OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in which artificial intelligence bots can be made into subject matter experts that are “deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages.” Through this vision, the bots would be available to “personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.”

But a few students see things differently. They’re not only fearless about AI, they’re building their studies and future professional lives around it. While many of their teachers are scrambling to outsmart AI in the classroom, these students are embracing the technology, often spending hours at home, in classrooms and dorm rooms building tools they hope will launch their careers.

In a , ACT, the non-profit that runs the college entrance exam of the same name, found that nearly half of high school students who’d signed up for the June 2023 exam had used AI tools, most commonly ChatGPT. Almost half of those who had used such tools relied on them for school assignments. 

The 74 went looking for young people diving head-first into AI and found several doing substantial research and development as early as high school. 

The six students we found, a few as young as 15, are thinking much more deeply about AI than most adults, their hands in the technology in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. Many are immigrants to the West or come from families that emigrated here. Edtech podcaster Alex Sarlin, who also writes a newsletter focused on edtech and founded the consultancy , ������’t surprised by the demographics. He explained that while U.S. companies typically make headlines in AI, the phenomenon has “truly been a product of global collaboration, and many of its major innovators have been immigrants,” often with training and professorships at top North American universities.

These young people are programming everything from autonomous bicycles to postpartum depression apps for new mothers to 911 chatbots, homework helpers and Harry Potter-inspired robotic chess boards. 

All have a clear message about AI: Don’t fear it. Learn about it.

Isabela Ferrer

Age 17

Hometown Bogota, Colombia

School MAST Academy, Miami, Fla.

What she’s working on: A high school junior at MAST, a public magnet high school focused on maritime studies and science, Ferrer plans to return to Colombia this spring and study computer science in college. She has been working with a foundation called that takes in abandoned and abused children in her home country. She’s developing an AI tool to help the children learn how to read and write Spanish more easily.

“They enter a public school system that expects them to know how to read, but they don’t have these skills,” she said. 

Ferrer is also considering adding more features in the future, such as one that uses AI voice recognition to identify trauma in a student’s voice. 

Once she graduates, she’d like to take a gap year to “get a little more involved in the Colombian startup ecosystem and culture. I also want to travel internationally and possibly keep working on projects like the one I’m working on right now, but on an international scale.” 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “Something I think most people don’t get about AI is that it’s very accessible to everyone,” Ferrer said. “Coding API [application programming interface, which allows two applications to talk to each other] and creating AI models for any specific purpose is very easy and, if done correctly, can be beneficial for different purposes.” 

All the same, she also worries that AI is often used to tackle “very superficial problems” like productivity or data processing. “But I think there’s a huge opportunity to use these technologies to solve real problems in the world … There’s a huge opportunity to close different gaps that exist in emerging markets and in developing countries. And it’s very worth exploring.” 

Shanzeh Haji

Age 16

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Bayview Secondary School, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Once she learned about postpartum depression, Haji began talking to new mothers and family members, including her own mother, who had experienced it. “I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it.” Haji finished coding the AI chatbot for the as-yet unnamed app and is working on the symptom recognition platform. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “If you look at some of the people who are working in AI and some of the significant impact that AI has made on so many different problems,” she said, “whether it be climate change or medicine or drug discovery, you can just see that AI has significant potential — it can literally transform our lives in a positive way. It really allows for this radical innovation. And I feel like people see more of the negative side of artificial intelligence rather than the positive and the significance that it has on our lives.” 

Aditya Syam

Age 20

Hometown Mumbai, India

School Cornell University

What he’s working on: A math and computer science double major, Syam is part of a longstanding team at Cornell that is developing an AI-powered, self-navigating, , basically a robot bike. “The kinds of applications we are thinking of for this are deliveries and basically just getting things from point A to point B without having a human intervene at any point,” he said. Syam, who is working on the bike’s navigation team, has been honing its obstacle avoidance algorithm, which keeps it from hitting things. 

The project began about a decade ago, he said. “Back then, it was just a theory.” Now they plan to showcase an actual prototype of the bike this spring, probably in March or April, so everyone who has contributed to the project “can see what we’ve built.”

What most people misunderstand about AI: “It’s technology that’s been around for decades,” he said. “It’s just been rebranded in a different way.” ChatGPT, for instance, combines Natural Language Processing and Web access, which results in a kind of “miracle” product. “It seems so great — it can just pull something off the web for you, it can write essays for you, it can edit software code for you. But in its essence, it’s not that different from technologies that have been around before.”

Vinitha Marupeddi

Age 21

Hometown San Jose, Calif.

School Purdue University

What she’s working on: A senior studying computer science, data science and applied statistics, Marupeddi recently led two student teams — one in voice recognition and another in computer vision — developing a robotic, voice-activated modeled after , the 3-D animated game in the Harry Potter books in which the pieces come to life. “We were able to do a lot of high-level robotics using that one project, so I thought that was very cool,” she said. Though the game is still far from being playable, Marupeddi calls it a good use case “to get people interested in robotics and machine learning.” 

Last summer, she interned at a John Deere warehouse in Moline, Ill., where she was set free to work on any project that struck her fancy. Marupeddi looked around the warehouse and saw that Deere had a robot that was being used to track inventory, so she expanded its abilities to cover a wider area. She also worked on a computer vision algorithm that used security camera footage to detect how full certain areas of the warehouse were and determine how much more inventory they could hold.

What most people misunderstand about AI: ”Honestly, I think a good chunk of people are just obsessed with the cheating part of it. They’re like, ‘Oh, ChatGPT can just write my essay. It can do my homework. I don’t have to worry about it.’ But they don’t try to actually understand the material. The people that do use ChatGPT to understand the material are actually going to use it as tutors or use it to ask questions if they don’t understand something.” That divide, between those who reject AI and those who learn how to control it, could grow larger if unaddressed. But learning about AI, she said, will “give people the resources, if they have the drive.”

Vinaya Sharma

Age 18

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Castlebrooke Secondary School, Brampton, Ontario

What she’s working on: Actually, the better question might be: What ������’t she working on? Sharma, a high school senior, writes code like most of us speak. In part, her work is a response to how little challenge she gets in school these days. “After COVID, I feel schools have gone easier on students,” she said. “I skip school as much as I can so I can code in my room.” The result has been a flurry of applications, from an AI-powered chatbot to handle 911 calls to a power grid simulator to a pharmaceutical app to aid in drug discovery. 

The is still in search of customers, she said, but would be valuable especially in cases where multiple people are calling about the same emergency, such as a car crash. The AI would geolocate the calls and determine if callers were using similar words to describe what they saw. To those who balk at talking to a 911 chatbot, Sharma said the current system in Toronto is often backed up. “It’ll be 100% better than being put on hold and no one assisting you at all.”

The idea was born after she began talking to engineers and energy policymakers and realized that, in her words, “The engineers were very technical, looking at things on a scale of voltages and currents. And the policymakers had trouble communicating with these grid engineers. And I realized that that was one of the bottlenecks slowing down the process so much.” She used design principles pioneered by one of her favorite video games, , to give the two groups a drag-and-drop simulation that both could understand. 

Sharma got interested in drug discovery that Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has a rare form of muscular dystrophy that makes it difficult to walk. He’s investing $100 million on treatments and research for a cure. Sharma said she “fell down a research rabbit hole” and soon realized that the drug discovery process “is honestly broken. It takes more than a decade to bring a drug to market, and it costs, on average, $1 billion to $2 billion,” or about $743 million to nearly $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars.

Her app, BioBytes, aims to bring down both the cost and time needed to bring drugs to market. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “With any new emerging tech, there’s going to be bad actors that will abuse the system or use it for harm,” she said. “But personally I believe the pros outweigh it. Instead of taking these tools away from us in order to prevent these bad things from happening, I think that people need to realize that the tools are here and people are going to use them. So there needs to be a greater focus on education, of how to use the tools and how to use [them] for good and how it can actually support us.” 

Krishiv Thakuria 

Age 15

Hometown Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

School The Woodlands Secondary School, Mississauga

What he’s working on: Thakuria founded a startup called and is building a set of AI-powered learning tools to help students study more efficiently. The tools let users upload any class materials — study notes, a PDF of a textbook chapter or entire novel or even a teacher’s PowerPoint. From there they can create “an infinite set of practice questions” keyed to the course, Thakuria said. If students get stuck, they can click on an AI tutor customized to the material they uploaded.

The tutoring function is similar to Khan Academy’s AI-powered teaching assistant , but Thakuria said Aceflow’s tool has an advantage: Khanmigo only works, for now, on Khan Academy materials. “In a lot of classes, teachers teach content in very different ways,” he said. “If you can personalize an AI tool to study the material of your teachers, you get learning that’s far more personalized and far more relevant to you, making your studying sessions more effective.” Aceflow users can also create timed study sessions, something neither Khanmigo nor ChatGPT users can currently do.

The new tool is being beta-tested by a focus group of 20, with a 1,400-person waitlist, he said. He and his partners plan to offer it on a “freemium” model, with charges for premium features. Even paying a small amount for unlimited use of the tool makes it available to many families who can’t afford a tutor, Thakuria said, since private tutoring can cost upwards of $10,000 a year. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: That its impact on education will be “binary,” he said. People believe “it’s either a good thing or a bad thing. I think that it can do both. For all the people who worry about AI being a bad thing, I would argue that, well, a hammer can be a bad thing when you give your kid a hammer for the first time to help you out with carpentry work. You have to teach your kid how to use it, right? And without teaching your kid how to use a tool, the tool is not going to be used properly, and that hammer is going to break something.”

It’s the same with AI. “If we can teach kids that smoking is bad for the body, we should teach kids that using AI in certain ways is bad for the brain. But we shouldn’t just focus on the negative effects, because then we’re closing off a future of using AI to solve educational inequity in so many beautiful ways. AI is a technology that can help us scale private tutoring to far more families than can actually afford it now. I think no one should underestimate the positive effects of AI while also safeguarding [against] the negative effects, because two things can be true at once.” 

On Nov. 28, 2020, the COVID-19 infection rate in Washoe County, Nevada, crested at 113 new cases per 100,000 residents. What that grim statistic meant to residents of Reno, Tahoe and the county’s other small cities depended greatly on their socioeconomic status. 

Employment on that day, for instance, was down 1 percent over January 2020 — low, but also deceptive. Employment among middle-income workers, those making $27,000 to $60,000 a year, was flat.

But among those making less than $27,000, it fell 22 percent. Meanwhile, for residents earning more than the area’s median income, employment actually rose an astonishing 19 percent.

That disparity is a glaring illustration of the so-called K-shaped economic recovery — one of the features of the pandemic recession that most troubles economists.

Past economic slumps have had more of a V-shape: an across-the-board dip followed by a relatively uniform and quick return to pre-recession conditions.

This time is different. For many high earners, those at the top of the K, COVID’s roiling effect on the economy was a blip. They may be working remotely, but they’re working. They are not, however, spending money the way they did before COVID-19, on restaurant meals, growlers, travel, mani-pedis, Uber rides — services their lower-income neighbors provide as they eke out a living.

The week that Reno’s case count peaked, small-business revenue in the area was down as much as 31 percent. But overall, consumer spending dropped as little as 8 percent. The money was still flowing — just not to the folks at the bottom of the K. 

It’s a problem nationwide, and , because many of the low-wage jobs lost since the start of the pandemic won’t be replaced, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs that will require a college or graduate degree, such as health care and technology occupations, are expected to grow. But those requiring a high school diploma or less — chief among them the restaurant, hotel and customer service jobs whose workers who have long been the spine of Reno’s economy — will continue to contract. Early indicators show COVID has accelerated this shift, which has broad implications for K-12 education. 

When the pandemic recession struck, economists John Friedman and Raj Chetty realized it looked different from previous downturns. While even small changes in the way money changes hands create ripples, COVID was a shockwave. Co-founders of — a team at Harvard University that researches income inequality and education’s potential to lift children out of poverty — they persuaded credit card companies, payroll processors and other businesses that track money as it moves through the economy in real time to turn over what are essentially trade secrets. Using that information, the researchers built a nationwide online pandemic tracker capable of providing a down-to-the-day snapshot of who is spending and who is struggling, by income level, city, state and county and, in some instances, by zip code.

The data quickly revealed stunning implications on virtually every front.

In Reno, as in many places, affluent residents at the top of the recession’s K shape bounced back right away — much more quickly than in a typical downturn. But their new spending patterns crippled the businesses that supported their lower-income neighbors; those impoverished families on the bottom continue to struggle disproportionately on every front, beset by challenges long proven to be detrimental to children’s ability to learn in school.

Researchers, Friedman told The 74, fear the resulting losses — of jobs, of loved ones to COVID, of mental health supports and reliable food supplies — may have even more devastating impacts for children that schools were already failing to serve, with education’s potential for lifting a family out of poverty moving further out of reach. 

(Friedman and Chetty update the tracker as the underlying information changes. The data in this story was downloaded June 29, 2021.)

The Opportunity Insights tracker contains one academic dataset: student participation and progress on the math app Zearn, which one-fourth of the nation’s K-5 students have access to. Immediately after schools closed, use of the app among low-income students “completely dropped off,” notes Zearn CEO Shalinee Sharma. As they started logging on again, a yawning gap became apparent. A year into the pandemic, these students’ progress was behind where it should have been, while their wealthier peers were ahead 28 percent.

WATCH: Beth Hawkins details her latest investigation into COVID’s K-shaped recession and how the fallout will challenge America’s schools

New studies . and the nonprofit assessment concern found wide disparities between white/affluent students and their low-income peers/children of color. Depending on grade and subject, low-income students ended the 2020-21 school year with up to seven months of unfinished learning.

In many ways, because Reno’s economic development officials took steps after the Great Recession to address major shifts in the economy, the city is better positioned than most places to weather COVID’s economic shocks. In particular, the community’s leaders tapped the local school district to help train the workforce needed to fuel a clean energy hub, with its thousands of good jobs. 

The resulting ripples from that prescient decision are being felt as early as kindergarten. 

Gambling and quickie divorces

When Tesla announced it was to break ground in 2014 on a much-anticipated Gigafactory, where it would develop a new class of batteries that could free consumers from fossil fuels, the headlines wrote themselves.

“Reno, Nevada, may have just won one of the most coveted economic prizes in America,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle’s “” blog. 

“Tesla Motors’ $5 billion Gigafactory may be the best thing to happen to northern Nevada since the silver rush of the 1850s,” . 

The $1.2 billion state incentive package that sealed the deal was a “” on lessening Nevada’s dependence on casinos, according to the magazine Area Development Site and Facility Planning. 

The anticipated jackpot — $100 billion in economic growth over the next two decades — “,” quipped the news site Teslarati.

The city, the stories noted, beat out glitzier locations because of its easy freeway and rail access to Tesla’s flagship Bay Area facilities, its lack of corporate income taxes and even its status as the jumping-off spot for the Burning Man. The pundits weren’t kidding about this last selling point: Like lots of Silicon Valley technocrati, Tesla founder Elon Musk himself is a “Burner” — a moniker analysts explained earnestly in auto industry publications. 

But in the same breath where they mentioned the good jobs the tech boom would create, the pundits decried the poor state of Nevada’s education systems. The deal the state and Musk eventually arrived at would require that half the jobs under Tesla’s control — 6,500 permanent positions and thousands more to build the Gigafactory — be filled by Nevada residents. But the state’s schools were not graduating students with the necessary skills. 

Nevada has the smallest higher education system in the nation, with a correspondingly low rate of postsecondary enrollment. Last year, Nevada students posted the nation’s lowest average score on the ACT college entrance exam, at 17.9. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card, Nevada students outperformed only their peers in Louisiana, New Mexico, Alaska and Washington, D.C. 

Historically, state leaders felt little urgency to confront the problem. An economy centered on gambling and quickie divorces put no pressure on public education institutions at any level to graduate students with skills beyond those needed to work in the gaming and hospitality industries. 

“There was … a demand side to the problem,” Elliot Parker, then the head of the Department of Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno, wrote in the in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. “Since before the crash, many young people without a degree could earn above-average wages working in casinos or construction, at least for a while.”

For 50 years, a near-monopoly on legal gambling helped the state weather economic swings. Even after the number of Native American casinos began to rise elsewhere, Las Vegas continued to appeal to tourists. But not Reno. 

In 2000, Californians voted to allow tribal casinos to offer slot machines and card games, paving the way for them to build resorts. No longer was there a compelling reason for northern Californians, Reno’s chief visitors, to make the trip across the state line. The region’s gambling revenue fell by two-thirds, a big drop at any time but especially hard to overcome once the Great Recession struck in 2008. Unemployment soared to 14 percent in 2010 — the worst in the country. By 2011, home values had fallen by 58 percent, leaving 70 percent of mortgage holders underwater and devastating construction, until then the metro area’s other major source of jobs.

In 2012, then-Gov. Brian Sandoval for diversifying the state’s economy. He proposed investments in higher education but said that wouldn’t be enough. Apprenticeships and other programs to provide job skills certification to students not necessarily seeking a college degree would be an important part of broadening the state’s employment base. 

To that end, he asked the state’s underperforming K-12 schools to work with regional economic development agencies to bolster career and technical education, or CTE, and make sure the training programs actually taught the skills needed by the employers that regional officials were trying to entice.

As an example of the kind of strategy needed, Sandoval singled out Washoe County Public Schools’ , then a relatively new initiative to offer four-year high school programs with specific career focuses. Students who choose one of the themed courses of study can earn college credit and industry-approved job credentials in fields such as agriculture, engineering, information technology and health sciences.

In creating CTE programs, districts and states face several pitfalls, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. The first is ensuring that offerings both engage students and are aligned to employers’ needs — an effort that is now required under the federal . Programs that achieve this, he says, are relatively rare. The second is avoiding the biased tracking of generations past, when schools placed disproportionate numbers of economically disadvantaged students and youth of color in vocational training programs to prepare them for low-wage jobs, rather than advanced academics that led to higher education. 

In Washoe County Public Schools, the district that includes Reno, shows that boys make up 52 percent of enrollment and 56 percent of CTE participants. Some 44 percent of students are white, as are 48 percent of program participants, while Latino students are 37 percent of CTE enrollment and 43 percent of the overall student body.

The district offers 36 CTE programs in 12 high schools, falling into six broad groupings: agriculture and natural resources; information technology and media; health science and public safety; business and marketing; education, hospitality and human services; and skilled and technical sciences. In many of the programs, seniors have the opportunity to earn an industry certification or other job credential, or complete an internship. Nearly one-fourth of 2020 12th-graders — 1,229 graduates — finished the three or more years of study in a particular field needed to be considered a “CTE completer.”

Washoe’s arts and communications programs are still its most popular CTE tracks, with more than 1,500 students participating in the 2019-20 school year. Information technology is a close second. While the number of students enrolled in traditional career programs such as education and hospitality remains high, interest in more cutting-edge offerings is growing. Programs geared toward the region’s economic development efforts include manufacturing, with 800 participants; transportation and logistics, with 575; science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) with 550, and 900 in health sciences.

High school offerings are planned using economic development data that in most states guides decisions about whom public colleges and universities should train, and for what jobs. The Economic Development Agency of Western Nevada provides the district with weekly reports on job openings, the wages those jobs are likely to pay and which fields are poised to grow or shrink. 

The nearly 8,000 students in Washoe’s CTE programs can study clean energy technologies like wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower, automation, greenhouse management, environmental engineering, manufacturing and, of course, automotive technology. Opened in 2002, the Academy of Arts, Careers and Technologies is entirely career-focused and enrolls students from anywhere in the county. A second all-CTE high school is scheduled to open in fall 2023. 

Before the pandemic, two-thirds of district elementary schools had robotics clubs, with offerings ranging from simple computer coding games to First Lego League and First Robotics, a competition in which students have a short time to build an industrial-size robot that will compete against other teams in a field game.

Incorporating economic forecasting into school planning has been a game-changer, says Josh Hartzog, the director of the department in charge of the programs: “Where do our schools need to be positioned 10, 20, 30 years from now, given that we have no idea what the economy will look like?”

Equipping today’s students with career credentials is terrific, he says. But the real key to future prosperity is to make sure they graduate with skills like critical-thinking, problem-solving, entrepreneurial drive and ability to refine ideas that will increase the odds they will create their own high-tech innovation or start their own businesses.

The robotics club effect

As the Gigafactory began to rise from the desert, Tesla founder Musk was vocal about whom he wanted working in it. A track record of “exceptional achievement” was his chief qualification. “There’s no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school,” Musk — — told the . “If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it’s not necessarily the case.”

Still under construction, the plant may, at 10 million square feet, eventually be the world’s largest building. Right now, the facility is about 30 percent complete, with the remainder to be designed around innovations gleaned from the work taking place inside now. Musk hopes his exceptional achievers can conjure the Holy Grail of clean, renewable energy: batteries that are greener, cheaper, smaller and capable of powering everything from cell phones to cars to homes.

When Tesla’s first electric cars were introduced in 2008, their price tags — often six figures — put them out of reach of most customers. One reason the cars were so expensive was the cost of producing the lithium-ion batteries they run on. If the company could reduce the cost of the batteries by 30 percent by bringing research and production under one roof, Tesla could produce cars for middle-class drivers. Indeed, the first $35,000 Model 3 rolled off the assembly line in 2017.

The batteries are cheaper, but inside the Gigafactory, the quest for better ones not reliant on cobalt — expensive and problematic to mine — continues, with the first production lines . A host of high-tech employers including Google, Apple, Panasonic and Intuit have set up shop in the Gigafactory’s shadow, hoping to capitalize on similar innovations and creating fierce competition for skilled labor. 

The feedback loop created by the new employers, the region’s economic development officials and the K-12 school system could be a positive departure from past CTE practices, which too often result in re-creating the low-skill vo-tech programming of the post-World War II era, says Carnevale. 

“Employer involvement is great, but it’s kind of like love,” he says. “Everyone wants it and there is never enough. They’re very fickle. They don’t work for you.” 

One reason he’s optimistic about Washoe’s programs is that instead of focusing on job training per se, the partnership is capitalizing on hands-on experiences to motivate students to develop the traits and intellectual abilities that will ensure they leave high school ready for college or a skilled career.

As part of its agreement with the state, Tesla agreed to spend $37.5 million on K-12 education. As people started working in the Gigafactory, the company analyzed the performance evaluations of its most effective workers. What it found was that many had participated in robotics clubs as kids. 

Reno is awash in robots, says Amy Fleming, until recently the economic development agency’s director of workforce development and now with the Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation. Visitors to Tesla’s campus encounter self-driving vehicles, which stop to let them pass. One of the area’s employers makes robots that make other robots. Students who learn robotics and other high-tech manufacturing skills in high school will have no problem finding a good job. 

But as Tesla’s executives probed further into its high-performers’ experiences with the clubs, they found something else. The clubs’ competitive aspect teaches students to solve problems on the fly. They’re fun for kids of any age and draw a diverse array of participants, . Students compete, but they work together to do so. 

Accordingly, one of the things Tesla has funded is a robotics coordinator for Washoe schools.

In 2019, students at Reed High School won a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program, which rewards student inventors. Their proposal: to create a flywheel that would extract cigarette butts from storm sewers, preventing toxins within from poisoning fish in a nearby lake.

The senior who conceived of the idea went to the school’s energy technology classes to recruit volunteers. Many of those who joined the effort had participated in robotics clubs since middle school. The students used the grant money to test and refine the idea. 

“Once you identify that thread and start pulling on it, it’s like, ‘Oh, of course, this makes sense,” says Fleming. “It’s that engineer’s curiosity.” Students taught to continuously test and refine their creations, whether an invention or a process, she points out, are going to drive the innovations that will shape the economy in the years to come — and in the process, secure jobs that will place them firmly at the top of the K.

Reno’s success in reinventing itself as a high-tech hub and attracting associated growing industries is great, she says. But looking further out, the key to true long-term economic health is whether regional officials — and the school system — can nourish Reno’s blossoming startup sector. The same problem-solving and collaboration skills that make robotics club participants prized members of Tesla’s current workforce, Fleming says, will make today’s high school graduates the entrepreneurs whose innovations will keep the local economy nimble.

“Northern Nevada has made progress transitioning from service to production,” says Fleming. “As your community transitions from production to a knowledge-based economy, that’s crucial.” 

This article is part of a series examining COVID’s K-shaped recession and what it means for America’s schools. Read the full series here.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and The 74.

Lead images: Getty Images