Universities

“We should meet the best scientists wherever they are. If they're at a university, we should fund them. If they're at a focused research organization, we should fund them. If they're on their own in their garage doing incredible work and can pass a merit-based …”

“The guidance will reshape how the federal government spends roughly two hundred billion dollars a year on research for the rest of Trump's term. The administration wants more of that money going directly to scientists through fellowships and awards rather than…”

“There's going to be a whole lot of breakthroughs happening with AI enablement in math and basic science, those kinds of things. Universities, I think will play a foundational role in shaping that future.”

“A hundred series classes in university are going to go away. Like as soon as everybody figures out this AI tutor stuff, they're just going to go away.”

“If the universities are forced to underwrite these degrees and they know that they'll take the first dollar loss up to a certain amount, 2030, 40,000, they'll be much more circumspect about what degrees they force onto people and the amount of money that they'…”

“There's a lot of good ideas that you need to test out at small scale. And in a university, you have a lot more freedom to pick pretty risky ideas at a small scale, but still, you know, no one's asking you to justify your research in, in ways that, that often h…”

“Because what we're seeing now is in all the universities, they're all using the Chinese models.”

“I think we have starved our universities of compute. If you want to do interesting training work at a university, very hard to get enough compute to do that.”

“Often the longest tenured institutions are universities and breweries.”

“We're starting universities, you know, policy groups to fight for things that help lift up lives.”

“I think we have to do better at that, and we have to reward universities that are better at that.”

“If you look at the actual numbers for educational institutions today, we have had a three to four x incline in the cost of universities, and we have had a flat line of return, meaning our salary increases after university.”

“We're working on accreditation with some local universities.”

“Universities obviously directly get federal funding, right? Some of them are literally federal, you know, public colleges but they're very dependent on tax exemptions and so on and so forth that the state grants, and they only exist because of that.”

“Commercial entities can't wait, and so having the fundamental research in universities, absolutely critical, and my concern is we don't have a plan B. You know, if it's not going to be done in universities, where is it going to be done?”

“They're quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future.”

“Both the universities and the corporate employers are literally, this is true. They're literally, they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African Americans. Because they still count as black.”

“A lot of universities have their own funds now. So you might be aware that they have their own funds. So that's an investment, Christian. That's not a brat. That's a, do we think that this thing's got a chance? So they, when they reach out to us, they have alr…”

“So if you think about AI, we think about nuclear fusion or, you know, a lot of different areas of research that have translated into really outsized returns for investors. They probably have originated from university or at some point touched the university in…”

“Earlier this year, the Trump administration said, We're cutting that to 15% across the board for all universities”

“You look across the landscape and you see universities almost without exception as being a place where people who are either narrow In their specialization, narrow technician or conforming ideologue who really is not thinking about these questions very deeply.”

“What we didn't know and what we were operating on a false premise is that we wouldn't be able to sell to universities, especially universities that had hospital affiliations. Because of the contracts that exist, but from the major x-ray supply companies, we th…”

“The buyers now are these kind of global studies or these deans or provosts of university institutions. But it took us a long time going through every other conceivable permutation to realize that that's probably our most easy, like, reliably addressable buyer.…”

“And we're actually not doing that at Duolingo. We still hire from universities.”

“There's a crazy stat around universities. So the top 10 universities in the world, I believe three are British and three are American. So when you actually look at our intellect, I think you could argue we're at least a smart, or at least the British sound sma…”

“And the average is around 30% today across universities and other institutions.”

“Universities actually pay contamination fees on the recycling bills. And so these are fees that they have to pay on top of what they already pay in recycling. So this can be anywhere between 75 to 150,000 dollars a year just on contamination.”

“Unless you're at the tippy top universities, the university costs you a ton of money, but doesn't actually ROI for you.”

“At the end of the day, their priority is their traditional business, which is the core university, the people that are going there, you know, spending 80,000 dollars a year to get a degree, undergraduate, whatever, like, that's really their core constituency.”

“The school, I was like, they spent a significant amount of money on student acquisition. Because if you think about it, there's some number of schools that are well known, and a significant number that are very high quality institutions that are just not as we…”

“I can tell you we're re, we're doing the next version in March. It'll expand to 135, 140 schools. So we're almost going to double it.”

“It somehow, it doesn't happen in universities. It doesn't happen in government.”

“There's a reason why adoption rates are over 70% in universities for chat GPT. And while they're like at a few percent elsewhere in the world, we figure stuff out like this.”

“The other hard part also is that, you know, with universities, it's like when you develop new technologies at universities, if you do it in that environment, like they own your IP, you know, you don't like. Just get to do your thing and, ah, you know, keep it …”

“We are in active conversations with hundreds, literally hundreds, maybe thousands of universities across the US, across the world, all grappling with this question of this is big technical shift.”

“I think all of the kids coming to university should get practice being offended. I think it's actually healthy for them to You know, we call it microaggressions. I think we should have all of them experience microaggressions. They need to learn that it's okay …”

“The problem is that I think, again, the companies will recover much faster from this cultural moment than the universities will.”

“I would imagine that like five or 10 years from now, it's actually much simpler. We're just at this inflection point where this hasn't really been done like this before.”

“Top, top flight university, universities are part luxury brand, Part daycare, part education, part insurance policy.”

“When you go talk to universities right now, one point they make is they don't have the compute power to be able to rival Microsoft and OpenAI and these companies”

“I mean, I'm a little skeptical of that because I do think at least, you know, among a pretty big contingent in the university, it's a religion. It's not a it's not a point of view. It's a belief system that requires faith. And which is why it cannot be argued.…”

“And the adjunct is somebody who is qualified to be a professor, has the PhD and all the equivalent training and so forth. But we're not gonna hire them, you know, almost like the gig workers of the academic field. We're not gonna hire them as full-time employe…”

“Like, I mean, I think that if you're designing the system from scratch, at least I would probably pay professors much, much more, particularly in fields that are highly competitive, like, you know, computer science or You know, physics are things where like, i…”

“Universities, you know, historically only were ever built to, you know, train a very small percentage of the eighteen-year-olds, you know, in the world each year.”

“You got to get the main thing done, and anything that compromises a prime directive has got to go and be subordinated, and I think that, you know, in the universities, partly because of just sheer size of them, you know, you have people who have no concern abo…”

“I'll just list the three reasons why this would be very difficult. Number one is existing institutions just have very powerful network effects, which is why they, you know, they, they're so, you know, which is why the big ones are like hundreds of years old. T…”

“Turns out that foreign students at universities generally pay full freight.”

“Universities rarely, you also have to understand almost never do layoffs. So they only get bigger.”

“And so the whole government funding process Is incredibly corrupting and bad and massive and drive so much of the research that's done in universities because it's a gigantic, it's like a gusher of cash. So it cannot be resisted, but it's set up in a very horr…”

“I think if you lose the student, you're done. That's the end of the whole thing. Like, it doesn't matter what the faculty think. It doesn't matter what the alumni think. It doesn't matter what the donors think. It doesn't matter what anybody thinks. If you're …”

“There is a pretty active campaign in the other direction and, you know, that, that campaign has taken hold of a lot of universities, a lot of government agencies you know, a lot of the power structure of the people who get to decide whether things are legal. T…”

“Universities actually pay contamination fees on the recycling bills. And so these are fees that they have to pay on top of what they already pay in recycling. So this can be anywhere between 75 to 150,000 dollars a year just on contamination.”

“As these new tech companies have built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the universities. And by the way, that process I think is accelerating in AI specifically because the capital needs to actually do modern AI are s…”

“I think, I don't think generative AI dramatically changes what was already going to happen to universities.”

“The moment we realized that we can charge universities some marketing fee, we dropped a hundred percent of our cost to our students.”

“The incentive structures within universities are set up such that the amount of resources they're willing to expend on actual, like, teaching technology and, like, investing in in student engagement, not super high. And it's just that most of their revenue, mo…”

“So in 10 years, I think universities and the entire EDU system, other than maybe the top hundred universities, is going to be pretty reimagined.”

“By the way people who got, you know, professors a hundred years ago, like how would they score the PhDs that are being granted today? Would they say, well, the bar is higher? Or would they say the bar is lower? I think they would say the bar is dramatically lo…”

“I would love to create a new type of engineer full stack hardware engineers. They don't exist like you have in the software world. You know, you always have to have a team with three or four types of engineers. And I wish there were more full stack hardware en…”

“Most of our universities have been conquered by dogma and by religion. That they no longer have these things.”