The last decade or so has seen schools and governments alike working on a substantial question: To what degree should students be allowed access to their phones? France has been among those leading the charge, requiring smartphones to be turned off during school hours since 2018. Now, the country is taking things a step further, insisting that students leave their phone in lockers or pouches, The Guardian reports. 

France's education minister and former prime minister Élisabeth Borne announced the new regulation, which will go into effect in middle schools come September. "At a time when the use of screens is being widely questioned because of its many harmful effects, this measure is essential for our children’s wellbeing and success at school." 

The decision follows two key events, a pilot program reported on by multiple sources and published expert recommendations. The former involved 180 middle schools comprised of over 50,000 students. Over the last six months, participants have done a "digital pause," putting their phones in a locker or pouch that is unlocked when they finish the day. Borne announced that the trial was successful in improving school's atmospheres. She added that schools will choose whether to use lockers or pouches, costing them up to a few thousand euros (€3,000 equals $3,331, for example). 

The 2024 report, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, issued recommendations including no smartphone use for children under 13 years of age and no "conventional" social media access until they reach 18. The recommendations, led by a neurologist and an addictions psychiatrist, additionally pushed for limited to no screen-time for children, depending on their age. 

The UK and the US are among the other countries exploring similar school-based measures to France. In 2024, the UK government released guidance for schools on banning phones in educational spaces. Both New York and California's governors have also supported measures to limit smartphone use in schools. 

• Wharton has introduced a new concentration for undergrads and a major for MBA students focused on AI.
• The new AI curriculum includes classes on machine learning, ethics, data mining, and neuroscience.
• "Companies are struggling to recruit talent with the necessary AI skill," Wharton's vice dean said.

The nation's oldest business school is evolving for the new, AI-powered world.

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has unveiled a new MBA major and undergraduate concentration in artificial intelligence. It will be available to students in the fall of 2025 as one of 21 MBA majors alongside options like accounting, finance, marketing, and real estate. For undergraduates who earn a degree in economics, it'll be one of 19 concentrations.

The new curriculum will help students develop both a technical understanding of how businesses are using AI and a more conceptual sense of the technology's economic, social, and ethical implications. Students will be required to take classes in machine learning and ethics and choose from a list of electives spanning data mining to marketing to neuroscience.

One of the required courses will be "Big Data, Big Responsibilities: Toward Accountable Artificial Intelligence," an ethics class.

"Foundations of Deep Learning" will be a new class in the statistics and data science department, giving students an introduction to the technical foundations of AI, Wharton professor Giles Hooker, an advisor for the new AI curriculum, told Business Insider by email. It will cover the technology underpinning the AI boom, including topics from "what is a neural network and how to train it" to "generative AI" to "efficient deep learning" to ensure students have "a solid conceptual grasp on what goes on under the hood in modern AI models," according to the syllabus.

Wharton also updated the syllabi for existing classes, including the management course "Innovation, Change, and Entrepreneurship" and the marketing course "Introduction to Brain Science for Business."

In a university press release announcing the changes, Eric Bradlow, the vice dean of AI and Analytics at Wharton, said, "We are at a critical turning point where practical AI knowledge is urgently needed."

"Companies are struggling to recruit talent with the necessary AI skills, students are eager to deepen their understanding of the subject and gain hands-on experience, and our faculty's expertise on the adoption and human impact of AI is unmatched," he said.

The intersection of AI and business

Wharton faculty began discussing a new AI curriculum last year, Hooker told BI.

In May 2024, Wharton launched the AI and Analytics Initiative to study possible changes to its curriculum, invest in new research, collaborate more with industries, and create open-source generative AI resources, according to Penn Today, the university's official news site.

Through the initiative, Wharton has launched the AI Research Fund to help faculty pursue research at the intersection of AI and business and the Education Innovation Fund to help faculty adopt AI in the classroom.

The initiative was also used to provide ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to all full-time and executive MBA students starting in the fall of 2024 — a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a business school and OpenAI.

In January, Wharton unveiled the Accountable AI Lab, which will produce research on AI governance, regulation, and ethics with a "practical focus on business applications."

Wharton therefore had several building blocks in place for a new curriculum, Hooker told BI. "A lot of what we had to do was to work out how to structure a useful and coherent path through what we offered and then see if there was anything we really needed to add," he said.

Students who graduate with an AI focus will ideally be adept in four areas, Hooker said. They'll have a strong technical knowledge of AI to assess the design and application of AI models in a business and be informed enough to keep up with new AI developments. They'll have a sense of how AI will impact business operations. They'll also have a handle on the ethics of data and automated decision-making and understand the legal frameworks governing AI.

Companies these days are hiring candidates who specialize in just one of these areas. For example, a company might hire an AI researcher to train large language models, a learning and development expert to teach teams how to use the technology or a lawyer who understands data privacy and regulations.

But graduates of Wharton's new program may emerge as a jack-of-all-AI-trades. Their skill sets will be tailored to a future workplace where adaptability might be more valuable than specialization.

"We expect the impact of AI on business to be long and deep. Even without new breakthroughs in human-like reasoning, we can expect AI methods to penetrate even further into business processes and our lives," Hooker said. "The careers and job titles associated with its penetration into business haven't yet been fixed."

Following the release of rival Anthropic's Claude for Education, OpenAI has announced that its $20 ChatGPT Plus tier will be free for college students until the end of May. The offer comes just in time for final exams and will provide features like OpenAI's most advanced LLM, GPT-4o and an all-new image generation tool. 

"We are offering a Plus discount for students on a limited-time basis in the US and Canada," the company wrote in a FAQ. "This is an experimental consumer program and we may or may not expand this to more schools and countries over time."

On top of the aforementioned features, ChatGPT Plus will offer students benefits like priority access during peak usage times and higher message limits. It'll also grant them access to OpenAI's Deep Research, a tool that can create reports from hundreds of online sources. 

AI tools have been widely adopted by students for research and other uses, with open AI recently saying that a third of young adults aged 18-24 already use ChatGPT, with much of that directed toward studies. Anthropic is going even farther than OpenAI to tap into that market with Claude for Education, by introducing a Learning mode specifically designed to guide students to a solution, rather than providing answers outright. 

Where Anthropic is positioning itself more as a tutor to students, OpenAI is simply giving them access to its most powerful research tools. That brings up the subject of academic integrity and whether AI tools are doing work that students should be doing themselves. Anthropic's approach may be more palatable to institutions — along with its Claude for Education launch, the company announced that it partnered with several universities and colleges to make the new product free for students. 

According to a recent Digital Education Council survey, as many as 86 percent of university students globally use artificial intelligence to assist with their coursework. It’s a staggering statistic that’s likely to have far-reaching consequences for years to come. So it’s not surprising to see a company like Anthropic announce Claude for Education, an initiative it says will equip universities to "play a key role in actively shaping AI's role in society."

At the heart of Claude for Education is a new Learning mode that changes how Anthropic’s chatbot interacts with users. With the feature engaged, Claude will attempt to guide students to a solution, rather than providing an answer outright, when asked a question. It will also employ the Socratic method in conversations, asking questions like “What evidence supports your conclusion?” as a way to guide users to understanding. All of this is powered by 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic’s new hybrid reasoning model, and tied to Claude’s Projects feature, which gives you a way to organize your chats around specific topics.

Claude for Education is available to all Pro users with an .edu email address. Additionally, Anthropic is partnering with Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as Champlain College to make Claude available to all students at those institutions. 

At the same time, the company is launching two new programs. The first, Claude Campus Ambassadors, gives students the chance to work directly with Anthropic to launch educational initiatives at their school. The second, meanwhile, will see Anthropic award API credits to students working on projects involving Claude. Separately, the company says it will work with Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning software, to increase access to tools universities are using to integrate AI into their teaching.