As the cost of attending college continues to rise, so do home prices in college towns across the U.S.

The most expensive college town, ranked by median home-sale price, is Santa Barbara, California, where homes sold for a median price of $1,964,170 from January to July of this year, according to a Redfin analysis published last week.

In the analysis, Redfin defines college towns as cities where at least 10% of the population consists of students enrolled at a four-year accredited university, located at least 30 miles away from a metropolitan area with a population of more than 1 million people.

Boca Raton, Florida, home to Florida Atlantic University, and Northern Arizona University’s college town of Flagstaff, Arizona, rounded out the top three most expensive college towns, according to the report.

These are the 10 most expensive college towns ranked by median home-sale price.

• Notable college: University of California, Santa Barbara
• Median home sale price: $1,964,170

• Notable college: Florida Atlantic University
• Median home sale price: $822,701

• Notable college: Northern Arizona University
• Median home sale price: $695,902

• Notable college: Oregon State University
• Median home sale price: $568,507

• Notable college: Utah Valley University
• Median home sale price: $517,224

• Notable college: University of Oregon
• Median home sale price: $501,571

• Notable college: Brigham Young University
• Median home sale price: $474,745

• Notable college: University of Michigan
• Median home sale price: $464,495

• Notable college: University of New Hampshire, Manchester and Southern New Hampshire University
• Median home sale price: $456,096

• Notable college: Washington State University
• Median home sale price: $452,137

While most college students are more likely to rent during their time in these places, home prices in college towns can give a general sense of how expensive local rental costs are, said Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather in the report.

″[Housing costs] in some college towns have climbed so high they’re increasingly out of reach for students, faculty and staff,” Fairweather said. This can force faculty and staff to live farther from campus and may even discourage some professors from accepting jobs there.

For students who have to pay tuition, additional housing expenses can lead to increased debt or require them to live further from school, Fairweather said.

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Many parents think kids develop strong social skills from memorizing phrases like “please” and “thank you.” But the real foundation is built much earlier, at home and through everyday interactions.

I’ve studied over 200 parent-child relationships, and I’m a mother myself. I’ve found that kids learn to communicate and connect by watching how their parents behave. And being raised in an environment where emotional safety and authentic connection are modeled makes a world of difference.

Here are nine things that parents who raise kids with exceptional social skills do early on.

Kids learn emotional vocabulary when parents name and normalize feelings.

Parents who say things like, “I feel disappointed we can’t go today, but I’ll take a deep breath and try again tomorrow,” are modeling emotional regulation in real time. It helps kids later express themselves with friends, like saying, “I’m sad you didn’t play with me,” instead of lashing out.

Children absorb how parents treat others: the neighbor, the cashier, and even each other.

A simple, “She has her hands full, so let’s hold the door for her,” teaches more about empathy than any lecture. Small daily acts of kindness become the blueprint for lifelong social awareness.

True confidence comes from being loved as you are and from being given the chance to try (and sometimes fail).

Letting kids try out for the team or pour their own milk, even if it gets messy, says: “I trust you.” When paired with encouragement like, “I love how you kept trying,” kids feel capable and connected, without needing to be perfect.

Every relationship includes conflict. What matters is whether kids learn how to repair.

Parents who say, “You hurt your sister’s feelings. Let’s think of what we can say or do to make it right,” are teaching a critical life skill: Repair strengthens relationships, and kids who learn it early grow into adults who can sustain healthy bonds.

If a child says, “My friend didn’t want to play with me,” some parents might brush it off with, “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.”

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But parents who say, “That sounds hard. Want to tell me more?” are teaching kids that their feelings and perspectives matter. That confidence in their voice is the foundation of strong social skills.

Kids don’t always pick up on social dynamics naturally. Parents who gently point out, “Did you notice how his voice got quiet? He might be feeling shy,” help kids tune into the subtleties of human interaction.

These micro-lessons add up and shape socially aware, emotionally intelligent adults.

The second kids argue, the impulse is often to intervene. But the best social learning happens when parents step back just enough.

Saying, “I’m here if you need help, but I think you two can work it out,” creates space for problem-solving and compromise. With time, kids learn they can handle conflict themselves because they were trusted to practice.

When parents treat mistakes as evidence of growth, kids build resilience instead of shame.

A parent who calmly says, “You spilled the juice. Let’s grab a towel and clean it up,” models accountability without humiliation. Children raised this way see mistakes as opportunities to learn. That mindset makes them more adaptable and compassionate with others.

Kids need to see what good listening looks like.

When parents pause, make eye contact, give full attention (without rushing to fix or interrupt) and say, “Tell me more about that,” they teach how to be patient and respectful. Over time, kids carry this into friendships, becoming the kind of people others feel safe opening up to.

Good social skills are becoming more and more important in today’s world, and those skills grow from connection and emotional safety. By practicing early, you’re ensuring that your kid will grow up to be empathetic humans who are ready for real-world relationships.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of FOUNDATIONS, a step-by-step guide that helps parents heal and become emotionally safe. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional safety and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Connect with her on Instagram.

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As a longtime startup investor and judge on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Barbara Corcoran has a lot of practice gauging which entrepreneurs will ultimately become highly successful — and which ones will struggle.

Specifically, Corcoran likes to watch what entrepreneurs do when something goes wrong with their business, she told journalist Katie Couric’s “Wake Up Call at Work” newsletter, which published on Aug. 28.

“I pay close attention to who takes responsibility and who plays the blame game,” said Corcoran. “Six months after ‘Shark Tank,’ something always goes wrong — the supplier didn’t deliver, the molds were wrong, an employee messed up. But the minute an entrepreneur starts blaming the next guy, I know it’s over and they’re going to lose my money.”

Entrepreneurs are typically responsible, legally and financially, for any mistakes or failures that happen within their company, whether they personally caused them or not, according to Corcoran. So it’s important to address missteps head-on, and it’s just as crucial to learn from them afterward, she told author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss on a March 2024 episode of his podcast.

“Recovering from failure, in my book, is 95% of life,” Corcoran told Ferriss. “If you’re going to have a good life, you’d better be really good at getting back up, like a jack-in-the-box, boom, boom, boom. Just get back up.”

Corcoran’s best, and highest-earning, employees all share this trait, she added. Those employees are resilient enough to bounce back quickly from any missteps, which also helps give them the confidence to seek out new opportunities rather than avoiding them out of a fear that they will lead to some inevitable mistakes.

“When it comes down to it, it’s how well you get back up and how long you take to feel sorry for yourself,” Corcoran added.

Constantly blaming others when mistakes are made, or obstacles arise, is a surefire sign that someone doesn’t have emotional intelligence — a trait with a strong correlation to workplace success — according to bestselling authors and communication experts Kathy and Ross Petras.

“People who are emotionally immature often won’t take responsibility for their own actions when something goes wrong,” the authors wrote for CNBC Make It on Feb. 1. “So what do they do? They extricate themselves from situations by immediately stating that they are not to blame.”

Instead of seeking a scapegoat when something goes awry, take ownership so you don’t look defensive, CEO and Harvard-trained career expert Suzy Welch told CNBC Make It in 2019. Then get a clear understanding of what went wrong so you can rebound quickly and avoid making the same misstep twice.

“Everybody screws up sometimes,” Welch said. “But one mistake isn’t the end of the game for you unless you let it be.”

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”

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Shanaz Hemmati, a veteran of two multibillion-dollar startups, says any prospective entrepreneur needs to remember one key lesson before launching a new business.

No matter how confident you are in your business idea, seek out as many prospective customers or clients as you can and get their feedback before you commit to a business model, she says.

Hemmati and Ross Buhrdorf are the co-founders of ZenBusiness, which makes artificial intelligence software aimed at helping first-time entrepreneurs navigate the regulatory processes of starting a small business. They launched the business in 2017, and it was most recently valued at $1.7 billion in November 2021, according to the company.

The pair previously worked together as executives at vacation rental marketplace HomeAway, which Expedia acquired for $3.9 billion in 2015.

When they teamed up to start ZenBusiness, they spent roughly 10 months researching their industry and talking to dozens of entrepreneurs about their businesses’ biggest pain points around legal compliance, says Hemmati, 62.

“When you have an idea, you already have identified a pain point you want to solve for,” she says. The next step is figuring out how to solve it, she says, but you shouldn’t jump to that stage too quickly, or without first conducting necessary research.

Hemmati says she and Buhrdorf knew they wanted to build an AI-powered software that helped small businesses manage and file legal documents. They had already witnessed the issue firsthand working at a startup and also found public data that showed it to be a widespread obstacle for entrepreneurs across the country, Hemmati adds.

They initially planned on marketing the service only to existing businesses, but talking to prospective clients made them realize that they should instead target first-time business owners who’ve never navigated a “pretty complex” legal process before, she says.

“We spoke with roughly 50 to 100 prospective customers to understand what they needed most — everything from formation help to ongoing compliance and growth services,” she says. “We ran design sprints, tested different packages and pricing, even built websites and refunded early sign-ups just to see what caught people’s attention and what they were willing to pay for.”

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That strategy proved invaluable, giving Hemmati and Buhrdorf “incredible insight and the confidence to launch,” she adds.

Working with those business owners from the start also meant those clients would be more likely to keep using ZenBusiness’ software as their companies grew, Hemmati says. ZenBusiness has now worked with at least 850,000 small businesses, according to the company.

The takeaway for other prospective entrepreneurs, she says: Any business idea needs to be properly vetted, and the first step is always researching your market and talking to the customers and clients you want the business to reach.

″[Start] by having that communication and collaboration, constantly interviewing your potential customers and learning about what is the next product that they’re interested in, and how you should even go about building it,” Hemmati says.

Steve Blank, an author and serial entrepreneur who teaches a course on the subject at Stanford University, similarly says that a failure to properly research your potential customers before building a business model is a “fatal mistake” that will likely doom any new business before it even launches.

“The most important [question] is: ‘Well, who are my customers?’ And the second one is: ‘What do they want?’” Blank told CNBC Make It in March. “It’s not: ‘Here’s what I’m building. Can I sell it to someone?’”

As important as it is to seek out that feedback, though, it can only help entrepreneurs who are actually open to new perspectives and willing to adapt.

“If you can’t pivot or pivot quickly, chances are you will fail,” Blank wrote in a 2010 blog post.

Hemmati agrees: “There is a huge difference between those who have a mindset of exactly how they want to do [something], versus those who are truly open and think through [their options],” she says, adding that, ultimately, that mindset can be the difference between success and failure.

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Something strange was happening at Jeff Hancock’s work.

It was 2022, just after OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT to the masses, and the Stanford professor noticed something was off in the research assignments he was grading. “They looked pretty good, but not quite right,” Hancock tells CNBC Make It. “And then because I had 100 students, I could see that 10 other assignments looked exactly the same with the same sort of not-quite-rightness.”

The papers in question seemed to have a lot of text without saying anything substantive to “advance the work,” and they all did so in the same overly wordy style.

Kate Niederhoffer felt the same sinking feeling of suspicion when she was once asked to speak about her research, but the request summarized her studies in a way that revealed they didn’t actually know her work.

Reading messages that missed the mark “felt like deep effort,” Niederhoffer says. “I’m a quick reader, normally, so I [thought] ‘Why is this feeling so effortful? Also this is so confusing?’”

Niederhoffer and Hancock now have a name for this phenomenon, the feeling you get when you’re reading a message or document that’s so convoluted or incomplete in thought that you start to wonder, “Wait, did a human even write this, or is this AI?”

It’s called workslop, and it’s killing teams and productivity across all kinds of businesses, they say.

Workslop refers to “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

That’s according to new research from BetterUp, where Niederhoffer is vice president of their research labs, and Stanford Social Media Lab, where Hancock is the founding director.

Like AI art or features of the so-called slop life that came before it, workslop looks familiar in an off-kilter, uncanny way but at its core is devoid of meaning. Think: long, fancy-sounding, copy-pasted language that doesn’t say anything.

Some 40% of people say they’ve received workslop in the last month, according to a recent BetterUp and Stanford survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. workers. These staffers estimate an average of 15% of the content they receive qualifies as low-effort, unhelpful, AI-generated work; it’s happening across industries but is especially prominent in professional services and technology.

One survey respondent, a finance worker, recalled how receiving AI-generated work from a colleague led to more work for them: “It created a situation where I had to decide whether I would rewrite it myself, make him rewrite it, or just call it good enough.”

Another respondent, a director in retail, said they wasted time following up on information they were sent and doing their own research. “I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

There are tell-tale signs of workslop, Hancock says, including “purple prose,” like using three paragraphs of text when one bullet point would suffice.

It may appear in different forms, from bad code to decks with incomplete information or just strangely worded emails, but it all has the same effect of adding work onto the recipient to make sense of it all. Ultimately, it can erode trust and productivity.

Niederhoffer has herself judged the people who send her workslop. “Why did they do this?” she’d wonder. “Can they not complete the job themselves? I don’t trust them. I don’t want to work with them again.”

The end result is “confusion, annoyance, wasted effort and then some serious layers of judgment,” she says.

AI use has doubled at work since 2023 from 21% to 40%, per Gallup, yet 95% of organizations don’t see a measurable return on their investment in the tech, according to a recent MIT Media Lab report. Workslop could be a big reason why, BetterUp and Stanford researchers say.

People who’ve encountered it say they spend an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with the aftermath of it; that adds up to a roughly $186 invisible tax per month, based on their self-reported salaries.

For an organization of 10,000 workers, that’s a $9 million hit to productivity in a year, researchers say.

(Worth noting, this doesn’t account for any productivity gains reported by companies or employees.)

Beyond the financial cost, there’s an emotional one. Recipients of workslop say it takes time and mental energy to figure out how to diplomatically address the subpar work with their colleagues; 53% report being annoyed, 38% confused and 22% offended.

Receiving it makes people rethink their colleagues’ abilities: Roughly half of workers say they consider their co-workers less creative, capable and reliable after receiving workslop from them. About 1 in 3 say they notify their teammates or bosses after receiving confusing AI-generated work, and a similar share are less likely to want to work with the other person afterward.

And though sloppy work has been around forever, AI takes it to another level.

“For me to produce sloppy work, I still have to put in a fair bit of effort. I have to write it. It can be thoughtless, but it still requires effort,” Hancock says. “Now that [the effort] piece is gone, I can generate a lot of useless or unproductive content very easily.”

The phenomenon’s human cost is driven by “shifting the burden onto the other person without recognizing that impact implicitly,” Niederhoffer says. “People forget that because we’re thinking of [AI] as a tool with which we alone work, but it’s actually mediating human-to-human work.”

Minimizing low-quality AI-generated work, and all the consequences that come with it, is up to organizations that bring AI into the fold, researchers say.

Businesses should focus on an organized approach to adopting and promoting AI at work, Hancock says. Without guidance and leadership, he says, workers may act out of fear that if they don’t use AI they’ll be replaced, but if they do, they’ll be judged for it.

What reduces workslop is “a team’s commitment to task quality,” Hancock says. Teams should spend time talking to one another about how they use AI and critiquing the best applications for their needs.

That also requires being forthcoming about when and where you’re using AI. Say you were pressed for time and used a generative AI chatbot to complete a presentation deck, for example. If you tell your colleague that the work you’re sending is AI-generated, they can have a better sense of what prompts you were working with and what your goal was and fill in any missing gaps, Hancock says.

Leaders should focus on human agency and encourage a “pilot mindset” to see how tools can give them more control in their workplace, Niederhoffer says. Managers should be able to provide specific reasons why they want to use certain AI tools for certain projects, and have clear messages on the guidelines, policies and training that will accompany usage, she says.

Having high agency over AI “can be incredible,” Niederhoffer says, “but it’s in stark contrast to this really copy-and-paste mode, where you just let the tool do all the work for you, and you forget to let it augment your human competencies.”

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