Andreessen and Horowitz on higher ed; Joseph Politano on new business formation; Michael Huemer on passivity vs. activism; Lorenzo Warby on Pournelle's Law
Combine the Huemer analogy with Pournelle's Iron Law, then consider that public employees frequently play an outsized role in determining local election outcomes due to the ol' "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs" problem, and what you're left with is a medieval doctor whose incentive is to poison the patient as badly as possible without outright killing him. Isn't democracy a wonderful thing?
"The issue[] of race... relations require[s] really careful thought..."
Why is that? If Harvard and other top schools admitted applicants based solely on test scores and grades, black students would drop to less than 1% of the student body. When you say the problem requires "careful thought," I think you mean you're squeamish about this outcome. But there are more dumb whites (< 100 IQ) than blacks, and absolutely no one cares that good colleges exclude them.
Please explain why it matters that this would disproportionately affect black people. I suspect you will have to rely on an argument based on the necessity of protecting black amour-propre (i.e., tribal pride), which, again, no one cares about in the case of whites.
+1 Yes, the undesirability of the expected result.
"really careful thought" seems like "really effective PR to avoid being called a racist".
The US problem has elite university issues, but the real problem is below avg IQ folk -- HALF the people, and maybe 70-80% of Blacks. Most "nice" people don't like this reality (nor the reality that sluts are really bad for society...), US society, and politicians, need to be specific about policies to help the non-college educated get normal jobs and achieve normal middle class lifestyles.
I listened to the Andreessen/Horowitz podcast last week and, although I thought Horowitz's perspective was good as a Columbia trustee, they were both very short on solutions. The big problem in my view is just the money issue. The federal government is causing the mother of all calculation problems. Talking about entrepreneurial opportunities while largely ignoring the federal loan and subsidy issue is a bit confused because your incentive is always going to be to form the institution into a shape that is best at absorbing federal money for the lowest cost. You just have these institutions and the students doing rain dances for federal money.
Critiquing the footwork on the rain dance is missing the cause of the problem. It is also missing the problem to focus on reforming the elite institutions (which are also heavily distorted by federal incentives) rather than on blowing up everything. My bias is always towards that if there is evil, distortion, corruption, and waste, it should be destroyed and that we should have no pity for people who will suffer the consequences. Most people do not have this trait: most people want to be "nice" and have a sort of inherently conservative disposition, which is pleasantly displayed by this discussion.
End the Single University Model of Awarding Degrees
“Professors would be independent contractors, selling their instructional and research services to the university, which would be the course aggregator and degree certifier. The arrangement between teacher and the university might be such that the amount paid the professor would depend on his or her ability to generate students, moving in the direction of the earlier professorial payment model praised by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. For example, a professor teaching a survey course in psychology might be paid $2000 plus $200 for each student over the fiftieth enrolled who receives a course grade (if the professor generates only twenty students, he or she gets paid $2,000; sixty students nets $4,000; with 150 students, the professor is paid $22,000). To discourage grade inflation (professors trying to attract revenue-producing students through nonrigorous grading), professors could have their pay docked if the average class grade point average exceeds something like 3.0 (a ‘B’ average). Even more sophisticated ‘grade-adjusted’ compensation schemes could be devised.”
From page 337, Chapter 19 “Reforming Higher Education” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
An important metric missing from education is an accreditation score. The current binary accreditation system is almost useless and probably very costly to the consumer. Ideally accreditation would be in the form of a review essay written by a trusted organization or individual, but in some cases it might be a single number score, between 1-100.
One way of determining such a score is to determine the value added of the class, certificate or degree. Such a score could be determined by taking the average of the value added for all students graduating from the class or program. The value added for a single student would be determined by taking the difference between an entrance “GRE” and exit “GRE.”
These “GREs” could be The GRE; one of the GRE subjects Tests; or a custom-made GRE for any class or degree program.
Rather than make this mandatory like No Child Left Behind, it should be voluntary and customized to the culture of the school, and sanctioned by trusted third parties.
Richard Vedder discusses this idea for post secondary schools in his Chapter 14 “The Academic Cartel of Accreditation” in his book Restoring the Promise.
Interestingly universities don’t seem to be interested in such a value added accountability metric. Maybe because their focus is on athletics, research, DEI, or satisfying federal regulations, rather than on teaching and learning outcomes? Or, cartel anyone?
Various public and private K-12 schools use accountability metrics like the Iowa Achievement Test or the Classical Learning Test (CLT). Why shouldn’t universities do this as well? It should be voluntary, and rather than reform those institutions, it might be more satisfying to create new institutions here on Substack, class by class, post by post, comment by comment.
Maybe Substack will offer a new service to make it easier for regular folks and teachers to offer web based classes. Is anyone Substack listening?
"universities don’t seem to be interested in such a value added accountability metric."
Unless they are subject based tests, my prior is that high SAT going in (%, decile) will equal that going out +-2% (for 90%).
However, Arnolds aiBot grader offers a near future way to customize learning testing & semi-automate more detailed, personalized testing. Testing the interviewing students in their 2,3,4 favorite subjects, with a large list of possible questions & topics, and having them write an 1/2 hr short essay which is then graded. Plus additional questions offered by aiBot to the interviewer.
All the textbooks for all college subjects should be part of the training material of the major AIs.
Great note by Lorenzo on the Iron Law of any org - mission folk, and org folk. With org folk, over time, gaining power over the mission folk, who care more about the mission than about the org.
Current US universities show this VERY clearly - all (virtually) the Presidents care more about their college, in particular, as well as all US colleges, in general, than they care about actual education of students.
Huemer makes some great points, but he's wrong: "almost all think that immigration helps the economy. " Please, show me the economist (other than Bryan?) who thinks unlimited illegal immigration with all immediately receiving welfare benefit will help the economy. None say that -- tho Huemer also didn't quite say that. {Note that had Trump said Huemer's quote, many Trump haters would say that Trump was talking about unlimited illegal immigration. Especially college grad Trump haters.}
Illegal immigration hurts the economy, as well as degrading respect for "rule of law". Legal, high skilled immigration helps the economy.
"#4.1 Don't Vote " Reminds me of my Libber coffee mug: Nobody tells the truth; Nobody will lower your taxes; Nobody cares about you; Nobody will solve your problems. Vote for Nobody.
On colleges degrading, it will take a long time to replace their status, but it is already starting. Many big companies use college admissions & graduations as a proxy for IQ tests, and quite a bit of boot-licking, bureaucracy accepting behavior. No easy way to duplicate that package.
"In the private sector you're supposed to find a solution to people's problems..."
There's a lot of "values/customer promise drift" and flexibility even here. How many dating apps e.g. began with the aim of pairing people up? This transformed into keeping people dating indefinitely.
"In the Andreessen-Horowitz podcast, Horowitz says that if he were running a university he would make it customer focused, meaning it would emphasize satisfying students. Be careful what you wish for, Ben."
For all the search engines, social media platforms, and other internet services that are paid for with advertising and "surveillance capitalism", there is that expression about the users of the services, "You aren't the customer; you're the product."
Trying to get the users to be the customers for most of these services was not successful, or at least, not competitive with the alternative, and fingers crossed substack breaks the mold. But if anything is ripe for disruption in education, it's just this changing of vision of "Who can be the customer?"
The problem is with seeing Parents and Students as "the" customers. They turn out to be terrible customers if what you care about is maintaining the quality of the signal of the credentials, because they have mostly refused to budge as the quality of an Ivy credential has collapsed. The hint is with that line, "Horowitz claims that employers have started to notice." Employers are willing to pay for credible signals of productivity, but the way they do so now is in a very indirect way that insulates the credential-issuers from market pressures that would keep those credentials aligned as proxies for expected levels of performance. "Harvard Degree" used to be enough. Now it had better be "Harvard Degree in a -hard- major, wink wink."
The American military spends a vast fortune each year on education and training. That this has large benefits for the individuals for their personal lives in ways that don't benefit the military is, to the military, a totally incidental and irrelevant matter.
In fact, it's kind of a negative. To the extent that anything the military teaches someone is a "portable skill" he can leverage elsewhere, the military runs the risk of not capturing the full value of the investment, and so tries hard to offer large bonuses for longer term contracts and dangles the carrot of 20-year pensions to keep people in until retirement. Sure, it's hard to a lot of military skills to civilian work, but outside combat arms, it's not that much of a stretch, especially if one moves to a similar national-security-related sector. Indeed, that whole sector and rest of the government gets an enormous subsidy out of the military budget which paid for all the initial weeding-out and training of individuals useful in their later careers at those other beneficiary agencies and companies.
Even the fact that someone has served honorably gives that individual a valuable credential signal that he is above some threshold for productive conscientiousness, and the military loses plenty of people after one term of service for this reason. Indeed, if there was any way to perform the training to maintain the value to the military and save 1% of the expense but at the the cost of 95% of the personal benefit, the military would jump to immediately implement that change.
The point it, the student-trainee isn't the customer of the training, and doesn't pay for it. Indeed, he gets paid for it. The military is the customer, pays for it and pays the student, and it's the post-student trained-tested-verified-certified-and-periodically-recertified soldier that is the product.
In Germany I once visited a place with a university known for its engineering department and located in the same town as a major engineering company, and the economic pattern was that a large number of new graduates got their first jobs at that company. While they are not 'integrated', the company and engineering department of university have a tight relationship with frequent intimate interactions and even professional engineers encouraged to teach some classes, to make sure that what is happening to the students in the education process was tied to real market needs and was good for all parties involved.
It seems to me that this is the direction in which a lot of disruption can happen, with companies or groups representing sectors trying to identify talent and sponsor students with tuition and promise of future employment, but with some provision for supervision, influence, and control so as to have a more secure belief in what a credential really means in terms of what a new graduate can really be expected to know and do.
"Another nugget from Horowitz is that student athletics plays an important long-term role for the school. He says that by far the biggest donors to colleges and universities are alumni who played on sports teams. Sports does the most to emotionally bond the student to the institution."
And I'll bet they're mostly men. Score another point for Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers.
Contrary the business boom, here's an important link on the decline and recent laying off of all the Sports Illustrated folk, in a comment on Althouse by Prof. Drout:
>>I'm sure that the wokeness was what finished off SI, but a big contributor is the disgusting "financialization" of everything. ... some jackass finance guys, empowered by the no-interest money that our genius Federal Reserve has been pumping into the economy since 2008, used debt to buy out the magazine and promptly stuffed it into a portfolio and ignored it. Half-assed itinerant MBAs or consultants get shuffled in to "manage," but no one really cares very much because SI is just another asset in a basket of assets. <<
The financialization of everything is a real problem, along with how too much of the business profits made are made by finance companies. So many (not quite everybody) want to get rich quick, and that is done legally more often with finance than creating some other great business.
It's insidious in the culture with the idea that money can, and does, buy happiness.
Considering these excerpts from Richard Vedder’s book, would you be open to offering a course here on Substack?
It could be very simple, or it could be quite sophisticated and potentially disruptive.
Here’s how it might work. You offer a course via a Substack post in which you describe the course. Students subscribe just as they subscribe to any Substack.
You might assign readings, host discussions; you might require homework, essays, tests or the creation of certain programming assignments, business proposals, podcasts, videos, speeches, etc.
You might hire a teacher, grader, or tutor to help with the workload.
You charge whatever you feel like, and share a portion of it with your staff and possibly save some for end-of-class parties or awards.
At the end of the class, students might meet in person for a final exam and/or final presentations, followed by a social.
Third-party outsiders might review and rank the course, giving it some sort of accreditation. Or the students’ work could simply be posted to the web to self-accredit the course. Students might or might not be allowed to post their own work to their own Substack. Various IP arrangements for the course could be agreed to in advance.
Grades could be assigned based on student performance, or even better yet, awards could be given out in various ways. One way is to highlight in a Substack post the best work from the class. The Best Work Board. This could be as simple as a Links to Consider or a post highlighting the best work of one individual.
Awards could also be letters of recommendation and praise. They could be monetary rewards paid for by the Substack audience (non-student subscribers who might be sitting-in on the class). Or rewards could be donated by entrepreneurs and investors looking for exceptional talent, or investing in the outputs of the class (business proposals, speeches, essays, tiny textbooks, software code, AI mentors, book chapters, tutorials, art, poetry, music, just about anything).
I think that the next step is to find a business executive who is well known and well connected to jump on the idea. That leader gets a lot of his contacts on board, so you start with some momentum, not just one or two random courses.
Arnold -- good idea, but are YOU really ready to dedicate enough of your life to push it towards success? I suspect that, like most of us who are comfy & busy retired folk, the realistic work commitment involved in starting a new revolutionary college is too much of a time sink - doesn't sync well enough with other, more fun stuff (like grandkids!).
I'd guess (thru projection!) that you'd be happy if Scott worked to find the Exec & Angel Investor and roughly followed that fine NBU paper. Where you'd be willing to teach a course or two.
Naturally I could be way wrong, and you're willing to work on recruitment, so we'd be interested in any comments from any that you've brought up the idea with: Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen; Peter Theil, or Balaji S. Srinivasan?
Asking Tyler or Alex of MR for which Execs lately seem likely to be interested?
Scott, the dad & husband (like me! years ago), might be available to dedicate full 40-50 hrs/ week, for a while, or perhaps only 2-3 hrs per day more like a hobby (like me! or less many days; family first).
Khan Academy did start as a set of random courses that Sal did for his nephews (see his Ted talk as referenced by Freddie recently). Lot's more money will likely be available to somebody who has been successful with at least one course that proves the concept.
Jordan Peterson would be great but ... he's working on both Peterson Academy and at UATX, with Bari Weiss (& Glenn Loury, & Rob Henderson, among others).
Scott : "You might hire a teacher, grader, or tutor to help with the workload." The chatGPT grader seems an excellent start.
Coursera doesn’t look that good. I think I looked into it 15 or 20 years ago and never returned. I see some very expensive online engineering degrees (44K). I see a two three week long courses on psychology by Paul Bloom. Those might be good, but only 14 hours long. I have a see a bunch of computer and software courses. Not much mention of professors though. The focus should be on the teachers like Substack focuses on the writers. With that said, an online-only course or degree is too sterile for 18 - 22 year olds. There has to be a significant in-person component. So I’ll have to revise my idea or focus on older people, 30 and up.
I agree most or all current coursera offerings aren't what you detailed but as you hinted, it is a flexible format. I suspect one could use it to do what you want.
Addendum: It might be a good idea, depending on the class and the goals for the class, to require a passing grade on an admissions exam, interview, essay, etc. to screen potential students. This could be conducted over video conference similar to the Classical Learning Test. See UATX’s statement below. https://www.cltexam.com/tests/clt/
“The University of Austin is proud to accept all three standardized testing options, the ACT, SAT, and CLT. For those who may be unfamiliar, the CLT is a remotely proctored test that can be taken in the comfort of your home in just two hours. Learn more about the Classic Learning Test and consider taking this testing option to satisfy your standardized testing requirement.”
“The ultimate use of incentives was suggested by Adam Smith in his magisterial Wealth of Nations over 240 years ago: have students directly pay professors for their services. Extending Smith's analysis, the professors, in turn, could contract with packagers of courses to create degrees, either through traditional universities or other providers. These packagers of degrees can provide administrative and other services (e.g., classroom rental) necessary to ultimately providing a diploma certifying the student has attained a reasonably high level of competence? Professors who are popular can charge higher fees to more students, obtaining higher revenues. To be sure, popularity and true learning are not perfectly correlated with one another, but incentivizing professors to be interesting and relevant is in itself not an altogether bad thing.”
From page 313, Chapter 17 “The Three I’s of University Reform” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
“The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, believed that university endowments had pernicious effects on academic life. Smith asked several questions:
‘Have those... endowments contributed in general to promote the end of their institution? Have they contributed to encourage the diligence, and to improve the abilities of the teachers? Have they directed the course of education towards objects more useful, both to the individual and to the public, than those to which it would naturally have gone of its own accord?’
“The one-word executive summary of Smith's answer to all of these questions is ‘no.’ Smith asserts that the positive attributes that endowments are supposed to have achieved had not been achieved, at least as of 1776 when he was writing.
“If endowments are generous, income from the funds makes the need for tuition fees to pay professors less pressing. While that may make college ‘more affordable’ to students, Smith would argue there are unintended consequences:
‘The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished…the necessity of application in the teachers. Their subsistence, so far as it arises from their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions.... In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years, given up altogether the pretense of teaching.’
“Smith's concern about endowments were echoed by other pioneering classical economists, notably John Stuart Mill and by scholars in the classical liberal tradition, notably Edwin West.
“In a world without endowments or government subsidies, the professors derive their income directly from the students. The better the professor is, the more students will study with him or her and the higher the fee the professor could charge for services provided. Professorial income is directly related to instructional popularity, which in turn is presumably highly positively correlated with competence and excellence. Endowments reduce the incentives for professors to strive to meet their student needs. Thus, modern-day professors lecture sometimes about obscure esoteric trivia on which they did doctoral research and ignore important themes that are fundamental and enduring, as endowments and other public subsidies shield them from competing directly for students in the marketplace. They simply teach less than previously and write obscure papers for the Journal of Last Resort or its equivalent, journals that hardly anyone, even scholars, read. Endowments reduce the role of markets in educational performance and thereby encourage inefficiency.
“I have witnessed Smith's point firsthand, as I once taught in the summers at the Economics Institute at the University of Colorado, which was almost entirely dependent on tuition revenues for its financing. Professors were hired not by the year, but by the term, and their long-term compensation and employment were tied to their classroom performance and enrollments. The quality of teaching was exceptional—unprepared or uninspiring professors lasted but one term.
“But Smith goes even further: ‘The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.’ This anticipates some modern thinking drawing on the economics of property rights and public choice, such as the work of the late Henry Manne and scholars like James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? It can be argued that so-called not-for-profit universities are in some meaningful sense deriving ‘profits’ (surpluses of funds) that are used to pay the equivalent of ‘dividends’ to the ‘masters’ (powerful teachers and administrators) who in effect largely ‘own’ the university, formal legal documents stating that the governing board owns the institution notwithstanding. Endowments conceivably provide funds that the faculty and administration capture in economic rents, and the students fail to benefit. If true, favorable tax treatment for endowments becomes indefensible, and taxing them is perhaps even desirable, since those funds largely support nontransparent income payments to a small segment of society at the expense of the general taxpayer.”
From pages 130-132, Chapter 7 “Why Endowments Don’t Lower the Cost of Tuition” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
Combine the Huemer analogy with Pournelle's Iron Law, then consider that public employees frequently play an outsized role in determining local election outcomes due to the ol' "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs" problem, and what you're left with is a medieval doctor whose incentive is to poison the patient as badly as possible without outright killing him. Isn't democracy a wonderful thing?
"The issue[] of race... relations require[s] really careful thought..."
Why is that? If Harvard and other top schools admitted applicants based solely on test scores and grades, black students would drop to less than 1% of the student body. When you say the problem requires "careful thought," I think you mean you're squeamish about this outcome. But there are more dumb whites (< 100 IQ) than blacks, and absolutely no one cares that good colleges exclude them.
Please explain why it matters that this would disproportionately affect black people. I suspect you will have to rely on an argument based on the necessity of protecting black amour-propre (i.e., tribal pride), which, again, no one cares about in the case of whites.
+1 Yes, the undesirability of the expected result.
"really careful thought" seems like "really effective PR to avoid being called a racist".
The US problem has elite university issues, but the real problem is below avg IQ folk -- HALF the people, and maybe 70-80% of Blacks. Most "nice" people don't like this reality (nor the reality that sluts are really bad for society...), US society, and politicians, need to be specific about policies to help the non-college educated get normal jobs and achieve normal middle class lifestyles.
This is the video Andreessen/Horowitz version of the podcast: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1747018355666751524
I listened to the Andreessen/Horowitz podcast last week and, although I thought Horowitz's perspective was good as a Columbia trustee, they were both very short on solutions. The big problem in my view is just the money issue. The federal government is causing the mother of all calculation problems. Talking about entrepreneurial opportunities while largely ignoring the federal loan and subsidy issue is a bit confused because your incentive is always going to be to form the institution into a shape that is best at absorbing federal money for the lowest cost. You just have these institutions and the students doing rain dances for federal money.
Critiquing the footwork on the rain dance is missing the cause of the problem. It is also missing the problem to focus on reforming the elite institutions (which are also heavily distorted by federal incentives) rather than on blowing up everything. My bias is always towards that if there is evil, distortion, corruption, and waste, it should be destroyed and that we should have no pity for people who will suffer the consequences. Most people do not have this trait: most people want to be "nice" and have a sort of inherently conservative disposition, which is pleasantly displayed by this discussion.
End the Single University Model of Awarding Degrees
“Professors would be independent contractors, selling their instructional and research services to the university, which would be the course aggregator and degree certifier. The arrangement between teacher and the university might be such that the amount paid the professor would depend on his or her ability to generate students, moving in the direction of the earlier professorial payment model praised by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. For example, a professor teaching a survey course in psychology might be paid $2000 plus $200 for each student over the fiftieth enrolled who receives a course grade (if the professor generates only twenty students, he or she gets paid $2,000; sixty students nets $4,000; with 150 students, the professor is paid $22,000). To discourage grade inflation (professors trying to attract revenue-producing students through nonrigorous grading), professors could have their pay docked if the average class grade point average exceeds something like 3.0 (a ‘B’ average). Even more sophisticated ‘grade-adjusted’ compensation schemes could be devised.”
From page 337, Chapter 19 “Reforming Higher Education” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
An important metric missing from education is an accreditation score. The current binary accreditation system is almost useless and probably very costly to the consumer. Ideally accreditation would be in the form of a review essay written by a trusted organization or individual, but in some cases it might be a single number score, between 1-100.
One way of determining such a score is to determine the value added of the class, certificate or degree. Such a score could be determined by taking the average of the value added for all students graduating from the class or program. The value added for a single student would be determined by taking the difference between an entrance “GRE” and exit “GRE.”
These “GREs” could be The GRE; one of the GRE subjects Tests; or a custom-made GRE for any class or degree program.
Rather than make this mandatory like No Child Left Behind, it should be voluntary and customized to the culture of the school, and sanctioned by trusted third parties.
Richard Vedder discusses this idea for post secondary schools in his Chapter 14 “The Academic Cartel of Accreditation” in his book Restoring the Promise.
Interestingly universities don’t seem to be interested in such a value added accountability metric. Maybe because their focus is on athletics, research, DEI, or satisfying federal regulations, rather than on teaching and learning outcomes? Or, cartel anyone?
Various public and private K-12 schools use accountability metrics like the Iowa Achievement Test or the Classical Learning Test (CLT). Why shouldn’t universities do this as well? It should be voluntary, and rather than reform those institutions, it might be more satisfying to create new institutions here on Substack, class by class, post by post, comment by comment.
Maybe Substack will offer a new service to make it easier for regular folks and teachers to offer web based classes. Is anyone Substack listening?
"universities don’t seem to be interested in such a value added accountability metric."
Unless they are subject based tests, my prior is that high SAT going in (%, decile) will equal that going out +-2% (for 90%).
However, Arnolds aiBot grader offers a near future way to customize learning testing & semi-automate more detailed, personalized testing. Testing the interviewing students in their 2,3,4 favorite subjects, with a large list of possible questions & topics, and having them write an 1/2 hr short essay which is then graded. Plus additional questions offered by aiBot to the interviewer.
All the textbooks for all college subjects should be part of the training material of the major AIs.
Great note by Lorenzo on the Iron Law of any org - mission folk, and org folk. With org folk, over time, gaining power over the mission folk, who care more about the mission than about the org.
Current US universities show this VERY clearly - all (virtually) the Presidents care more about their college, in particular, as well as all US colleges, in general, than they care about actual education of students.
Huemer makes some great points, but he's wrong: "almost all think that immigration helps the economy. " Please, show me the economist (other than Bryan?) who thinks unlimited illegal immigration with all immediately receiving welfare benefit will help the economy. None say that -- tho Huemer also didn't quite say that. {Note that had Trump said Huemer's quote, many Trump haters would say that Trump was talking about unlimited illegal immigration. Especially college grad Trump haters.}
Illegal immigration hurts the economy, as well as degrading respect for "rule of law". Legal, high skilled immigration helps the economy.
"#4.1 Don't Vote " Reminds me of my Libber coffee mug: Nobody tells the truth; Nobody will lower your taxes; Nobody cares about you; Nobody will solve your problems. Vote for Nobody.
On colleges degrading, it will take a long time to replace their status, but it is already starting. Many big companies use college admissions & graduations as a proxy for IQ tests, and quite a bit of boot-licking, bureaucracy accepting behavior. No easy way to duplicate that package.
"In the private sector you're supposed to find a solution to people's problems..."
There's a lot of "values/customer promise drift" and flexibility even here. How many dating apps e.g. began with the aim of pairing people up? This transformed into keeping people dating indefinitely.
"In the Andreessen-Horowitz podcast, Horowitz says that if he were running a university he would make it customer focused, meaning it would emphasize satisfying students. Be careful what you wish for, Ben."
For all the search engines, social media platforms, and other internet services that are paid for with advertising and "surveillance capitalism", there is that expression about the users of the services, "You aren't the customer; you're the product."
Trying to get the users to be the customers for most of these services was not successful, or at least, not competitive with the alternative, and fingers crossed substack breaks the mold. But if anything is ripe for disruption in education, it's just this changing of vision of "Who can be the customer?"
The problem is with seeing Parents and Students as "the" customers. They turn out to be terrible customers if what you care about is maintaining the quality of the signal of the credentials, because they have mostly refused to budge as the quality of an Ivy credential has collapsed. The hint is with that line, "Horowitz claims that employers have started to notice." Employers are willing to pay for credible signals of productivity, but the way they do so now is in a very indirect way that insulates the credential-issuers from market pressures that would keep those credentials aligned as proxies for expected levels of performance. "Harvard Degree" used to be enough. Now it had better be "Harvard Degree in a -hard- major, wink wink."
The American military spends a vast fortune each year on education and training. That this has large benefits for the individuals for their personal lives in ways that don't benefit the military is, to the military, a totally incidental and irrelevant matter.
In fact, it's kind of a negative. To the extent that anything the military teaches someone is a "portable skill" he can leverage elsewhere, the military runs the risk of not capturing the full value of the investment, and so tries hard to offer large bonuses for longer term contracts and dangles the carrot of 20-year pensions to keep people in until retirement. Sure, it's hard to a lot of military skills to civilian work, but outside combat arms, it's not that much of a stretch, especially if one moves to a similar national-security-related sector. Indeed, that whole sector and rest of the government gets an enormous subsidy out of the military budget which paid for all the initial weeding-out and training of individuals useful in their later careers at those other beneficiary agencies and companies.
Even the fact that someone has served honorably gives that individual a valuable credential signal that he is above some threshold for productive conscientiousness, and the military loses plenty of people after one term of service for this reason. Indeed, if there was any way to perform the training to maintain the value to the military and save 1% of the expense but at the the cost of 95% of the personal benefit, the military would jump to immediately implement that change.
The point it, the student-trainee isn't the customer of the training, and doesn't pay for it. Indeed, he gets paid for it. The military is the customer, pays for it and pays the student, and it's the post-student trained-tested-verified-certified-and-periodically-recertified soldier that is the product.
In Germany I once visited a place with a university known for its engineering department and located in the same town as a major engineering company, and the economic pattern was that a large number of new graduates got their first jobs at that company. While they are not 'integrated', the company and engineering department of university have a tight relationship with frequent intimate interactions and even professional engineers encouraged to teach some classes, to make sure that what is happening to the students in the education process was tied to real market needs and was good for all parties involved.
It seems to me that this is the direction in which a lot of disruption can happen, with companies or groups representing sectors trying to identify talent and sponsor students with tuition and promise of future employment, but with some provision for supervision, influence, and control so as to have a more secure belief in what a credential really means in terms of what a new graduate can really be expected to know and do.
"Another nugget from Horowitz is that student athletics plays an important long-term role for the school. He says that by far the biggest donors to colleges and universities are alumni who played on sports teams. Sports does the most to emotionally bond the student to the institution."
And I'll bet they're mostly men. Score another point for Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worriers.
Contrary the business boom, here's an important link on the decline and recent laying off of all the Sports Illustrated folk, in a comment on Althouse by Prof. Drout:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2024/01/authentic-brands-group-has-owned-sports.html#more
>>I'm sure that the wokeness was what finished off SI, but a big contributor is the disgusting "financialization" of everything. ... some jackass finance guys, empowered by the no-interest money that our genius Federal Reserve has been pumping into the economy since 2008, used debt to buy out the magazine and promptly stuffed it into a portfolio and ignored it. Half-assed itinerant MBAs or consultants get shuffled in to "manage," but no one really cares very much because SI is just another asset in a basket of assets. <<
The financialization of everything is a real problem, along with how too much of the business profits made are made by finance companies. So many (not quite everybody) want to get rich quick, and that is done legally more often with finance than creating some other great business.
It's insidious in the culture with the idea that money can, and does, buy happiness.
If Trump wins I’m predicting significant financial collapse of universities within his term. Let’s get some bets going on this. Ideas?
Paraphrasing Marc Andreesen at 1 hour 25 minutes: “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is basically applied stoicism.” Thanks for the tip Marc.
Guess it’s time for me to read the Ryan Holiday self-help series.
https://www.econtalk.org/ryan-holiday-on-discipline-is-destiny/
https://www.econtalk.org/ryan-holiday-on-stillness-is-the-key/
https://www.econtalk.org/ryan-holiday-on-ego-is-the-enemy/
His bookConspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue is one of my favorites.
https://www.econtalk.org/ryan-holiday-on-conspiracy-gawker-and-the-hulk-hogan-trial/
One line summary of Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen podcast on Higher Ed:
“Government funding turns out to be highly corrupting.”
Ben Horwitz 52 minutes in.
Professor Kling -
Considering these excerpts from Richard Vedder’s book, would you be open to offering a course here on Substack?
It could be very simple, or it could be quite sophisticated and potentially disruptive.
Here’s how it might work. You offer a course via a Substack post in which you describe the course. Students subscribe just as they subscribe to any Substack.
You might assign readings, host discussions; you might require homework, essays, tests or the creation of certain programming assignments, business proposals, podcasts, videos, speeches, etc.
You might hire a teacher, grader, or tutor to help with the workload.
You charge whatever you feel like, and share a portion of it with your staff and possibly save some for end-of-class parties or awards.
At the end of the class, students might meet in person for a final exam and/or final presentations, followed by a social.
Third-party outsiders might review and rank the course, giving it some sort of accreditation. Or the students’ work could simply be posted to the web to self-accredit the course. Students might or might not be allowed to post their own work to their own Substack. Various IP arrangements for the course could be agreed to in advance.
Grades could be assigned based on student performance, or even better yet, awards could be given out in various ways. One way is to highlight in a Substack post the best work from the class. The Best Work Board. This could be as simple as a Links to Consider or a post highlighting the best work of one individual.
Awards could also be letters of recommendation and praise. They could be monetary rewards paid for by the Substack audience (non-student subscribers who might be sitting-in on the class). Or rewards could be donated by entrepreneurs and investors looking for exceptional talent, or investing in the outputs of the class (business proposals, speeches, essays, tiny textbooks, software code, AI mentors, book chapters, tutorials, art, poetry, music, just about anything).
Are you game?
note that I wrote this: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/white-paper-for-network-based-higher
Yes, I know. What’s the next step?
I think that the next step is to find a business executive who is well known and well connected to jump on the idea. That leader gets a lot of his contacts on board, so you start with some momentum, not just one or two random courses.
Arnold -- good idea, but are YOU really ready to dedicate enough of your life to push it towards success? I suspect that, like most of us who are comfy & busy retired folk, the realistic work commitment involved in starting a new revolutionary college is too much of a time sink - doesn't sync well enough with other, more fun stuff (like grandkids!).
I'd guess (thru projection!) that you'd be happy if Scott worked to find the Exec & Angel Investor and roughly followed that fine NBU paper. Where you'd be willing to teach a course or two.
Naturally I could be way wrong, and you're willing to work on recruitment, so we'd be interested in any comments from any that you've brought up the idea with: Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen; Peter Theil, or Balaji S. Srinivasan?
Asking Tyler or Alex of MR for which Execs lately seem likely to be interested?
Scott, the dad & husband (like me! years ago), might be available to dedicate full 40-50 hrs/ week, for a while, or perhaps only 2-3 hrs per day more like a hobby (like me! or less many days; family first).
Khan Academy did start as a set of random courses that Sal did for his nephews (see his Ted talk as referenced by Freddie recently). Lot's more money will likely be available to somebody who has been successful with at least one course that proves the concept.
Jordan Peterson would be great but ... he's working on both Peterson Academy and at UATX, with Bari Weiss (& Glenn Loury, & Rob Henderson, among others).
Scott : "You might hire a teacher, grader, or tutor to help with the workload." The chatGPT grader seems an excellent start.
Sounds similar to Coursera.
Coursera doesn’t look that good. I think I looked into it 15 or 20 years ago and never returned. I see some very expensive online engineering degrees (44K). I see a two three week long courses on psychology by Paul Bloom. Those might be good, but only 14 hours long. I have a see a bunch of computer and software courses. Not much mention of professors though. The focus should be on the teachers like Substack focuses on the writers. With that said, an online-only course or degree is too sterile for 18 - 22 year olds. There has to be a significant in-person component. So I’ll have to revise my idea or focus on older people, 30 and up.
I agree most or all current coursera offerings aren't what you detailed but as you hinted, it is a flexible format. I suspect one could use it to do what you want.
I’ll check out Coursera. I’m not very familiar with it.
Addendum: It might be a good idea, depending on the class and the goals for the class, to require a passing grade on an admissions exam, interview, essay, etc. to screen potential students. This could be conducted over video conference similar to the Classical Learning Test. See UATX’s statement below. https://www.cltexam.com/tests/clt/
“The University of Austin is proud to accept all three standardized testing options, the ACT, SAT, and CLT. For those who may be unfamiliar, the CLT is a remotely proctored test that can be taken in the comfort of your home in just two hours. Learn more about the Classic Learning Test and consider taking this testing option to satisfy your standardized testing requirement.”
https://www.uaustin.org/admissions#standard-test-scores
Incentives
“The ultimate use of incentives was suggested by Adam Smith in his magisterial Wealth of Nations over 240 years ago: have students directly pay professors for their services. Extending Smith's analysis, the professors, in turn, could contract with packagers of courses to create degrees, either through traditional universities or other providers. These packagers of degrees can provide administrative and other services (e.g., classroom rental) necessary to ultimately providing a diploma certifying the student has attained a reasonably high level of competence? Professors who are popular can charge higher fees to more students, obtaining higher revenues. To be sure, popularity and true learning are not perfectly correlated with one another, but incentivizing professors to be interesting and relevant is in itself not an altogether bad thing.”
From page 313, Chapter 17 “The Three I’s of University Reform” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.
Arguments Against Endowments
“The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, believed that university endowments had pernicious effects on academic life. Smith asked several questions:
‘Have those... endowments contributed in general to promote the end of their institution? Have they contributed to encourage the diligence, and to improve the abilities of the teachers? Have they directed the course of education towards objects more useful, both to the individual and to the public, than those to which it would naturally have gone of its own accord?’
“The one-word executive summary of Smith's answer to all of these questions is ‘no.’ Smith asserts that the positive attributes that endowments are supposed to have achieved had not been achieved, at least as of 1776 when he was writing.
“If endowments are generous, income from the funds makes the need for tuition fees to pay professors less pressing. While that may make college ‘more affordable’ to students, Smith would argue there are unintended consequences:
‘The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished…the necessity of application in the teachers. Their subsistence, so far as it arises from their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions.... In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years, given up altogether the pretense of teaching.’
“Smith's concern about endowments were echoed by other pioneering classical economists, notably John Stuart Mill and by scholars in the classical liberal tradition, notably Edwin West.
“In a world without endowments or government subsidies, the professors derive their income directly from the students. The better the professor is, the more students will study with him or her and the higher the fee the professor could charge for services provided. Professorial income is directly related to instructional popularity, which in turn is presumably highly positively correlated with competence and excellence. Endowments reduce the incentives for professors to strive to meet their student needs. Thus, modern-day professors lecture sometimes about obscure esoteric trivia on which they did doctoral research and ignore important themes that are fundamental and enduring, as endowments and other public subsidies shield them from competing directly for students in the marketplace. They simply teach less than previously and write obscure papers for the Journal of Last Resort or its equivalent, journals that hardly anyone, even scholars, read. Endowments reduce the role of markets in educational performance and thereby encourage inefficiency.
“I have witnessed Smith's point firsthand, as I once taught in the summers at the Economics Institute at the University of Colorado, which was almost entirely dependent on tuition revenues for its financing. Professors were hired not by the year, but by the term, and their long-term compensation and employment were tied to their classroom performance and enrollments. The quality of teaching was exceptional—unprepared or uninspiring professors lasted but one term.
“But Smith goes even further: ‘The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.’ This anticipates some modern thinking drawing on the economics of property rights and public choice, such as the work of the late Henry Manne and scholars like James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? It can be argued that so-called not-for-profit universities are in some meaningful sense deriving ‘profits’ (surpluses of funds) that are used to pay the equivalent of ‘dividends’ to the ‘masters’ (powerful teachers and administrators) who in effect largely ‘own’ the university, formal legal documents stating that the governing board owns the institution notwithstanding. Endowments conceivably provide funds that the faculty and administration capture in economic rents, and the students fail to benefit. If true, favorable tax treatment for endowments becomes indefensible, and taxing them is perhaps even desirable, since those funds largely support nontransparent income payments to a small segment of society at the expense of the general taxpayer.”
From pages 130-132, Chapter 7 “Why Endowments Don’t Lower the Cost of Tuition” in Richard K. Vedder’s book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.