Smart investing principles

Some of our favorite local billionaires are putting money behind essential investments to give today’s young people the skills and credentials to fill the upwardly mobile jobs of tomorrow. A hearty thank you to Jim and Marilyn Simons for giving a record $75 million to the City University to build out their offerings in the field of artificial intelligence, and to Mike Bloomberg’s foundation for plowing $250 million into an ambitious program to connect high schools and hospitals across the country to prepare kids for direct entry into health-care careers.

Simons last year gave $500 million to SUNY’s Stony Brook University. It was there that Simons taught math before using his breakthrough quantitative trading models to make money hand over fist on Wall Street.

The largesse now headed CUNY’s way will go to bulk up computer science studies with a brand new master’s degree program and up to 25 new faculty members, as well as to help the nation’s largest urban university system participate fully in a new New York State consortium, launched by Gov. Hochul, intended to make our state a leader in the AI-related research and business development.

Unlike throwing millions and millions atop the already massive endowments of Harvard, Yale or Princeton, which disproportionately serve kids from wealthy and privileged backgrounds, boosting CUNY has a very different result: It gives a hand up to those eager to build better lives for themselves and their families.

Eleven CUNY colleges are among the nation’s top institutions of higher education for advancing social mobility, according to an analysis by CollegeNET. Simons is helping make this engine of economic advancement bigger and more efficient, lifting more poor, working-class and middle-income young people into prosperous and productive careers.

Speaking of which, the Bloomberg Foundation’s investment will create new public schools linked to hospitals in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, Charlotte and Durham, N.C., among other places. A curriculum developed by Mass General Brigham in Boston, one of the nation’s best clinical medical institutions, will send teenagers into training in labs and emergency departments in their junior and senior years, so they’re all ready to join the workforce or more advanced vocational training upon graduation. f grads of the training program want to go on to college, that’s well and good — but if not, they’ll have the very real option of starting down a meaningful career track immediately.

That’s good for the health care sector, which is desperate for workers in our aging nation, and it’s good for people filling those jobs.

The American economy has always been dynamic; these days, it’s transforming at a breakneck pace, leaving many people anxious about whether and how they fit into the complex puzzle. If they remain set in their ways and largely disconnected from employers, our K-12 schools and colleges will fail millions, especially kids who don’t have connections or family money. They’ll graduate with debt and the false promise of advancement.

Bloomberg and Simons, who both grew up middle-class public school kids in the Boston suburbs before finding their way to New York and into lucrative careers through some combination of brains, pluck and luck, are giving schools the tools to change — and young people the tools to excel. We should thank them a million times over.

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