Ken Griffin’s $3 billion gift to Carnegie Mellon University ($2 billion for CMU Miami and $1 billion for CMU Pittsburgh) could shake things up in the world of higher education. Here are five things to know:

1) From academic majors to challenges to solve

CMU Miami’s proposed model will start with societal challenges, not traditional academic disciplines and majors.

CMU President Farnam Jahanian said: “Carnegie Mellon has an opportunity to show what a great research university can become: more interdisciplinary, more connected to real-world problems and more focused on human impact.”

2) The thinking that predates the $3B

CMU’s November 2015 strategic plan recommended (page 11): “Engage students in grand societal challenges via an interdisciplinary approach.”

By January 2025, CMU reported that every first-year Dietrich College student took a Grand Challenge Seminar. Examples of the seminars include:

-66-146 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: From Pandemics to Politics: Modeling Complex Social Systems
-66-155 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Sports Betting, Highs and Lows: Your Brain on Stats
-66-143 Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Realizing Human Rights: The Challenge of Achieving Justice

3) Which challenges?

CMU Miami will organize its academic and research model around four grand challenge areas:

-Human health and biological discovery
-National security and strategic capabilities
-Advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation
-Energy and climate resilience.

4) The ROI: A better way to prepare students, for learning and for work?

Real-world problems rarely fit neatly into one academic subject.

Imagine studying how to keep essential services running during a power outage. Engineering, computing, policy and human behavior become connected parts of a consequential problem.

Learning this way could help students:
• Understand why what they’re learning matters.
• Connect ideas across subjects and apply their knowledge.
• Practice working with people whose expertise differs from their own.

Those are also skills students will need at work, where knowing your subject is only part of getting something done.

5) The road ahead

Making this shift will require internal changes: encouraging collaboration is one thing; deciding who leads, who pays and who gets credit is another.

“Addressing complex societal challenges requires more than bringing different disciplines to the table,” said Theresa Mayer, vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon. “It means organizing researchers, shared capabilities and partners in government and industry around challenges that no single institution can solve alone."

If you were choosing a university today, would you rather start with a major or a problem you wanted to solve (and why)?