Cecilia Conrad

In 2023, when Yield Giving founder MacKenzie Scott wanted to give $250 million to 250 charities serving low-income households and people facing discrimination, she turned to Cecilia Conrad for help choosing which groups most deserved the grants. Conrad runs Lever for Change, a nonprofit that connects donors with organizations through 'open calls,' or competitions for funding, then brings in experts to evaluate applicants for financial soundness, impact, and effectiveness. It's a reversal of the typical invitation-only system most foundations use for grants, and gave, on the one hand, little-known nonprofits a shot at significant funding and, on the other, donors a chance to discover compelling new groups to support.
The upshot for Scott? Lever for Change identified so many promising organizations that last year she ended up more than doubling her initial pledge, giving away $640 million to 361 groups, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants.
Such is the transformative power of Conrad, a Stanford-trained economics professor-turned philanthropy executive who previously led the MacArthur Foundation's Fellows program, aka its 'Genius' grants. She founded Lever for Change in 2019 to dismantle barriers in philanthropy. 'There are donors who want to fund creative, effective organizations and creative, effective organizations who need funding but they have trouble finding each other,' Conrad says.
To date, Lever for Change, which has also advised LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has influenced $2.5 billion in donations to more than 500 charities. And more is coming: The organization is now vetting hundreds more charities to help Melinda French Gates decide how to allocate $250 million to improve women's health. 'We exist to help donors discover new ideas, new potential," Conrad says.

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This millennial was rejected from 200 jobs—now he makes millions charging wealthy families six-figures to get their kids into the Ivy Leagues

Like many Gen Zers today, after graduating from college, Christopher Rim was rejected from more than 200 job applications—including at top firms like Goldman Sachs and BCG. But, he says, 'that was the best thing that could have happened to me.' Now, he's making millions disrupting the $3 billion college consultancy industry. How much would you pay to help your child get accepted into Harvard, Stanford, or MIT? $10,000? What about $100,000, or even $750,000? Hundreds of families are paying six-figure price tags to a young millennial named Christopher Rim to get their kids into their top college choices. As the founder and CEO of college admissions consultancy group Command Education, Rim has become a wizard of sorts for how to crack the Ivy League code. Over the last five years, 94% of his clients have been accepted into their top three college choices. And while the $3 billion college consultancy industry may sound like another leg-up the rich have to get their children into schools, Rim says it's about helping students reach their dreams and unlock their potential. After all, on average, only about 5% of pupils who want to go to an Ivy League school actually get in. 'You have one chance. That's it,' the 30-year-old tells Fortune. 'You can't go back to college or apply to these selective universities again.' Unlocking potential is something that hits home in Rim's own story toward success, both in his own journey trying to attend an Ivy League school as well as trying to find his footing as a young graduate. As a public high school student in New Jersey, Rim was told he'd never be cut out for an Ivy League institution. While he admits himself that he wasn't the smartest kid in his class, he had a mission to attend Yale University, and decided to apply even when his guidance counselor pleaded with him to settle for Rutgers University, an in-state public school. Out of the nearly two dozen students from his school who applied to Yale, he was the only one who got in—despite having a lower GPA than the rest. As a student, he kept the ball rolling by charging high schoolers $50 to edit their admissions essays and advising them on how to strengthen their resumes and 'authentically stick out.' After his first two clients got into MIT and Stanford, he realized he might have a gift, and thus Command Education was born in 2015 in his New Haven, Conn., dorm room. However, Rim still wasn't sure it was the key to a post-grad career. Then came the time to apply for jobs. 'I applied to over 200 jobs senior year. All my friends were getting jobs at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, BCG, major corporations. I got none. I got zero,' he says. 'And that was the best thing to have that happen to me.' Instead of letting the rejection defeat him—like what happens to millions of young adults each year—Rim used it as motivation to help others reach their dream college, too. 'Everyone has this potential, and I was able to instill that confidence and belief and motivate them through the process,' Rim says. 'I think that was a major reason as to why my students succeeded, which, of course, led me to succeed with the business.' So far, Command Education has guided over 1,500 students into top-tier schools, with acceptance rates that soar far above the national average—more than seven times higher at places like Harvard, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. And with parents investing close to $100,000 on average for his services, Rim isn't just shaping student futures, he's built a booming business in the process. 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Meta's CFO describes her mortifying first day on the Morgan Stanley trading floor

Her first day on Morgan Stanley's trading floor, Susan Li was "mortified." Li, who is now Meta's CFO, started at the bank around two decades ago when she was just 19, after graduating from Stanford sooner than most of her peers. "When I showed up at Morgan Stanley for my first day, I was on the trading floor in the big Broadway headquarters at 1585, and the equivalent of an HRBP basically got the attention of everyone on the trading floor," Li told Stripe cofounder John Collison on his podcast Cheeky Pint. "And so she wanted everyone on the floor to stop and look at me and know that no one was to serve me any alcohol at any company gathering." It was about par for the course for the industry, she added. "So it was exactly the way you think about beginning your career on Wall Street, by being mortified," she said. The Meta CFO talked about some of the potential pros and cons of advancing through the education system so quickly. "Well, some might say, because I started kindergarten when I was four and I graduated from college when I was 19, that having 15 years of formal education is — I'm woefully under-educated, as it were, so I'm really just having to make up for that rough start," Li said. She was able to sprint through her education, she added, in part because the institutions she attended noticed when students needed different challenges to keep them engaged. "I was in a school system that identified when kids were bored in school and then just gave you opportunities to keep moving ahead, and my parents always took them," she said. Li first joined Meta in 2008, eventually rising to the rank of CFO at 36 years old, making her one of the youngest chief financial officers in an industry where the average age of people in similar positions is 53. Working for a Wall Street heavyweight When Li finally entered the professional circuit as a banker, she said she worked with Michael Grimes, the former head of global technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Grimes is currently a senior official at the United States Department of Commerce. Li said she remembered Grimes' energetic nature and curiosity, as well as his ability to outwork anyone. "Grimes is extraordinarily, very high-energy — applies that to a whole host of things," Li said. "You go talk to Michael about tech companies, about banking, about parenting, about why there should be more undergraduate sales programs in colleges in the country. He's got a point of view on everything, and he's endlessly curious." Morgan Stanley and Meta did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication. Li added that Grimes's behavior served as a sort of model for her own. "He is going to outwork you and outlearn you. It's actually a pretty spectacular thing as a young person starting in your career to see what excellence at this looks like," Li said.

Atlantic

a day ago

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The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting

The job of the future might already be past its prime. For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country's top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton's computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year. 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If the numbers are any indication, we might have passed peak computer science. Chris Gropp, a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has spent eight months searching for a job. He triple-majored in computer science, math, and computational science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and has completed the coursework for a computer-science Ph.D. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his degree, but he has found it almost impossible to secure a job. He knows of only two people who recently pulled it off. One sent personalized cover letters for 40 different roles and set up meetings with people at the companies. The other submitted 600 applications. 'We're in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist in the kind of AI that we're doing the revolution with, and I can't find anything,' Gropp told me. 'I found myself a month or two ago considering, Do I just take a break from this thing that I've been training for for most of my life and go be an apprentice electrician? ' Gropp is contending with a weak job market for recent college graduates in general and the tech sector in particular. Although employment for 22-to-27-year-olds in other fields has grown slightly over the past three years, employment for computer-science and math jobs in that age group has fallen by 8 percent. Not long ago, graduates from top comp-sci programs—such as those at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon—would have been fending off recruiters from Google and Amazon. Now, professors at those schools told me, their graduates are having to try much harder to find work. Gropp's dad, William Gropp, runs the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 'I can say, as the father of a computer-science master's degree holder with expertise in machine learning who is still looking for a job, that the industry is not what it used to be,' he told me. In the ultimate irony, candidates like Gropp might be unable to get jobs working on AI because AI itself is taking the jobs. 'We know AI is affecting jobs,' Rusinkiewicz, from Princeton, told me. 'It's making people more efficient at some or many aspects of their jobs, and therefore, perhaps companies feel they can get away with doing a bit less hiring.' Derek Thompson: Something alarming is happening to the job market The best evidence that artificial intelligence is displacing tech workers comes from the fact that the industry that has most thoroughly integrated AI is the one with such unusually high unemployment. Tech leaders have said publicly that they no longer need as many entry-level coders. Executives at Alphabet and Microsoft have said that AI writes or assists with writing upwards of 25 percent of their code. (Microsoft recently laid off 6,000 workers.) Anthropic's chief product officer recently told The New York Times that senior engineers are giving work to the company's chatbot instead of a low-level human employee. The company's CEO has warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level workers in the next five years. Kinder, the Brookings fellow, said she worries that companies soon will simply eliminate the entire bottom rung of the career ladder. The plight of the tech grads, she told me, could be a warning for all entry-level white-collar workers. Not everyone agrees that AI is causing the turbulence in the job market. The tech industry frequently goes through booms and busts. The biggest companies exploded in size when the economy was good. Now, with high interest rates and the specter of new tariffs, executives are likely holding off on expanding, and workers are reluctant to leave their job, says Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI instead of forces within their control, David Deming, an economics professor at Harvard, told me. 'Before we see big changes from AI in the labor market, companies have to internalize this new capability and change what they ask for. And that's the thing that I have not seen very much of,' he said. 'It could be AI, but we just don't know.' Enrollment in the computer-science major has historically fluctuated with the job market. When jobs are scarce, people choose to study something else. Eventually, there aren't enough computer-science graduates, salaries go up, and more people are drawn in. Prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than where they started. (And some universities, such as the University of Chicago, still haven't seen any enrollment drops.) Sam Madden, a computer-science professor at MIT, told me that even if companies are employing generative AI, that will likely create more demand for software engineers, not less. Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming's research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. 'It's actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don't know what the future holds,' Deming told me. 'You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that's going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.' Of course, when faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people take the opposite approach and pursue something with a sure path to immediate employment. The question of the day is how many of those paths AI will soon foreclose.