college

The College of Engineers fears that it will remain like this forever

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The AVE to Extremadura is causing quite a few headaches, especially in the bottleneck represented by the part that connects with Castilla-La Mancha. And the provisional branch designed to advance the arrival of high speed to Extremadura without waiting for it to be resolved his complicated passage through Toledohas hit a new obstacle. According to share From ABC, the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports of Castilla-La Mancha demands written guarantees from the Ministry of Transport that this provisional branch will not end up replacing the definitive route. what has happened. The Ministry provisionally approved the informative study of the Pantoja-Bargas branch on May 19 and submitted it to public information through an announcement in the BOE five days later. Now, within this process of allegations, the College of Engineers of Castilla-La Mancha has requested that in the final resolution it be declared in writing that this work has a “strictly transitory” character, according to collect the group itself in a statement cited by ABC. What exactly is it about?. The branch is a connection of just over 18 kilometers between the Madrid-Seville high-speed line and the conventional Madrid-Valencia de Alcántara line. In practice, it would allow trains bound for Extremadura to leave Atocha, take advantage of the high-speed tracks to the Pantoja area and from there connect, via Bargas, with the route to Talavera de la Reina and Extremadura. This is what the Ministry proposes as a shortcut to speed up travel times without having to wait for the final design of the passage through Toledo to be finalized. Why is it important. The passage of high speed through Toledo has been blocked for years. Since the first study of the Madrid-Oropesa line was submitted to public information in 2020, the different allegations presented have forced the routes through Toledo and Torrijos to be revised several times, and in 2024 the City Council, the Provincial Council and the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha proposed alternatives that the Ministry considered important enough to commission a completely new study, according to explained The Extremadura Newspaper. Given the uncertainty of how long this process could take, the Government decided to take the fast track and design a provisional branch. A temporary patch. The College does not oppose the railway improvement to Extremadura, which it considers “strategic” for territorial cohesion, but warns of the risk that a work intended as a temporary patch ends up, in practice, becoming the permanent solution. Its main argument is based on the deadlines, since after 32 months of work it would still be necessary to add the environmental processing, the drafting and approval of projects, the bidding and the tests prior to start-up. Times that, according to the groupthey could dilate enough that the branch ends up settling by default. Money. The provisional branch has a tender budget of 333.9 million euros, a figure that represents 60.8% of what the Toledo Central alternative would cost (549.2 million) and 48.1% of the Toledo Exterior alternative (694 million), according to share from the middle. If the two infrastructures are finally built (first the branch and then a definitive solution through Toledo), the joint investment would be between 883 and 1,028 million euros, without counting price reviews, maintenance, operation or a possible partial dismantling of the branch once it becomes obsolete. What engineers ask for. Beyond the complaint, the College poses that: The Ministry compares all possible scenarios, including the option of directly accelerating the final solution and launching it in phases. That the risk that the provisional work ends up being consolidated be incorporated into the analysis. That it be better detailed how the service will operate during the transitional stage, with frequencies, stations, travel times and compatibility with the trains that currently circulate between Madrid and Toledo. That both the branch line and the future route leave open a connection between the Extremadura and Andalusia lines, which would allow travel between both communities without passing through Madrid. And now what. Despite the allegations, the project continues with its environmental and administrative procedures. What they do add is political pressure on the Ministry at a time when Europe’s objective is to complete the Madrid-Lisbon journey in about five hours in 2030, and in 2034 the aim is to lower the three hours between Madrid and Badajoz. To unblock the disagreement, the College has offered to participate in a technical table together with the Ministry, the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha, the City Council and the Provincial Council of Toledo, and Adif, with the idea that the provisional branch serves to pressure the final agreement, and not to postpone it indefinitely. Cover image | Renfe In Xataka | Salvador Galve, railway expert: “When I go from Zaragoza to Barcelona, ​​I go by car”

College students are rapidly losing a critical skill: reading.

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My students can’t read. It is the title of the opinion column in which Tyler Jagtuniversity literature professor, narrates the situation currently found in his classrooms. Many students are not able to read or maintain the plot of a 20-page text. He believes that AI and mobile phones are to blame. 20 pages is too much. This teacher says that he has been assigning the same task to his rhetoric and writing students for five years: reading a 20-page article. However, this year none of his students finished the work and they were not repeaters, but rather university students who had passed the entrance exams. One of them was honest and admitted that the text was too long and “constantly missed the point of the article.” Jagt acknowledges that the complaint that students do not know how to read is common among teachers, but according to him this time things are serious and there is data that corroborates it. The tests. According to the results of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), students in grade 12 (equivalent to a 2nd year of Baccalaureate in Spain) obtained the lowest score on the reading test since the assessment began in 1992. A third of the participants reached the basic level, which means that they are likely not able to “draw general conclusions based on concepts explicitly presented in a text.” Younger students are even worse off. According to a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation70% of fourth grade students (like fourth grade) are not able to read fluently. That is in the United States, but in Spain the situation is not ideal either. According to the OECDat least a third of the Spanish population has level 1 reading comprehension, which means that “they can only understand very short texts with a minimum of distracting information.” A report from the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie)Spaniards between 25 and 34 years old, who have studied more than their parents, advance much more slowly in basic skills. It’s technology’s fault. Or at least that is what the author maintains, specifically the emergence of smartphones and, more recently, AI. The idea that technology makes us stupid has been accompanying us for decades and with the emergence of AI, technological panic has intensified. That students are using AI to do their jobs is something we already knew. What is still not clear is what consequences it can have on a cognitive level. There is no evidence that technology produces cognitive damage (yes changes), but it is also true that until now we have not had a technology capable of doing everything that AI does. Debt and cognitive surrender. They are two concepts that emerged from recent studies. The first, cognitive debtcomes from a MIT research titled “Your brain on ChatGPT”. Participants who used ChatGPT had the worst brain performance when completing a task that involved writing essays. The researchers conclude that using AI as a complete substitute for mental effort can weaken our neural connections. The idea of cognitive surrender is mentioned in a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania. According to researchers, cognitive surrender arises when we delegate our thinking to AI and accept its answers too confidently. Another study from the University of Oxford saw how If we use AI and then it is taken away from us, our performance worsens. not so fast. There is an important nuance and that is that the concept of “using AI” is very varied. We can use it without checking the answers and accepting everything it tells us or we can use it as a tool in our creative process. In fact, in several of these studies, participants who used AI as support obtained scores very similar to those of the group that did not use AI. Therefore it is not whether we use it or not, it is how we use it. However, the arguments in favor of using AI in educational environments are becoming fewer and fewer. There was a study that said using chatbots like ChatGPT had a positive impact on learning, but was recently withdrawn due to “concerns regarding discrepancies”. Come on, the biggest argument of the defenders of educational AI went down the drain. The other culprit. As we said, this professor also points to smartphones as responsible for this situation. Appointment a 2017 study in which they verified how the simple presence of the mobile phone reduced the “available cognitive capacity”. He also cites another 2022 study in which they saw that reading on a smartphone was associated with prefrontal overload and decreased concentration. Tiktokize the school. The problem is not cell phones, but social networks and doomscrolling that hijacks our attention. We have become accustomed to consuming pills of information in the form of tweets, posts, reels and tiktoks. In this context, a 20-page text is much, much. Tyler Jagt is adapting to this reality by dividing work into two, so they have to read less, and assigning specific tasks so they don’t lose track as much. Image | Siora Photography in Unsplash In Xataka | “I can’t stop”: the addiction to talking to AI is already here and there are even support groups to quit it

College students are getting more A’s than at any other time in history. There is a suspect

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Some already call it “grade inflation.” It is a phenomenon that should make us happy—what grades our young people get—but that is increasingly worrying in the educational world. University students have never gotten as many A’s as they have until now, but in reality the credit is not theirs. Using ChatGPT and other AI tools It is distorting its capacity and putting the educational system at a global level in check (again). Note inflation. Igor Chirikov published in May 2026 a study in which he talked precisely about how artificial intelligence is causing grade inflation. In his research, he analyzed the data of half a million students in 319 subjects at the University of Texas, and detected something surprising: since 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the number of outstanding students at that institution has grown by 30%. But not everyone gets the same grade. In his conclusions, Chirikov explained how “these increases” in the grade “were greater when homework had a greater influence on the grades, which is consistent with the theory that AI is replacing the student’s work, and not improving learning.” The effect is greater, for example, in courses such as Economics or Journalism, where there are many written assignments to be submitted, but also in Computer Science courses and others in which programming subjects are taught. Both ChatGPT and other AI models are an increasingly popular (and effective) tool for students who want to improve their grades at all costs. perfect homework. The researchers indicate that a displacement of cognitive tasks is occurring here. The student no longer uses technology to support the learning process, but rather completely delegates many of the tasks that he should do to the AI. Essays, research papers and programming practices What should they give to teachers? They are becoming more and more perfect. Mirage. That theoretical brilliance is a mirage. Controlled studies like this one reveal that students who systematically use AI in their assignments end up suffering a 17% drop in their grades when they are subjected to a classic in-person pencil and paper exam on the same subject. ChatGPT becomes a superpower, but without it, grades drop clearly. The problems grow. Grade inflation is not a new phenomenon. In the US, university centers suffer structural pressures: if they are strict, they receive criticism from students, which jeopardizes future students wanting to attend them. This contributed to the fact that at Harvard, for example, A’s went from representing 24% of grades in 2005 to 60.2% in the spring of 2025. ChatGPT, write me my TFG. In Spain and Europe the panorama is similar. 89% of university students admit to using AI to write reports or Final Degree Projects (TFG), according to a recent GoStudent survey. Meanwhile, 61% of teachers confess that they do not have tools or software to confirm that whoever has done a job has not done it with AI. They are all too good students. When the outstanding becomes something totally normal and so frequent, this grade loses its power of differentiation. The filter previously made it clear which students were exceptional, something that was also vital for companies’ search for talent. Now those looking for these talents have reacted: in the US, job portals such as HandShake show that job offers that require a minimum GPA (average score of the university degree) of 3.5 out of 4 have skyrocketed from 9% in 2020 to 25% in 2026. As all university students are exceptional, companies look for the most exceptional among the exceptional. No more A’s. This distrust of job and homework qualifications has made some institutions prefer to return to the past. harvard will apply a notable reform in fall 2027 and will limit outstanding grades to a maximum of 20% per course, while honors enrollment will also depend on a certain percentile instead of via grades. 85% of the students opposed to these measures, but at Harvard they will continue with the measures although they indicate that they will review their application three years after the start of their application. everyone cheats. At the prestigious Princeton University the phenomenon is equally worrying. About half of its students They used AI to write their essays. 15% admitted to using AI to cheat in school, and 65.5% “knew a classmate was cheating and did not report it.” Everyone seems to be cheating at the university, as indicated in an article in The New York Intelligencer as early as May 2025. The university has just approved a proposal that would allow supervised exams, something that would break a 133-year tradition in which the students themselves monitored each other to prevent others from cheating. The “Code of Honor” of this institution has not been able to with the avalanche of AI. Image | Christian Lendl In Xataka | Something is happening in the computer science major in Silicon Valley: enrollment falls for the first time in 20 years

Why more and more Gen Z students prefer trades over college degrees

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Forty years ago China decided to invest in training millions of engineers who have turned out Be your ace in the hole in the AI ​​race. In fact, it is the country with the highest number of STEM graduates in the world and while ups its ante on doctoratesboth the government of the Asian giant and generation Z have begun to pay attention to vocational training. The graduate bubble. The Chinese Ministry of Education counted in November 2024 that in 2025 there would be a historic number of graduates: 12.22 million, how to collect the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. With this panorama, the competition is fierce, also taking into account that The United States has made visas more difficult for those who decide to migrate. The Chinese Ministry of Education is offering different measures and support systems in the form of recruitment events in key regions and industries to alleviate unemployment among university students. It doesn’t seem enough. Labor demand changes. On the other hand, companies are changing their needs: official data show that the demand for people with a university degree fell from 20.3% to 17.4% last year. However, the number of those who had completed vocational training rose from 8.5 to 11%. The FP is so sought after that this segment was the one that had the highest rate of job offers in 2024. It is already a matter of state. Not only is it a labor market issue, but it is also a guideline that points towards a “Strong Educational Nation.” That is the objective of new state plan in education (2024 – 2035): China makes vocational training a state priority, committing to concrete measures such as more funding, improvements in facilities and the development of a modern skills system. In short, vocational training has the same importance as academic training to sustain technological self-sufficiency. As already happened in Europein China they are also stopping stigmatizing VET as an alternative for students with fewer resources or worse grades. The return on investment is no longer profitable. Sixth Tone picks up the testimonies of several young people and their experiences such as that of Ke Chenxi, who scored high enough on the gaokao (something like the PAU) to go to university, but he chose to enroll in a vocational school. Yes, economic and family circumstances were partly to blame, but also because the Wuhan Vocational Institute program offered shorter early childhood education courses, intensive internships, and faster incorporation into the labor market. Associate Professor of Shanghai Fudan University Gao Shanchuan speaks directly from the “income effect”, that is, from the belief that by going to university you will have a higher salary: “What is changing is that young people are beginning to evaluate education in a more pragmatic way. If vocational training leads to stable jobs and a reasonable income, their social prestige will improve over time.” Zhuo Ping is a teacher at Ke School and is clear that although VET is not going to replace universities, it does encourage students to choose according to their aptitudes and not just prestige: “We went from focusing solely on credentials to more substantially recognizing ability.” Wuhan is the epicenter of change. The Chinese city is a true higher education cluster, with more than 80 universities and a strong weight of technical careers. But also where VET is emerging: those who obtain their degree in trades already find work as quickly as their university counterparts, with a successful access rate to the labor market of over 98% in some institutions. And they do so by accessing the labor market faster and with more experience. That VET centers in Wuhan work closely with local companies to design training according to the needs of the industry and not according to rigid and theoretical itineraries will surely help. In fact, in Sixth Tone they pick up the statements of a human resources supervisor, who experiments with live reality, highlighting their good performance, adaptation and skill, although they have pending issues such as teamwork. In Xataka | China promised them very happy with day 996. Until they realized that it was a shot in the foot In Xataka | China has a huge youth unemployment problem. So much so that some people pay to pretend to work Cover | Green Liu and TruckRun

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