Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
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- Опубликовано: 11 июн 2024
- Welcome to “The Ben & Marc Show”, featuring a16z co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. In this latest episode, Marc and Ben tackle the university system - a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months.
As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis. In this one-on-one conversation, Ben and Marc take a “structural” look at higher education, diving deep into the twelve functions of the modern university. They also unpack the numerous challenges that universities face today - the student debt and the replication crisis, among them.
As colleges face an existential dilemma that could have long lasting repercussions, how can we find ways to improve these institutions, while being open to new entrepreneurial opportunities in education? Enjoy!
** Watch Part II of the discussion: • Fixing Higher Educatio... **
Topics Covered:
00:00:00 - Teaser
00:00:34 - Introduction
00:05:59 - Evolution of the modern university
00:13:39 - Marc's Twelve Functions of the University
00:19:22 - University as a credentialing agency
00:37:55 - The student loan crisis
00:45:26 - College tuition inflation vs. overall inflation (US CPI)
00:46:32 - Which college? Which degree?
00:51:24 - University as a research bureau
00:54:00 - Replication crisis
00:57:31 - Research and government funding
01:00:42 - Policy Think Tank
01:05:12 - Ben on the Roland Fryer case
01:09:07 - University as the moral instructor
01:11:29 - DEI and its side effects
01:25:27 - Student athlete scam
01:31:47 - University as adult day care
01:32:57 - Reverse CBT
01:34:55 - Campus justice systems
01:38:56 - The truth about accreditation
01:41:23 - The current existential threat to universities
01:49:50 - Key questions and entrepreneurial opportunities
01:55:43 - Sign off
#education #university #college #school #history #podcast #technology #tech #entrepreneur #highereducation #learning
Listen to Us!
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- Spotify: spoti.fi/3SclPOr
Resources:
Marc on X: / pmarca
Marc’s Substack: pmarca.substack.com/
Ben on X: / bhorowitz
Books mentioned on this podcast:
- “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” by Bryan Kaplan amzn.to/47HOSOO
- “Public Opinion” by Walter Lippmann amzn.to/48uY3m5
Article mentioned on this podcast:
- “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” by John Ioannidis bit.ly/3RZnqWa
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Ben and Marc should consider making a channel for themselves and these talks. It would be great to have an “all in” podcast but with the Marc and Ben flavor
Totally agree I hope they do this!
A playlist on a16z with these two that follows all in format is better as it allows for more people to come to the a16z. They are doing aggregator theory to get more people to come to their firms channel
Yeah, exactly
Interesting perspective: These fellows are in the business of finding and investing in talented individuals. They are at the top of their game, and the point they are making is that post-secondary education is not necessarily an indication of talent. This is wave making. We need more people like this making bold statements and intellectually challenging the status quo.
This is not a unique idea most people have arrived at those conclusions independently, they just don't have a podcast to talk about it. Also, Peter Thiel was paying kids to drop out of college, I believe over a decade ago.
one of the bid problems with higher ed is that the school doesnt increase in size to meet demand. How harvard can educate so few students and get away with tax exempt status is beyond me. they educate less kids than some highschools do, yet have many billions in endowments.
in my company we look that they got a CS degree, we dont really care where it was from. one guy got his degree in CS from a religious cults university. but he passed the code test so got hired.
Glad more people are talking about how young people are getting screwed and the old people in congress aren’t fit to fix it for us.
That's like expecting the Pope to talk his priests into ending tithing.
Yes Sir! Exactly what I was waiting for. After reading first post by Bill Ackman on X pointing out that HES (High Education System) is downstream of everything in society (Institutions, law, education, health) something click on my head. This is the battle of our decade. To reform or reinvent the HES
In a way, this debate is even weirder from a Danish perspective with public universities. Why are we not recording everything and making it available for all of us. We pay for it with out taxes, 100% of it. If our educations are worth anything at all. I get there is "tradition" for not doing it. But it is super weird.
amazing discussion thank you! happy 2024
Fascinating discussion…Industries shift & your model must adapt. Between the Internet, and now AI, the universities response has been to only get bigger and charge more! That’s not adapting and people are realizing it more than ever.
Great talk - I look forward to hearing your follow up. Two items: #1 what will be the role of very large on-demand tutoring companies like Varsity Tutors in picking up the slack and just-in-time education, especially when no one can predict four years in advance what jobs will even look like? It may be easier to have a high-quality relationship with a tutor than with a faculty member. #2: The job of many administrators involves processing information and as such they seem very likely to be among the white-collar jobs most easily replaceable by large language models, if not this year then almost certainly within two years of additional exponential growth in capacity of AI. It's not clear what percent of this bloat of administrators is due to ever increasing state and federal regulations about test taking and tracking everything in sight, and burdening teachers with more chores and never removing any. In any case something has to remove "sludge" in the way of actually competing with Singapore, Shanghai, Finland, etc. As Sir Ken Robinson pointed out, our whole education system needs to be replaced, and no one is discussing how to train dyads of students each with their own copilot chatbot / executive secretary to operate in an ever more rapidly changing world.
Great discussion. Salley is a great disrupter in the space. They are building the future of leadership development
This is the kind of fair and interesting delve that I love, thanks for your thoughtfulness guys.
It's amazing the depth that Ben & Mark bring to any discussion. I am intrigued - when the key money source keeping the universities alive comes from taxpayers, then why are the Universities allowed to offer legacy. Of course, I understand what they gain but why would the government allow that to happen?
underrated video well done thanks for highlighting lots of problems
Thanks for this discussion. I sued my school for fraud without hiring a lawyer. 1yr PT got me 35k + legal education. Hope the societal lense widens.
This was so interesting--so many insightful talking points (which I can now privately pass off as my own )
This is an excellent conversation that is very insightful and accurate. Although I’m Faculty in Canada - much of their observations are applicable here as well.
my recent experience doing my Masters was highly disappointing, mainly, I found it to be too easy. The openness to discussion or discourse was basically non-existent and when topics get remotely hard, professors do "mean" grading to "help" the students that are not doing great. Definitely dimished the value I perceive now of any "masters" credencial. Smarts and fit need to be looked at from angles other than just University credentials.
Marc and Ben Pod would be great!
Just listened to this one on Spotify -
a) YES as to crazy costs for higher ed! If the cost was clearly worth it, we wouldn't actually be talking about student debt burden, loans. YES to the idea that we don't want gov't to forgive loans = no incentive for higher ed to change or reform or reduce costs.
b) academic research: back in the 90's my tenured Econ professor father felt that 90% of academic research in his field was useless. Norms that once worked well, STOP working as conditions change. One example - policies that reduced crime in the 80s, 90s in NYC that then led to stop and frisk civil rights violations and underreporting of violent crime...
Perhaps it DID work well a) pre-internet, b) pre-higher ed explosion, c) pre-gov't funding gold mine, d) pre-ideological capture of higher ed. Jonathan Haidt may be right, that every 80-100 yrs we get a tectonic societal shift.
c) The IQ test, entry point concept is interesting. We're talking about some sort of proxy for talent/capability, whether that's SAT, GRE, grades, degree. I do think we've been talking about future skills, skills necessary for the future of work for FORTY YEARS now. We have building blocks now to measure these kinds of skills (problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, etc.) and programs outside of higher ed that do it. We need better proxy measures for skills of this kind that currently sit in non-hard science realm. And of course better proxies for knowledge acquisition and ability to APPLY that knowledge...than grades. Go PBL. I do see knopro.org, projectset, others looking to quantify future skills.
How do you use religious ethics to end up with Locke's individualism? Assuming that's where you want to end up based on what you say. I see more consistency between the "meek shall inherit the earth" and marxism or wokeism than the individual achiever.
Re. "the kids coming out of college this year" are not what they used to be, do you two think that might be due to college level learning loss instead of reduced standards or test optional admissions? Much of the test optional admissions at the top universities happened after this graduating class.
really good podcast.
Fantastic conversation.
Thank you for this content!
"...higher education is an industry and there's always the possibility of startups. And so one of the interesting questions is always when an industry is going through structural transitions and when sort of a lot of things are flying, there's always this question of well, should there be new competitors in the industry? Or actually should the structure of the industry itself change?" Marc Andreeson
I am a STEM grad. I don't think my tax dollars should go to people with unproductive degrees. I am also in the hiring process. I saw a precipitous drop in the quality of college graduates. I had one that had a degree in software engineering. I don't care if you can't use the enterprise tools just yet, but you have to be able to do the tasks of read the requirement, implement the requirement within the constraints, and test. Ended up having to move him off that and put them on getting a set of equipment. Source the vendors, get quotes, compare it to what the employer needs. He couldn't even do that. Was asking me what the right answer was. Colleges are crap now.
The ruling class considers all degrees productive. Come on, think like a ruler! The herd animals are sent through extra years of social conditioning and propagandizing--all for credit and under pseudo-competitive conditions. Now they know what thoughts to think and what types of parasites to vote for.
Parents are the crap ones. And getting crappier.
The current crop of women is worse than the current crop of male graduates. Golden penis syndrome run amok on campus, draining our youth of the will to live.
What degrees do you regard as unproductive?
@broski120 anything not stem or accounting. The rest are fingerpainting. Even now that is suspect. Maybe less woke and more work would help the colleges. Marxism killed it.
a HUGE number of papers in the humanities are literally critiques of literature and stuff or critiques of culture. which are essentially just poetic waxings on stuff with no actual valuable concept. One paper that makes a discovery in physics or materials science could outweigh 1000 of these humanities papers. yet funding for humanities flows in. they say "hey why are u not making physics discoveries? the guy over in humanities wrote 20 papers, seems hes doing better research than u." and u are like "yea thats because all his discoveries are useless to the world and mine could revolutionize energy or transportation"
Yes, humanities is largely useless. No, universities do not make physics/literature comparisons.
@@kreek22 life sciences research takes up the lions share of research dollars by a wide margin.
@@bbsara0146 $245 billion out of $717 billion in 2020 went to life sciences research. The other major area is infotech.
I’m looking forward to sending my kids to the University of Austin Texas.
Niall Ferguson is doing great work over there!
S/n: You guys should consider being interviewed on Ben Shapiros Sunday special or Chris Williamson’s podcast.
I have to disagree with the idea that only the middle and upper class go to college My family there's five of us We all went to college at least some some of us got masters degrees from top 100 universities and we were as poor as you can be in the United States single mom disabled on welfare It's actually an advantage if you're really poor cuz he can just take out loans or get a scholarship or financial aid. It really has more to do with the family culture whether or not you go to college, I absolutely hated college and left after I decided I didn't want to go to Cornell and I didn't want to take all my general education requirements I took all my classes I wanted to learn something and then left one of the best decisions I ever did. And I like my work a lot more. I mean they were parts of college that were very fun like meeting who still are my best friends with similar interests but The experience was pretty crappy.
Cutting liberal arts degrees is a mistake. There’s a good deal of evidence that suggest on average liberal arts majors have high salaries than stem majors in the long term. David Epstein has a good book on this and other topics related to the discussion titled “ Range”.
Yeah I can say the same about my uni, the engineering buildings were much nicer, newer and had a lot more utility than the aging Liberal Arts dungeons haha
Great discussion!
This is a great podcast. After listening to the nonsense from admissions folks for so many years, it is such a relief to hear two people talk about admissions in an intelligent, rational, and realistic way. There must a 4SD difference in the quality of this conversation vs. what goes on in NACAC circles. People like Ben, the boards, and the profs should make major decisions about these schools, not the administrative bureaucracy.
It would be great if you allowed for the transcript function because it makes it easier to listen and then go back and find where you said specific things. The list of topics is helpful but still not as helpful as the transcript.
@christinehill1038 .. You clearly have no idea how universities work. Professors want to do research and some like to teach. None want to run a university.
@@michaelthomson5125 Don't talk to me like that. Of course the professors care about making the major decisions, like who gets in, whether they have free speech etc. Why do you think Steven Pinker and the former medical school dean were meeting with the members of the Harvard Corporation. They certainly don't want bozos like FAIR deciding which students to send them.
This particular podcast is too singularly focused on problems at elite schools like Columbia, and the problems at these schools are vastly different than the problems at an average state-funded institution or small private school (non-elite). Because so few people end up going to these elite places of higher learning, it is not a good microcosm of the state of college education in the US. For example, when you talk about the cost of higher education and mention a number like 300k of debt for an undergraduate education, that really only applies to a handful of places, e.g. Ivy-like schools (e.g. Columbia, Stanford). In-state tuition in my state is 10k/year. In another nearby, "more expensive" state it is 12k/year. I honestly pay more to send my kid to daycare, and you can easily spend more on secondary, private school tuition or on a new car for the total cost including room and board.
This is very, very true. I’m so tired of hearing this back and forth argument among tech elites and “what’s wrong with higher education?”. In my opinion, Mark and Ben unintentionally contribute to a conversation where one of the main effects is to pull up a really solid ladder of prosperity, after they climbed it, with huge subsidized help from the national government.
I grew up poor. I could not finish high school as I had to get a full-time job to take care of my family. I slowly got my high school diploma, undergrad, and masters degree online, all while working. Finished by the time I was 32. I took no loans out. I paid in cash. My schools are not prestigious. They are affordable regional public universities. I get judged because I didn't attend a fancy university.
I feel like elite colleges are going to be in decline. there is more demand for poorly educated people from the third world who will work for less than an ivy league graduate.
On the sheepskin effect: students know it exists, so those skipping the last semester are biased towards low conscientiousness. This is self reinforcing, where employers notice such candidates aren't as good. So it's not the effect of the last semester, but that kind of people drop out right before the end.
I'm not sure sometimes if you're talking about only Ivy League, Harvards in higher ed or ALL higher ed. I think you mix them up from time to time. It's also worth noting that some brilliant, brilliant talent exists that would never a) become engineers and b) get into top tier universities. Entrepreneurs are one group...anyone brilliant at hands on, perhaps? There's an underlying assumption in a lot of the discussion that getting into Harvard/Stanford = smartest, most talented. Of course, it does mean some level of smarts, follow-through, commitment, ecosystem, resources - you have to start planning when you're in middle school..
If I had to hear him say "uh, um, uh" one more time
I’ll take the ums every day if I can hear these titans talk
First of all, I am a fan of the show. I watch your Podcasts and similar ones hosted by other Billionaires. While I agree with most of what you say.
Do you think the Venture capitalist community has some responsibility for the slow degradation of various institutions (like universities) in the US. VCs have funded social media companies or are on the board of similar companies that use algorithmic models to ensure people are in their own bubbles polarizing people. A polarized population makes fixing any issues almost impossible. Snapchat, TikTok. some parts of RUclips etc. are addictive making kids completely glued to these shows (have almost zero General knowledge. dumbing down the next generation) These videos add nothing to their education (often misleading). While parents have a major role (it is hard to compete against peer pressure) ... High-tech companies should own up to their responsibilities. what is happening is worse than selling tobacco to children.
Marc and Ben you both are very influential and can make a difference, by ensuring something is done to this by funding companies that do the opposite. (make people less polarized, maybe a little less profit, make kids smarter while they get entertained). Other things you could do include Break the two-party monopoly .. fund more independent candidates. Start universities that are more altruistic etc. which work in the student's and society's interest.
"No student loan bailouts". But please government bail out my bank.
I count 7 of 37 comments not visible. Y-tube is doing its Orwellian thing.
Independent scientist launching a new kind of entrepreneurial 'university', based on a completely new framework for science. Maybe in the UAE?
Notably left out Computer Science as a named science.
♥
College skills will rapidly be commoditised by AI. it’s a negative NPV prop. For the majority of people it’s a better deal to use all that capital to buy AI profiteers such as MSFT, and nondillutable property rights system (gold, bitcoin). Use your freetime as a young person to leverage AI and launch products as soon as you can.
A university degree is a lifelong credential, where a trusted institution vouches for an individual's skills and knowledge.
The text "An" appears to be incomplete and lacks context. Without further information, I cannot provide a meaningful revision. Could you please provide additional context or clarify your request? Thank you!
we need to determine which things are worth discovering. the government thinks that because more papers are published in humanities they are doing a better job researching than in math and science. but thats because humanities papers are not actually discovering anything useful. a feminist critique of a 1970s comic book isnt actually useful to anything. it might be interesting to read but its not going to help anyone heat their homes in the winter
This is such an unfactual opinion. Where did you develop this opinion? Seriously… The government, the defense department, and other agencies fund a huge, huge amount of non-humanities research.
@@ejohn977 i feel like only a few fields of study actually advance our quality of life. and the humanities do not really do that.
Marc says so many uhh
Pull all government funds, grants and loans and watch college admissions collapse!
Exactly
great conclusion 😂
Fund science/engineering, let those interested in other fields (including me) fund there own educations.
Higher Ed as an industry has endowments and pension funds that fund VC, which invests in startups…so watch out for those 2nd and 3rd order effects in that hypothetical.
Such a genius conclusion… wow… so original. You must have put a lot of thought in that one. Describe your process? How can I communicate empty, useless tech cheerleader speak like that?
because then geriatric guys that want to be listened have nowhere to conduct 1-2 hour monologues about something something vague and arbitrary