State of The Nation

Does graduate school pay off? Here's which degrees have the highest returns, study finds IEEE Spectrum Careers & Education IEEE Spectrum Careers & Education Why Stopping Short of a PhD Often Pays — and How AI Is Rewriting the Calculus A landmark 2025 NBER study confirms what many engineers have long suspected: the marginal return on an EE doctorate, once opportunity costs are factored in, is narrower than the credential implies — and a disrupting AI labor market is tightening the calculus further. April 4, 2026 | Analysis & Opinion BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Yale economist Joseph Altonji and Vassar's Zhengren Zhu, drawing on administrative records for 121 graduate degrees in Texas, finds that a master's degree in electrical engineering yields a cost-adjusted lifetime return of approximately 4 percent — and a PhD in EE, excluded from the study's scope because...

Every Major US Lunar Mission Explained, Including the Artemis II - Business Insider Deep Space Analysis · Special Report 2 April 2026 KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. | Artemis / SLS Program | Acquisition Policy | Commercial Space | Geopolitics Special Analysis — Human Deep Space Operations Congress Built a Jobs Program. NASA Called It a Moon Rocket. Now Both Face a Reckoning. Artemis II has restored American human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 54 years — aboard a vehicle assembled from shuttle-era throwaway engines, politically mandated heritage hardware, and Constellation program castoffs. The mission is real, the achievement genuine, and the architecture arguably a $100 billion monument to what happens when Congress specifies inputs instead of outcomes. With SpaceX Starship waiting in the wings and China advancing on a 2030 crewed lunar landing, the question is no longer whether America can reach the Moon —...