Higher Education

“And I said, but I got a feeling that this is a problem in education. People are learning in a siloed way.”

“We've seen administrative staff grow from 10% to 60% in the last 30 years.”

“Education, I think, is probably the easiest, which is if you end the federal student loan program, I think you solve 90% of the problem in education.”

“If you're not getting into medicine, or like a hard thing that requires four to six years of school, I'm not sure people should be going to school right now.”

“And it's ridiculous because they're only taught for half the year. The rest of it is holidays. So you've got these big institutions, expensive institutions, with people only there part-time. It's madness.”

“Just free speech is not enough. the idea that we're gonna resolve this by just having more speech, I think is naive.”

“This idea of, hey, I'm gonna graduate at 22, and then somehow be able to have, like, a successful career for the next You know, call it 50 years or so, or 40 years, whatever amount of time you're thinking about working without having to require some type of up…”

“The innovation that we're seeing happen there is almost, if I made the analogy to, like, the idea of, like, how cell phones, like, kind of leapfrog landlines in Africa. We're starting to see new ways of, kind of, starting to think about, like, higher education…”

“It turns out that the collaboration piece has particular importance in the higher education space, and so that's why we decided to focus, and that only happened about four months ago.”

“And most recently have really focused on Providing that not just to the workforce, but also to the higher education space, where ironically students are driving the professors rather than the other way around of using generative AI.”

“It's just a matter of fact that the political leanings of faculty have really moved to the left since the 19 sixties in this country, and it's happened kind of decade by decade by decade, to the point where people do get screened out of certain colleges and sc…”

“When you feel like what you've got are a bunch of graduates from a school that have been indoctrinated in a certain worldview, and they're gonna come and be, like, culture warriors in your company and create chaos people don't want that.”

“In the next five years, there's going to be three female college grads for every two male college grads.”

“So that was the precedent that was set, and that, I believe, was the beginning of one of the greatest brand destructions in American history. Higher ed used to have one of the greatest brands in the world. Elite higher ed was the envy of the world. Now it's a …”

“Like, I mean, I think that it's pretty fragile now, you know, in terms of the value proposition and that it's so expensive and got, you know, the cost relative to the value is so precarious.”

“Largely, especially in econ lesson classics, they teach you how to solve exercises, which can be initially complex, but there's a definite answer that you can arrive at. Computers are really good at exercises. Problems don't have a definite solution, and so yo…”

“Whatever the right way to think about this was, 40 years ago, the time for legacy admissions is over.”

“Because I like to believe that it's not oversimplification, but it's the reality that if you say that you will get X after doing Y, then people are more motivated. So I don't think it's an education issue. I think it's a motivation issue.”

“You start new institutions when you recognize that there's a North Star that you want to aim for, and I think the North Star that we have that we're currently aiming for right now is a kind of renewal of the spirit of the pursuit of truth in higher education.”

“One of the issues at hand in higher education is that a kind of a radical relativism has begun to pervade our institutions of higher learning”

“I think the problem, one of the root problems today in higher education, which is endemic to the culture at large, is, is not so much that everybody, most people, almost everybody in higher education is on one end of the political spectrum, the left, it's the …”

“The mission, however, with Contact Hour funding, the traditional way of funding higher education, Is really focused on what can I sell to a student? So I'm selling programs into the student customer. When we shift the funding model to placement and earnings, n…”

“The contact hour model encourages you to keep as many students enrolled for as long as you can because you're selling units, semester credit hour units.”

“Most of the data analytics done in higher education is in a compliance fashion for reporting. We put the data analytics group in the CFO's shop. And it's about performance optimization.”

“Three out of four students are going to higher education for job specific skills. That's a study that's done every year by the Higher Education Research Institute. Four out of five are there for Out of interest for an occupation.”

“There are like, I think, forty million students that are there in higher education today. And, you know, most of them other than probably a million or two million are actually getting very poor quality education.”

“The classes are huge. 800 people in a class. And then I get to graduate school, and in graduate school, there's like eight people in a class. So this is upside down. I needed it when I was a freshman. I don't need it now that I'm a graduate student. I know wha…”

“For many, many years they teach it to their kids and then it worked. And over the past 20 years it stopped working.”

“We're going to see students, you know, entering the workforce earlier, but then returning for further education at a higher rate. But I think that's not going to be stacked. It's going to be, you know, years down the line.”

“I think there's going to be a pop in a sort of higher ed bubble where a lot of colleges are going to go out of business and it's going to be a lot of pain in higher ed because of this factor.”

“You're seeing things like, you know, YC, which is incredibly valuable as a networking place. And people talk about YC as kind of like startup graduate school, right? And, you know, you're seeing places like that have Add an incredible amount of value providing…”

“I think the hardest one is that That brand signaling piece. I think that will be the last kind of, the last domino to fall. Just cause I think there's a ton of strength in kind of traditional education around that signaling piece.”

“I think brand is a huge piece of what's protecting traditional institutions from being disrupted. And I think brand is very closely coupled with exclusivity. So at the lower levels where the brand is less strong, I think that is a prime target for disruption a…”

“I'm on the board of trustees at Columbia, and there are certainly people who are going to go to, like, an elite school and become a scholar, a PhD, and I think the system works reasonably well for them, but for, you know, the kind of bulk of the population who…”

“We're not a, like, a professional training school, like, we're not a handmaid into the industry where it's like an on-ramp to getting a job, like, yes, we want our students to be successful and have jobs and have careers, but that's a bad use of the academy, t…”

“If you want to sell something in higher education, generally speaking, you know, you have to go through a committee process that can take years, sometimes three years for relatively small transaction sizes.”

“Teaching, as surprising as it may be, is really very low on the total pool of priorities in higher education. In fact, that's just, it's not how universities get funded. You know, universities are not known generally because of the quality of their teaching. I…”

“I think many people believe that education is an investment that makes you more productive. In a sense. And I think beyond some of the very basic stuff that you learn in primary school, I don't actually think that's the case. I actually view education as a con…”

“I used to be huge anti-higher education. For the most part, I still am. The difference is now I'm, you know, an adult in school pursuing a physics degree, but even there was a plan for that.”