, ARNI will ignite advances in both neuroscience and AI, and transform our world in the next decade.

Mary Boyce

Provost, Columbia University

The National Science Foundation has long been a strong supporter of research at Columbia University and we are very excited about this new collaboration, said Mary Boyce, Provost, Columbia University. TheAI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence draws not only on our interdisciplinary strengths throughout the University but also our partnerships -- both old and new -- across the country. By bringing together the amazing progress being made in AI systems and our growing understanding of the brain, ARNI will ignite advances in both neuroscience and AI, and transform our world in the next decade.

The past 10 years have seen spectacular progress in interrogating neural activity, circuitry, and learning, yet our neuroscience insights have so far informed AI only superficially. Conversely, our rapidly advancing AI methods and systems based on massive amounts of data have only begun to impact neuroscience. ARNI will meet the urgent need for new paradigms of interdisciplinary research between neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI. This will accelerate progress in all three fields and broaden the transformative impact on society in the next decade.

ARNI is anambitious plan that requires a dedicated effort across institutions, and we have assembledone of the strongest groups of investigators in theoretical neuroscience and foundational machine learning in the world, said Jeannette Wing, Executive Vice President for Research, Columbia University. Our PIs are building on existing, and often tightly interacting, neural and AI groups at Columbia, Baylor, Penn, together with Janelia, MILA, Google/DeepMind, and Meta. At the same time, we are building new bridges to Tuskegee, CUNY, Yale, IBM, and beyond. Our track record is already strong and now, thanks to the National Science Foundation, we expect ARNIto meet the urgent need for new paradigms of interdisciplinary research between neuroscience and AI."

ARNI will be led by Principal Investigators (PIs)Richard Zemel,Kathleen McKeown, andChristos Papadimitriou (Computer Science, Columbia Engineering),Liam Paninski (Zuckerman Institute and Statistics and Neuroscience Departments, Columbia University), andXaq Pitkow (Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University). These PIs bring together expertise from a wide variety of disciplines, including artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, statistics, neuroscience, physics, and cognitive science. They will work with a large team of researchersto tackle the limitations and challenges of current machine learning systems, including learning with limited data, reasoning about causality and uncertainty, and lifelong learning--all hallmarks of biological systems--while also pushing the boundaries of our understanding of how brains compute and learn.

ARNI will bridge the current significant gaps between artificial and biological networks and make room for a broad, diverse range of applications, from the industrial sector, such as robust, interpretable medical decisions and smarter home assistants; to societal applications, such as better social safety nets and assistive multimodal systems to help the vulnerable; to scientific discoveries such as providing hypotheses about brain function and creating powerful tools for extracting insights from massive data.

Thanks to new AI algorithms, our knowledge of neuroscience and cognitive science expands every day, said Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of Columbia Engineering. And with our growing knowledge of the brain and cognitive science, we have better AI algorithms, making progress on important applications that impact our world. ARNI aims to overcome current limitations in AI while also introducing modern AI into neuroscience, foundational machine learning, and cognitive science. Engineers are pivotal for applying scientific insights to real-world problems, and we look forward to the groundbreaking discoveries that will come from this exciting large-scale collaboration. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for helping us create this modern cross-disciplinary arsenal, converging to generate new insights and advance this very important, emerging field.

Richard Zemel, the Director of ARNI and the Trianthe Dakolias Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia Engineering, has been integral in the development of AI technology, most recently as the co-founder and Research Director of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His research spans machine learning and its interaction with neuroscience and cognitive science, as well as robust and fair machine learning. He noted that robust and fair machine learning is critical for using these new AI tools to improve society.

A key characteristic of our approach is a focus on developing interpretable models, often based on causal approaches, that are cognitively grounded, given our research on the brain, Zemel said. This will lead to the development of trustworthy systems that can explain their reasoning to end users in terms they understand. This is critical in high-stakes applications such as healthcare, law, and in support of vulnerable populations.

The institute will provide educational and research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral trainees, within and at the interface of AI, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Outreach partners, including the Neuromatch Academy and the New York Hall of Science, will help inform the public of these new developments and teach critical skills to the next generation of students.

Since 1864, theFu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University has been a resource to the world for major advances in human progress. Today, Columbia Engineering is a leading engineering school and a nexus for high-impact research. Embedded in New York City, the School convenes more than 250 faculty members and more than 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students from around the globe to push the frontiers of knowledge and solve humanitys most pressing problems.

In collaboration with Columbia'sZuckerman Institute, the ARNI team includes leading senior investigators and visionaries in the field of theoretical and cognitive neuroscience. The Zuckerman Institute brings together diverse researchers whose expertise spans a wide range of interdisciplinary neuroscience research areas, providing an unsurpassed intellectual environment, multi-level support, and opportunities for interaction.

The U.S. National Science Foundation propels the nation forward by advancing fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. NSF supports research and people by providing facilities, instruments, and funding to support their ingenuity and sustain the U.S. as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2022 budget of $8.8 billion, NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities, and institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 40,000 competitive proposals and makes about 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with industry, Arctic and Antarctic research and operations, and U.S. participation in international scientific efforts.www.nsf.gov

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Team Led by Columbia University Wins $20M NSF Grant to Develop AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence - Columbia University

Computer scientists who helped build the foundations of todays artificial intelligence technology are warning of its dangers, but that doesnt mean they agree on what those dangers are or how to prevent them.

Humanitys survival is threatened when smart things can outsmart us, so-called Godfather of A.I. Geoffrey Hinton said at a conference Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After retiring from Google so he couldspeak more freely, the 75-year-old Hinton said hes recently changed his views about the reasoning capabilities of the computer systems hes spent a lifetime researching.

These things will have learned from us, by reading all the novels that ever were and everything Machiavelli ever wrote, how to manipulate people, Hinton said, addressing the crowd attending MIT Technology Reviews EmTech Digital conference from his home via video. Even if they cant directly pull levers, they can certainly get us to pull levers.

I wish I had a nice simple solution for this, but I dont, he added. Im not sure there is a solution.

Fellow A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, co-winner with Hinton of thetop computer science prize, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that hes pretty much aligned with Hintons concerns brought on by chatbots such as ChatGPT and related technology, but worries that to simply say Were doomed is not going to help.

The main difference, I would say, is hes kind of a pessimistic person, and Im more on the optimistic side, said Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal. I do think that the dangersthe short-term ones, the long-term onesare very serious and need to be taken seriously by not just a few researchers but governments and the population.

There are plenty of signs that governments are listening. The White House has called in the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to meet Thursday with Vice President Kamala Harris in whats being described by officials as a frank discussion on how to mitigate both the near-term and long-term risks of their technology. European lawmakers are also accelerating negotiationsto pass sweeping new A.I. rules.

But all the talk of themost dire future dangershas some worried that hype around superhuman machineswhich dont yet existis distracting from attempts to set practical safeguards on current A.I. products that are largely unregulated.

Margaret Mitchell, a former leader on Googles A.I. ethics team, said shes upset that Hinton didnt speak out during his decade in a position of power at Google, especially after the 2020 ouster of prominent Black scientist Timnit Gebru, who had studied the harms of large language models before they were widely commercialized into products such as ChatGPT and Googles Bard.

Its a privilege that he gets to jump from the realities of the propagation of discrimination now, the propagation of hate language, the toxicity andnonconsensual pornography of women, all of these issues that are actively harming people who are marginalized in tech, said Mitchell, who was also forced out of Google in the aftermath of Gebrus departure. Hes skipping over all of those things to worry about something farther off.

Bengio, Hinton and a third researcher, Yann LeCun, who works at Facebook parent Meta, were all awarded the Turing Prize in 2019 for their breakthroughs in the field of artificial neural networks, instrumental to the development of todays A.I. applications such as ChatGPT.

Bengio, the only one of the three who didnt take a job with a tech giant, has voiced concerns for years about near-term A.I. risks, including job market destabilization, automated weaponry and the dangers of biased data sets.

But those concerns have grown recently, leading Bengio to join other computer scientists and tech business leaders like Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in calling for a six-month pause on developing A.I. systems more powerful than OpenAIs latest model, GPT-4.

Bengio said Wednesday he believes the latest A.I. language models already pass the Turing test named afterBritish codebreaker and AI pioneer Alan Turings methodintroduced in 1950 to measure when A.I. becomes indistinguishable from a human at least on the surface.

Thats a milestone that can have drastic consequences if were not careful, Bengio said. My main concern is how they can be exploited for nefarious purposes to destabilize democracies, for cyber attacks, disinformation. You can have a conversation with these systems and think that youre interacting with a human. Theyre difficult to spot.

Where researchers are less likely to agree is on how current A.I. language systemswhich have many limitations, including a tendency to fabricate informationwill actually get smarter than humans.

Aidan Gomez was one of the co-authors of the pioneering 2017 paper that introduced a so-called transformer techniquethe T at the end of ChatGPTfor improving the performance of machine-learning systems, especially in how they learn from passages of text. Then just a 20-year-old intern at Google, Gomez remembers laying on a couch at the companys California headquarters when his team sent out the paper around 3 a.m. when it was due.

Aidan, this is going to be so huge, he remembers a colleague telling him, of the work thats since helped lead to new systems that can generate humanlike prose and imagery.

Six years later and now CEO of his own A.I. company called Cohere, which Hinton has invested in, Gomez is enthused about the potential applications of these systems but bothered by fearmongering he says is detached from the reality of their true capabilities and relies on extraordinary leaps of imagination and reasoning.

The notion that these models are somehow gonna get access to our nuclear weapons and launch some sort of extinction-level event is not a productive discourse to have, Gomez said. Its harmful to those real pragmatic policy efforts that are trying to do something good.

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A wave of A.I. luminaries are sending out grim warnings about the new tech but not everyone thinks the situation is so dire - Fortune