 Welcome, I'm Audrey Waters, I'm a writer about education, education technology, and I'm actually super excited to talk about the future of learning, which may or may not be about the future of college, as we know it today, so congratulations on the publication of the book. Thank you. It's very exciting. It's someone who's worked on, working on multiple books, getting it out the door, shipping it, I think as we call it in the software industry, right? You shipped, you shipped a product, you shipped a good job. Thank you. So we don't have any plans for where we're going to sort of take our conversation today. I think we can cover a lot of things that are in the book and perhaps not in the book, but I want to start by asking you to describe what's the subtitle of the book, The University of Everywhere, this vision for the future that you have. Thanks, and thanks to Audrey very much for making the trip out to California. I think we'll probably end up spending her in D.C. for another couple of days. So thanks even more for that. And thanks to all of you for coming here to New America to talk about the book. It's been a lot of fun. The University of Everywhere was actually my preferred title for the book. The end of college was my publisher's preferred title for the book, and so they're the ones who are publishing it. But it was, because it, I wanted to present a positive vision of where I felt like we were going, and I wrote the book in part because I do this for a living here in New America, but also because I have a daughter, she's four and a half, you know, and when you're in our society today, when you have a child, as soon as they come out, like there's this little mental ticker that starts going down from 18. And you know that 18 years from now, 17 years from now, 16, 15, 14, if all goes well, you're a child who will enroll in college and you're going to have to pay for it and where is the money going to come from. And so it kind of gave me a point of reference, and I said to myself, you know, if I really took seriously this question of what will higher education be like when she turns 18 in 2028, is it going to be pretty much like college as I went to with just some technology on the side, or is it really going to be different? And I concluded that I think it is really going to be different, that this is the time period in which we are going to make not a complete transition, but a significant transition toward a higher education learning environment that looks like college as I knew it, and I imagine all of you knew it in some ways, but not at all in other ways. And I really think the university of everywhere is my way of describing a world in which the educational experience that people have after high school and then for the rest of their lives is partly conducted in organizations that are colleges as we know them now, or at least have the names of colleges as we know them now. Partly conducted in new learning organizations that are real places where people come together as learners and interact day to day and live and form authentic human communities with other learners and with adults who have expertise and can mentor them. And partly exist in a purely virtual space. Partly is online higher education just wherever you are and whatever you're doing and it's going to be that the experience of going to college is going to be characterized by what I would say is a transition from a paradigm in a way of thinking that's based around the scarcity of educational resources to an abundance of educational resources. It's going to be one in which the people we learn with is not limited to the people that we are in close proximity with. Some of our learning will be like that. It'll be very much like the college we went to, but we will also be engaged in global learning communities that are built around digital learning environments and educational software that is much, much better than anything we have now and much, much less expensive and that's really going to change the economics of higher education. And part of that also will be really recasting the way that we gather information about ourselves and present it to the world. So right now we have a very old system of educational credentialing, which is of enormous importance in the way our labor market works, in the way that we fund and subsidize and regulate higher education. It is controlled by traditional institutions. I think that also is going to change over time. And in the future, we're actually going to be much more able to comprehensively gather information about all the things that we've learned and present it to one another in an educational context, in an employment context. So it will be much more diverse, much more interesting, hopefully not as horrifically expensive. So you said you're an optimist. My Twitter bio says that I'm Edtex Cassandra. For those of you who are familiar with Greek mythology, that means that I'm the person who's like, oh my god, doom is on the horizon. Watch out, and then no one listens to me. I'm less of an optimist. My favorite, actually, one of my favorite quotes is by, I don't know, are you allowed to quote a Marxist? It is, I think, Tank in DC. So one of my favorite quotes is by Antonio Gramsci, which is I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but I'm an optimist because of will. So for me, I'd like to think that I have to really will myself to sort of not be pretty pessimistic about the future of college, but also the future of education technology. So I'm curious what makes you such an optimist and how much of that is grounded in what you explain in this book to be really powerful and I think interesting experience with MOOC. Sure. So there are a couple of reasons. I'm partly optimistic because I think that there are a lot of elements of our traditional system that are so absurd that they can't go on forever. And so the book is in the first kind of a third to the half of the book is really not about technology at all. It's the story of how American colleges and universities got to where they are now, why they are so expensive and becoming relentlessly more so, why, in my opinion, they've systematically undervalued their undergraduate educational missions and why all of those problems are getting worse and worse and worse for American society. So I don't think that that's sustainable and I think it's good that it's not sustainable because I think that it actually has many, many harmful effects that are increasingly refracting through the prism of class bias. I think it increasingly is the worst for the people who are hardest off among us and has the effective reifying privilege for everybody else. And I think that sort of changing social attitudes towards higher education and some of the new attention giving to higher education reflects that. So partly my optimism is grounded in this critique and partly I'm optimistic because I feel like you, there's always this push and pull when you're thinking about technology in the future between sort of cynicism and utopianism. And utopianism, I will be the first to admit has a very strong pull because it sort of allows you to sort of say, you know, to sort of insert AI here and some arguments and like everything works out afterwards. The Star Trek vision, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well cured poverty, disease, and well not really education, they still have the academy. I guess that's right, that's interesting. We should think about that. But I also actually, I feel like to be reasonable and accurate about the future requires a certain amount of utopianism because there are like a lot of wonderful things that exist now that no one knew would exist because people hadn't invented them and I think you can actually make a reasonable prediction that barring global climate collapse or collapse of political systems which I'm just gonna say is outside the purview of my book, one way or the other, that there will still be kind of amazing things that will happen that we won't have yet. And also I feel like these specific kinds of information technology that I talk about in the book which is just sort of what we have now, we're just kind of scratching the surface in seriously putting time, resources, and attention toward trying to make them as good as they can be. There are all kinds of different experiments and interesting things that are going on. So to answer the question that you actually asked me, the book is sort of framed by my experience taking one MOOC, one massive open online class. And I don't pretend that that's representative, I'm not saying that my experience proves or disproves anything, but I did want to be able to talk about these ideas from a first person perspective. So I took a class through edX, which is the nonprofit consortium founded by Harvard and MIT. And the class that I took was an online version of a course that all MIT freshmen are required to take. So MIT, somewhat unusually for an American college or university, has a core curriculum for undergraduates. There are six classes that you have to take if you're an undergraduate there. I think it's chemistry, biology, physics, too, and math. And so this is the biology class, but it's not actually like the biology that you would take in high school. It's essentially a genetic class. The guy who teaches it, his name is Eric Lander. He led the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. He's, I think, the chairman of President Obama's Council of Science Advisors. He runs this huge interdisciplinary genetics-focused medical center at MIT. So I think he is unimpeachably qualified to be teaching these class. He's been doing it for a long time. He's actually very good at it. And the thing that kind of amazed me about this class is that it was a very faithful translation of exactly the same class that MIT undergrads were taking. So the lectures actually were taped in the classroom to the students. They just came up online a couple of weeks later. So there were 100 students in a lecture hall in Cambridge, and the lecture hall was sitting inside of an enormous and beautiful like 40 million dollar, 10 story modern building of the kind that you can find on American college campuses that can afford to build them. There were 100 students there and about 10,000 students around the world. Also watching the same lectures, doing the same homework problems, taking exactly the same two midterms and finals, doing all of the same problem sets which are a big part of the way the educational experience is set up there, on the same timeframe over like a 15 week period, just kind of delayed by two weeks. So I went through the whole class. I got an 87, a B, which seemed pretty good to me. I was not a science major. I wanted to pick something that I didn't know anything about. I was a political science major in college, which is not science at all, opinion. I hadn't taken a science class in high school. And so I wanted to be sort of starting fresh from something. So I mean, that did kind of impress upon me that, well, we're here now. What can we do in the future? So I've had very different experiences with MOOCs. I am, well, I should preface this by saying that I was a college dropout, then I eventually went back and got my degree and I remain and I will remain for life a PhD dropout. And then I am also a serial MOOC dropout. I am one of those people that signs up and then sometimes I log in again. Sometimes I log in and watch a couple of videos, but I've never made it that far with MOOCs. I don't find the format very compelling. Even at faster speeds, I have a hard time sitting through five minute lecture chunks. Whether I do something in my own academic background or try to learn new things, it doesn't, I'm not particularly motivated. But both of us have advanced degrees already. So in some ways, I don't know if we're, like I'm not even sure how much it matters when we talk about the future of education, whether you or I succeed in MOOCs or don't succeed in MOOCs. And so one of the things that causes me a lot of concern is it seems as though that the MOOCs, as they're currently sort of envisioned, really serve what my friend, Tressie McMillan-Cottum calls the Roaming Autodidact. So it's someone who is sort of self, sort of placeless, as you say, the University of everywhere, who's really self-motivated, who doesn't need a lot of support, whether it's academic support or emotional support or financial support to sort of do well in these online classes. And so I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the students who maybe aren't us. And back to this notion of optimism, some of the stuff that's happened over the past year or so that has had some people saying, oh maybe actually this isn't the answer. And I can't help but pick on Sebastian Thrun and Udacity here with the failure at San Jose State. And I wrote down some quotes because he makes great quotes. He makes great quotes. So he said, so I should say, so Sebastian Thrun, he's a former, former Googler still at Google, former Stanford AI professor, one of the people who sort of popularized the MOOC movement, they made a deal with San Jose State to have this university, which is one of the most diverse universities, public universities in California, to run the remedial math and statistics. And it was sort of a disaster. The students performed much more poorly in the Udacity classes than they did in the face-to-face classes. And so Sebastian Thrun announced that they were gonna do something different afterwards. And he said, if you're a student who can't afford the service layer, that special tutoring, you can still take the MOOC on demand, you can do it at your own pace. If you're affluent, we can do a much better job with you, we can make magic happen. And he said about the students at San Jose State, they were students from difficult neighborhoods without good access to computers, with all kinds of challenges in their lives. For them, this medium is not a good fit. So how do we reconcile the roaming autodidact with the fact that most of us really aren't that? And some of us have even more challenges to become learners in this new university. I think that's a great question. Motivation is a key part of learning in any kind of context. I've signed up for, that's the only, I've finished two MOOCs, one was a Coursera philosophy class, it was very short and I think not very hard. It wasn't a course really, it was five weeks or something, it was fine, but it wasn't course level. And this one, I was highly motivated to finish this class because I had signed a book contract. And so, and I had pitched it and decided in my mind that it was gonna be important from a writing standpoint, from a credibility standpoint to be able to take this experience all the way through. And so I did. I've signed up for a few other ones and I haven't finished because I didn't have that same reason. It's a very hard comparison because, and I think this kind of goes to the fact that we found a lot of people who take these classes already have degrees. Well, if you are paying a lot of money for, or even some amount of money or you're borrowing money for a degree, that's a form of motivation. If you know that having or not having a degree is going to make a huge difference in your economic opportunities, that's a strong sort of source of motivation. And I think if you are part of a real community of fellow students, there's a peer element to that. There is a relationship with an organization that kind of either directly supports you or just kind of implicitly like you go there every day, like you're there, you have this identity as a student. All of those things are motivational. And then there's all kinds of sort of very specific motivational constructs that I talk about this a little bit, but there are ways to think about how you set up credentialing inside of courses that motivate people. This straight MOOC doesn't really do any of those things. It doesn't connect with any of those motivational constructs. Now, but a lot of that I think is just the fact that MOOCs are outside of the path to a degree. So, if you could actually take these classes and authentically get a degree that would get you a job, I think people would be in a very different space. I also think, going back to your question about like what does the University of everywhere look like, I actually expect that most people will have a relationship with a learning organization that does provide those kind of supports, that does provide a lot of the things I talked about, but won't be in the business of hiring people to deliver lectures or design problem sets or design assessments, because other people will do that and you'll be able to get it online. So, it doesn't surprise me, it was sort of, it was like a very odd thing that happened three years ago where, I think undeniably, there was this small group of people out on the West Coast who had a real effect on the way that everybody understood online education, even though none of them knew anything about education at all, and people assumed they did because they were college professors, but that's the whole critique of higher education in the nutshell that I present in my book, which is we hire people to be college professors that don't know anything about teaching students, we hire them, I mean, Sebastian Thrun had a job at Stanford, it was because of his standing in AI research. Yeah, which is interesting about all the origins of the major MOOC providers is all in AI, right? So, we have Sebastian Thrun AI who founded Udacity, both Daphne Kohler and Andrew Ng. Also, their doors at Stanford, it must be so awkward. Their faculty doors are like side by side, yeah, it must be a little bit weird. And then Anas Agrawal from edX also has a, he was part of the CCL. So, I think that that word artificial intelligence carries with it a lot of weight, that we presume that if they know how to make machines learn, oh, I'm sure they'll be able to handle freshmen. Right, yeah, I think that, I mean. Am I done? So, a couple things, I think. So, part of the book does talk to the people who I think are actually seriously thinking about the intersection between behavior, between cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and these are people that were centered at Carnegie Mellon University, which was part of, at the time, the Open Learning Initiative, which is sort of migrated out to Stanford as part of the huge gravitational force that Stanford has on everything. But, I mean, people at Carnegie Mellon have been thinking about these issues seriously since the 1960s. I mean, they have a very interesting, very interdisciplinary, very serious, well-developed set of programs. They think about human-computer interaction. They've got a couple of federally financed education labs where they're doing, I think, real research around these issues. The people who design these OLI classes actually are very careful and very deliberate and I think are grounded in the legitimate knowledge of educational principles and are trying to work these things out. And so, I do think that there are people who are doing it seriously. It's just not those people. Right. I mean, I think that this is one of the things I really enjoyed about your book, too, is because I think we hear a lot, and I do think that part of it is, I'll say this is someone from California, this very special Californian notion that the past is irrelevant, and that we get to reinvent ourselves all the time until wonderful grand, Hollywood-like or Silicon Valley-like stories about the future. It's all about the future. And I love that your book was a history of education and of higher education, but that you also told the history of education technology because right now, there seems to be this notion that, like a couple of years ago when Sebastian Thrun and the crew hit The New York Times, that somehow, or perhaps when Khan Academy, when Sol Khan decided to put his videos on YouTube, that that was the invention of education technology. And I think that there is a much deeper, richer history. What's interesting to me is that you, despite having part of it being about DIY learning, the sort of notion of becoming in the future, we'll be able to piece together our own education, a lot of it, a lot of what you look at is still on that model of computer-assisted instruction. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the research around Patrick Zupp's and that's this legacy I think that we're building, a different Stanford legacy that we're seeing built forward. Yeah, so I was lucky, you know, I went out to Pittsburgh and I wanted to talk to some of the people who were doing the work in OLI and so they had me, Candace Teal, who runs OLI, sent me to a professor named Wilfried Sieg who is the, was the chairman of the philosophy department at Carnegie Mellon and he's a logician and a mathematician and he's at Carnegie Mellon, you know, philosophy is very logical and mathematical and so I met him in his office and he's like a stern German man who kind of intimidated me. He has like a, I don't know, I think there's just something culturally where I was kind of like, you know, kind of doing this. So we kind of talked for a while but he has been one of the, he's a real proponent of this. He teaches a logic class and he had done a lot of work in creating, creating a logic class and this is one of the things that you can take for free through the OLI website. It is, it's actually entirely automated. There's not a person in there anywhere. I mean, it's just you and the machine kind of going back and forth and the things that runs it is the software program that he created called the Automated Theorem Solver which I felt was kind of like a steampunk name almost, you know, it felt very 19th century to me but what it does is it solves proofs and he made this point, he said, look, you know, you can't teach logic without students creating proofs. That's what you do. This is the educational process for this, you know, one piece of the vast realm of human knowledge that people work on and the problem with that is that someone has to grade them. It's really hard to grade them. It takes a long time and if the student gets like step two wrong out of 25, the rest of the steps are worthless and they have to go back and so he was able to automate this process of proof grading and then therefore it totally changed his expectations for how fast he could work through the material. What kind of students would be able to succeed in this class up until that point? It was basically, you know, Carnegie Mellon is like really truly an arts and sciences university. They've got a, you know, they have, the sciences they're most famous for but they actually have a music conservatory and a drama departments and sometimes he would get, you know, those students in his classes and they would all wipe out because they just kind of couldn't keep up with the way he had constructed it. So we were talking about that and he said to me kind of offhandedly, he said, you know, I took a fully automated class in 1971 and I was like, I kind of, really 1970, that was just outside of my timeframe for when this was happening. He said, oh yeah, he points over my shoulder. He's like, it's right up there in that red book and there was this up on the shelf because it's great shelf full of books, was a compendium of papers that had been edited by a professor at Stanford. His mentor, his name was Patrick Soupees who actually just died a few months ago. The book says he's still alive, that's not true. The second edition and I think the kindle edition of the book has been edited to reflect the fact that he passed away. He was 92 years old, so I mean, he lived a full life. So I thought that was really interesting and so I took a picture of the book with my phone and then I went right on Amazon and found a copy which is kind of amazing. It would have been out of print for like a million years but someone in the world had one. And sure enough, it described these experiments that had been done at Stanford in 1970. So I looked him up and found out that he was still alive. So I went out to Stanford, I was there, I guess, fall of 2013 and visited Pat Soupees at his house. Wasn't really sure what to expect. He was, I guess, 91 at the time. He had been retired. He was recently remarried. Like literally within the last year, he had been remarried, which optimism will keep you alive for a long time, I guess, you know. Let's think about that. Dealing note. And he was like working hard. He was working really hard. He had not lost a step. I mean, I think the life of the mind does sustain people, I think. And so we kind of talked about everything. And so Pat Soupees was born in Oklahoma, was somebody who kind of accidentally ended up in college. He was the beneficiary of this thing called the eight-year plan, I think. It was this thing where they test, they created an educational experiment and they happened to kind of do it in Tulsa, Oklahoma and they gave him a test in the sixth grade and he did really well. And they said, oh, you're smart. Your life is different now. And so he ended up at the University of Chicago. He was in the Army. He went to Columbia, but he got a philosophy degree and he started teaching at Stanford in 1950 and stayed there all the way until he passed away a few months ago. And so in like not long after he got there, his daughter went into kindergarten and he was a really curious person. He published across an amazing number of fields in his career. He became really interested in how young children learn math. And of course, if you were at Stanford in 1956, there was all this technology happening like literally right up the street and so he founded a company and he sort of started this process of doing experiments with kids about whether or not you could actually create a computer that would teach you in kind of an automated way. They could understand you in some ways and a lot of the language that is very popular today in terms of this is the stuff that Carnegie Mellon talks about, that the computer will be adaptive, that it will react, it will change, personalize all those things. So he was working on all that. Back in the 1960s, he published a very influential article in Scientific American in the early 1960s where he said, these are where things are going. Now I think like everybody back then, he was wrong about how complicated the human mind was and he was wrong about how fast we would get to the point where artificial intelligence could really be smart enough to replace people. At the same time, I think he was right on a principal basis and I think that the work that he's been doing that he did demonstrate a lot of things that are true about human learning. And so when I interviewed him in 2013, I said, what do you think about all these people down at Stanford? And he said, you know, when you're 91, I guess you can say anything you want. He's like, Daphne Koller doesn't know what she's talking about. She doesn't know anything about education and of course that had been his frustration all along. It's hard for me even to describe what he did as a professor because he was like so far up there intellectually, like I can't even really connect with it, but the thread that kind of went through all of his philosophy and his math was essentially thinking about what rigorous thinking is. He was like a profoundly interested in intellectual seriousness and making claims that are real and they're not kind of some foundation to stand. And so from the very beginning, he was frustrated that, like there were lots of other people at Stanford who sort of were interested in how their kids learned, but none of them wanted to do the work to actually experiment and find out. And so his, I mean, he basically was like, yeah, all these people, you know, right down the street, like they, they're just launching into these educational companies and they haven't actually taken the time to figure out the pedagogy behind it. And he was very frustrated about it. No, I love, I mean, I love this history of education technology. And I actually love the history of the 60s and 70s, partially because it was a time for interesting experimentation around, around the personal computer as well. But when we talk about automation now, and I don't know, we seem to be in another round of panic around automation, like in the general, like in the general sort of sense. The robots are taking over. The robots are taking over. And this idea of having robotic teachers has sort of struck people with fear for almost 50, 60, 50, 60 years now that we will be replacing, we will be replacing teachers with robots. But I think that there are some really important labor questions that robots are not that the university needs to address, least of which being the fact that the vast majority of the classes right now are taught by adjuncts. So what do you think the future of, what do you think the future of teaching looks like before we talk about the future of learning or the future of research even? What do you think the future of teaching looks like in the university of everywhere? Does it address the adjunct thing? Is it gonna get more precarious, will there be more precariousness? And I should note with the asterix over to the side, you say a lot of nice things about Uber in your book. And I'm wondering if we could connect labor, drivers, data, Uber, regulation, privacy into that. Yeah, I mean, I think they are all kind of... That's a really big part of it out. Right, I think they are connected. It was like my first Uber ever was on that trip because they were like about nine months ahead of us. You were excited in the book. Yeah, it's a little bit less exciting now because Uber is everywhere, but when I wrote it, it was still kind of new. So I had to go back and say at the time it was cool. Now it's just the knob. But you know like how fast things change, right? Like at the time it was cool, that was two years ago. Now we're, now we just take it for granted. You put your phone out, someone comes and picks you up. One of the things that I really, that I think is really great about this general conversation about technology and education is that it's forcing people to be a lot more specific about what they mean by words like teaching and education. I think that we have taken those things for granted in ways that we really can't now because one way or the other, like the long-term trend is that technology I think will be able to replace more labor, educational labor. How much more? Which, what the consequences of those? Complicated questions, both just empirically but also from a value standpoint, absolutely. But, you know it was the thing that I think I can say for sure for the one class I took is that technology replaced 95% of what they were doing. Now, are all college classes like that one? No. So when you say that 95% of what they were doing means what then, the grading? I think my experience, well the grading was automated. You know they just had, I mean it was, you know they were just, you had to sort of sort of solve problems and then there weren't actually just multiple choice. You had to kind of, in some cases you had to go on and like one of the problems that I had to do that was part of the test was you could log on and interact with a software program that was called the integrated gene viewer. And this is essentially a simulation of a multi-billion base pair DNA sequence. And they would say, what happens if you change these two? What mutation occurs? Or like, what two would you have to change in order to create this mutation? And so the exam you would just have to sort of solve a problem like that. But it didn't involve a person grading anything. It was just right or wrong, depending on that. So when I say 95%, I mean the course consisted of watching the lecture or lecture. It consisted of solving the problem sets. That's it, that's the course. That's how MIT teaches kids. It's not much more than that. I mean they would, and I actually interviewed a half dozen of the other students because I wanted to be sure about that, that there wasn't some like really important value add that the university was providing, but there wasn't. Not for that particular class. And at MIT, we need to both sort of exceptional class and an exceptional university. Well, but I think that, I mean I don't think that person lectures to you, you have to like read a textbook, do work, and turn the work into be graded is an unusual educational design. I think that's a ubiquitous educational design in all kinds of college classes. Now, should it be? Maybe not. And so another kind of complicating factor in this is I think we can compare what technology can do to a reasonable ideal of the kind of non-technological education that is possible and that we aspire for students to have. And then we can compare it to what actually is happening in a lot of colleges and they're very different from one another because I think that colleges are designed to not really care enough about whether or not they are teaching as well as they can. Yeah. And I think that it matters to the discipline, the discipline matters as well. Right, how you're able to automate the molecular biology class would be very different than in my case more the literature background. Absolutely. We tend to be the first leadites to throw our shoes in the automated essay grading machine. Well, I mean, sure, of course, yeah. Although, I mean, I put this question to, so I interviewed Robert Lu, who's the head, who's the faculty director of Harvard X now, a really interesting guy, also like a biology teacher, but like with a really different mindset than Lander, who was like much more of a, you know, I mean, Lander's all about DNA and kind of all that stuff. And I said to him, you know, Lu got that job in part because he had been very interested in technology and distance education and he created this video called The Inner Life of the Cell, which you could look at. And you told me it was an educational video and I said, okay, but like, what about the inner life of the mind? You know, I mean, is this in any way applicable to the humanities? And he, interestingly enough, like without hesitation said, absolutely, absolutely it is. He said, you know, the humanities, we teach the humanities by exposing people to certain kinds of ideas in different contexts and different mediums and the contrast between them provokes, you know, moments of coalescence and inspiration. And there are all kinds of ways that you can use technology to do that. So I mean, he didn't bat an eye at that question. So this makes me think again, back to the sort of utopian vision of what the future looks like and what the future looks like, particularly online. The University of Nowhere, or the University of Nowhere, the University of Nowhere is my book, right? The Distopia, the University of Nowhere has no trolls. It has no stalkers, it has no griefers. Everyone seems to really want to participate in the intellectual endeavor. And the internet, as I know it, doesn't look like that, particularly as a woman online. But then I also think of, you know, so what does that look like? What does it look like for women in these online educational experiences? What does it look like for marginalized voices across the board? And then what does it look like for really controversial ideas? Maybe there's controversy, I don't actually know, is there controversy around molecular biology? Probably, but I think about having a class that was say a class on the Holocaust or a class on the Middle East, that having it in an online open forum suddenly probably will bring the griefers and the ugliness. Yeah, so when I was choosing a class to take, it was either gonna be the class I took that Eric Lander taught, or another MIT class that was taught by a professor named Walter Lewin, who had been teaching physics there for a long, long time and was like renowned. He was one of the OG rock stars. Yeah, that's right. He was renowned for being a great physics lecturer. He would use these props and everything and actually, you know, at one point I interviewed this guy named Michael Saylor, who's here in Washington, D.C., who was an MIT graduate. And he said, yeah, you know, they had Walter Lewin's lectures running on closed circuit video in 1983. So because they were already like, yeah, we'll just broadcast them, you can watch them anytime you want to. And so I think I say a few complimentary things about Walter Lewin in the book. The other thing that happened in addition to Patrick Sup is passing away between when the book was done and was published was it turned out that Walter Lewin allegedly, but we have no reason to think this isn't true. He was an emeritus professor at MIT, used all of these students enrolling in his MOOC. They made a MOOC out of his lectures as an opportunity to severely sexually harass a bunch of women. And some of the women finally reported it. They stripped him of his emeritus title. They've taken all of his lectures and courses down. It's like as if he never existed. And one, I mean, has to assume that this must have been going on in person, like while he was at MIT. I mean, I don't think people become terrible people all of a sudden when they're 80, but they were good before that, that's my guess. And the internet. Yeah, 80 plus the internet. Right, and so, but all of a sudden he could, as opposed to, he could probably sexually harass like many, many more people. So yeah, no, I don't have any, I have no doubt about that. And in some ways, I think maybe my vision isn't quite as radical as it might seem. I really do believe that the best educational environment is not purely virtual. I think it is purely virtual will be the only educational environment for time, location, and resource issues for a lot of people. And that will be a whole lot better than nothing. And there's lots and lots of people where that is their option right now. They just can't do anything. But I think what's most likely is that we will create new educational organizations that if they do their jobs well, aren't supportive of that kind of misogyny and those sorts of values, but take advantage of the abundance of new resources and don't build all kinds of expensive shit that students don't need and make them pay for it. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is, I mean, I think that this sort of, the facts that Walter Lewin misbehaved online isn't simply just the internet. I wanna like, like this stuff happens offline all the time across campuses everywhere. And when we do, we have built these institutions that aren't particularly safe. I mean, we look at the discussions now about rape on campus, rape and sexual assault on campus, for example. They aren't particularly welcoming to everyone. And so I think that if we're going to create something different, then we do have to think about what is beyond just this notion of access, we really do have to think about sort of what does safety look like online? But I wanna come back, I wanna talk more about that, but I wanna come back to this notion of MIT taking Walter Lewin's materials off the internet. Because to me that's pretty interesting because of course MIT has had all of their materials, all of their lectures in syllabi online since 2001 with MIT OpenCourseWare. So now that it's down, I think that it raises one of these interesting questions not just about when we talk about automation of education, but what happens to faculty IP? So what happens to faculty whose work is caught up in their research but also in their teaching? What does that look like in the University of everywhere, not nowhere? I think that's a really interesting question. I'm surprised there hasn't been more kind of thinking and discussion about it. I mean, so you take somebody like Greg Mankiew who is a tenured economist at Harvard, lived here in D.C. for a while. He was on, I think, his counsel of economic advisors. That's what Greg Mankiew is known for here in Washington. What he is known for everywhere else is as the owner and author of the predominant economics textbook in American higher education. Well, he wrote the op-ed recently in the New York Times saying that he didn't think his textbook was that expensive. It's like $400 or something like that. He thought his textbook was totally worth it. That dude has made millions and millions. I mean, so it turns out that at one point, I mean, it's a really interesting story. Like 20 years ago or so, whoever it was that had written the previous one died and there was this scramble among all the publishers to see who would replace him. Because once you get in there, it was a fight whoever won was gonna make a lot of money. And so they signed up Mankiew who was younger at the time and he won and he just reaps massive amounts. I mean, I think $42 million they said he's made on this textbook. Now, so what's interesting about that is, it's interesting because it's appalling in a bunch of interesting ways. But for the purposes of this discussion, like Harvard doesn't think it should get that money, right? Because he's the author of a book and he's just selling books and professors are expected to write books and they get paid for them. This distinction between a book and a course is dissolving, I think, in technology. And in fact, the justification the companies have for $400 is, oh, well, there's like a, you get access, you get a logon and there's exercises and, yeah, and it's really, it's got lots of pictures and stuff like that. So I think that there is going to be a huge power struggle between the academy and between the professor class and the administrative class and between the academy and the institutions about ownership around these issues. I kind of hope and expect that the professor wins in the end. They're the ones who are doing it, right? We sort of saw this at San Jose State, not with the Udacity classes, but with the ones that they had, they had us, the administration had signed with edX to have philosophy classes and the philosophy faculty were like, oh, hell no. We want to be able to design our own classes. We want to be able to teach our own classes. But this is our work. And so I do think that we'll be seeing lots, lots more of those. But it is, I mean, I do think that, you know, the question is sort of out there. Like, is your class as good as something that we can expose students to online that doesn't cost us anything? That's a reasonable question for a college to ask. And I think it's not a question that has been posed to a lot of professors before. I mean, to get back to your question before, I think the, I don't see how the adjunct problem doesn't just keep getting worse. I think the tenure tournament will get even harder for people and even more cruel, like in its own way. And I think it is a big issue and a problem that this book does not solve in any way. It acknowledges, but it doesn't solve it, which is by commingling the research and educational functions in the same institutions, we've created a lot of implicit and not very obvious subsidy mechanisms for subsidizing things that the market won't subsidize, for subsidizing scholarship that, frankly, is out of step with the predominant culture and that you really wouldn't want to be exposed to some sort of political process. I think that those subsidies and protections are gonna get stripped away by the kind of likely result of this on institutions and we're gonna have to find other ways to support those people. I mean, this is really, this is a really challenging, even though I dropped out of a PhD program and I hate the university, I also sort of have that sort of, I think it's sort of PTSD from working on your PhD, where I sort of feel like I should defend research here and I do think that many, many, most departments actually rely on these large classes that are required for freshmen, perhaps for sophomore, that then subsidizes the rest of what's taught either for juniors and seniors and particularly what's taught for graduate students and of course, those are the ones that we then feed back into become future adjunct professors, sadly. But what happens to research when we uncouple it from teaching? What happens when we lose the ability to subsidize research? Who will subsidize literature? So, I think there's two questions. The connection between research and education, which could be, I don't think there's much of one, but there'll probably be even less of one. And then what happens to the kind of scholarly work that doesn't have a direct funding source? So, I mean, to some extent, you know, I mean, a lot of the research that happens that particularly at your kind of elite AAU level research universities doesn't really have anything to do with these places as educational institutions at all. This is just where the federal government decided to set up research centers. So, I mean, an example I like to give is, there are right now, I think, like 70 people employed at Penn State working on hydrodynamics and acoustics and it's because they're designing better torpedoes for the Navy. You know, like a long time ago, they just set up a, you know, it's like run by the Navy and a bunch of money comes in there and they're trying to figure out how to make better torpedoes. Like, what does that happen? It just happened and it's not anywhere near the ocean, which I think is kind of weird. But it's there, right? And there are all kinds of places like that and of course, you know, as my friend Mitchell Stevens, who's a sociologist at Stanford and very smart about this stuff, like likes to remind his colleagues, Stanford University was built by the federal government. It is to, the idea that it's a private university, I mean, it is one, but public money built that place. And so, like to the extent that the federal government of whomever still wants to pay researchers and scholars to do research who are located at university, I guess they still will. And to the extent that those kinds of education, those kinds of fields require a level of presence and interactivity where there is no online substitute, then there won't be one. I'm not really talking about replacement, I'm just talking about changing what we can change, which I think is a lot. But back to my point before, there's no like NIL for literature, right? We're not sending money out to people to support all of that work. To some extent I think that probably like we have as many professors as we need to fill our universities and how many we need is an interesting question. But I don't, I mean, it's very easy for me to say it, like I said, I think it's gonna be a problem and my book doesn't solve it. And what happens globally as well? I mean, another issue that I think about, you talk a lot in your book about the demand for a degree from an American college globally. This is the place that people want to come to go to school. But there are of course universities all over the world. What happens to the university of everywhere? And again, what happens to knowledge and research and scholarship elsewhere? If there is say one or two or even a dozen, histories of Western civilization and they're all taught by Coursera partners and they all happen to be taught by professors from North America. I don't think that's gonna happen. I mean, I'm just, I mean, I think that the more, the more, but I mean, the more kind of legitimately or unlegitimately or whatever contested these issues are, then there will be, because the, it doesn't actually cost that much money to create per student to create one of these classes. I think people will see that as an opportunity to get their point of view into the educational mix. There is this demand for American higher education. So true story, yesterday I was in a radio studio doing an interview in New York. And so two noteworthy things happened. One, I ran into Jeffrey Sachs, the famous economist in the green room, which was very cool. Like, wow, this is Jeffrey Sachs. But of course, like we had something to talk about because like he was there like shilling for his book and he was on right before me. And his book, interestingly enough, so he created a MOOC and for all of the stuff that he teaches around global poverty, but now he's made a book out of it, the Columbia University Presses, which is sort of an oddly backwards thing. I didn't think that was gonna happen, but he did, it's the tone, it's like big and heavy. But he talks about how he travels around and he runs into people who come up to him. He said, once I started doing this, because there's like 300,000 people enrolled in this, people would come up to me all around the world and say, oh, you're my teacher. And he had never met them before. And so he wasn't their teacher maybe in exactly the same sense as some of us have had teachers, but they thought he was his, they saw him that way. I mean, that relationship, there was a reality of that to them that was real. The second thing that happened was so after he leaves, I gave him a copy of my book. And so a young woman came to bring me from the green room to the studio, because that's a job. And she said to me, she's like, yeah, I really hope this doesn't make me regret going to NYU. And so she was a recent NYU graduate, but she was Chinese and she had come from Beijing and I'm 100% confident that her parents paid NYU full tuition to go there. She was really kind of dissatisfied with the experience. She said it's, you know, like, there's a lot of people from China are coming to American universities and there's so much of us. We just end up like with other Chinese people for four years and leave like $240,000 poor or our parents do. And then she was headed back. I think that this is an opportunity to take advantage of the sense that people have justified or not that American higher education is worth being connected to, to provide educational opportunities to a lot of people who wouldn't have them otherwise. So probably the greatest thing that's happened on planet Earth over the last 40 years is the decline in global poverty. From 1980, 52% of everyone on Earth lived below $1.25 a day. I think it's down to less than 20% now, even though the population has grown to 7 billion people. And so the next sort of step after coming out of poverty is moving into something like the global middle class, which I think the UN defines as an income of between $10 and $100 per person per day in a household. So a lot more than $1.25. And kind of the mid-level projection of the growth of the global middle class so defined between now and 2030 is 3 billion people. I think one of the first things that people want once they can provide for the basics of shelter and healthcare and food and safety is education. Education is, and that is a universal desire. We can't build like a million and a half American style research universities that are like grossly expensive and were designed in an age before the technology we have now to serve all these people. I think technology has to be a huge part of the solution to, I won't say that problem because I think it's a huge opportunity. And I actually expect that like that's where things will change fastest because you won't have as many incumbent institutions pushing back on things. So this raises a really interesting question I think about what does a degree mean? Because you spend a lot of time talking in your book about how in the future learning will improve. But I think when we were talking earlier that when a lot of folks talk about their own experiences in college, the learning is sort of eh. And the reason that college seems important was because of the social networks, was because of social status, and certainly because of prestige. So how do we reconcile that? I mean I have a hard time seeing this prestige market and the power associated with certain names who just happen to be the big names in MOOCs right now. Flattening in the University of everywhere. I mean I think that Harvard isn't gonna give up Harvard. And NYU actually probably isn't gonna give up NYU. So I think there will always be a prestige market. I think exclusivity is human nature. I think there will always be institutions that essentially their job is to acculturate the ruling class, or the children of the ruling class to go back into it. And I think that's a very specific thing and people will always want to do that. It's a small kind of thing. It is interesting, one of the organizations I talk about in the book is this place called the Minerva Project. So it is a San Francisco startup, venture backed. It's a for-profit company. And it was founded by this guy named Ben Nelson who was a Penn graduate and had been an exec at Snapfish. So not in education until he kind of came back to this. So when I first, I actually first met Ben like a week after he had gotten his first round of seed funding. So like Minerva was him, his business plan and 20 million bucks that they just thrown at him. And the big story. And he is a great salesman. He is, that's how he got the 20 million dollars. He had a story to tell. And his pitch, the thing that got him the money is to say, look, you have this very, very strong demand for elite American higher education, but the elite institutions cannot or will not expand. And if a lot of their eliteness is about selection, I can select. You know what I mean? It's not like a mystery really how, well, the most of the admissions process is not a mystery and the mysterious part of it is the corrupt part of it. You know, where you just like the kind of the legacies and the Brab's novel. But otherwise, you know, it's not like all that complicated to figure out how they're selecting students. I can do that. And then I can take those students and make an authentic claim that I'm giving them a more rigorous, more serious liberal arts education than those elite institutions are because they have mostly abdicated that responsibility. But because I'm not gonna be bound to one place and because I'm going to use a not really scalable technological platform, it's all a seminar based, live seminar based education. So it's not like you can have 10,000 people for no marginal cost for the last person, but it's scalable organizationally. He's said, look, I want to enroll as many people as there are who qualify. You know, their first students enrolled in the fall, some of them, so they say, turned down Ivy League admissions spots to go there. And a lot of them are not from the United States, they're from other places. So I do think that there can, I think that we'll see some things like that. But I mean, that's just, that's like one example of somebody creating something new that, and they charge $10,000 a year. That's their tuition. So it's not free, but it's not 60 either. And I think we'll find a lot of things that are sort of in between that way. So I think one of the challenges then is how do we help people, and it's a challenge I think that we fail at currently, is how do we help people navigate this new market for higher education? I mean, we do a really, I think a really poor job. I mean, I think that that's why institutions like for-profit higher education have sort of capitalized on the fact that a lot of people don't know how to make a good choice and where to spend their education dollar. So how do we in the future make sure that we're, that when we say here's the brand, that it's actually a meaningful degree? No, that's a great question. And do you wanna go to audience after this? Cause I think we have a great toy for this. It's a great question. It's something we think about a lot here at New America. And I wanna kind of acknowledge some of my colleagues here who actually have been doing some pretty careful focus group research over the last year that we'll get a chance to see soon where we actually try to bring people in a room and ask them in a reasonable and kind of rigorous way. Like, how did you make these choices? I mean, the market for education is a mess. It's really complicated. You can see how it doesn't work in like lots and lots and lots of ways. Certainly the kind of public policy fiasco that was the for-profit industry of the 2000s is a fantastic example of that where people trust that if it's an accredited college, like, well, I mean, the government wouldn't let me give my loan money to someone who's gonna rip me off, would they? Well, it turns out the answer to that is yes, they would and still are, frankly. It's not like that is a solved problem. But I mean, actually to exactly your point, I was after we did one of these events last night and I was talking to a friend of mine afterwards. You know who I think he was? He's someone who is very critical of traditional higher education, but he said to me, and I was actually talking about Minerva and I'm like, here's the plan. And he said, so you know what would be a better plan than that? Everything is the same except the education is 20% not as good and they save money. Because who would know? Who would know? And I think he's exactly right about that, but we have almost no mechanisms in place for really actually getting out at quality for any of the education we have, including all of the education that we're financing at great expense, both public and private, in traditional colleges and universities. And I would like, I hope that one result of technology kind of doing that thing that it does where it breaks things down into more discrete pieces. And like I said before, provokes us to take more seriously these questions of what do we mean by education and what do we mean by teaching that it'll be a little easier to look at the piece and start to make reasonable judgments about is this any good or not? Should students be paying money for it or not? That's part of bioptimism in a way. And what will employers value? Which is, and then also I think, how do we reconcile? So you started off by saying you have a daughter whose daughter, four and a half. So my son is 21 and he's not in college. He decided not to go to college. And it's tough out there for a high school graduate who has post-secondary education. But when he hears the phrase lifelong learning, he sort of gags a little. Because school has always been really traumatic to him. And this notion that he's gonna have to spend the rest of his life, because he doesn't hear the learning part and think of like, oh my God, I got to be in the class with the guy who did the Human Genome Project. He's like, shit, I gotta do this thing that's always been drudgery and menial and demeaning. And so I think we have a lot of work to do to sort of make the process of learning not so exploitative and awful for a whole chunk of people that again, that are not these roaming autodidacts. Yeah, I think I thought a lot about liberal arts education in writing this. And I concluded that liberal arts education is something that everyone is in favor of and not nearly as many people can explain in any adequate way what they mean by that. And there's actually like a, there's a sort of unresolved philosophical debate about what liberal arts education means, which is interesting to think about. But one of the, like, and it's always sort of held up as they, well, but what about the liberal arts? By people who I think are not actually committed to them, other than in that moment, because it's convenient for them rhetorically. Right. I, you know, my book relies like really heavily on, in the history section, Laurence Easy's book, The Emergence of the American University. Really weird guy, I'm writing a story about him for the Chronicle of higher ed actually, so look for that in a few months. But his book is, I think it's, I mean, it's 50 years old and I think it still sort of stands as a great analysis. But, you know, he talked about this competition between the research function, the liberal arts function and the practical training function and how essentially the liberal arts was adopted as the like replacement spirituality for colleges that had abandoned their like actual spirituality as they transitioned from being religious institutions. But like in a kind of very perfunctory just show up on Sunday and be like, you know, kind of and then go back to your, your non-religious life kind of way. But then I also, you know, I think about, I think if you take liberal arts seriously, it's so odd to think that we could give someone an adequate liberal arts education in four years. I think it is a lifelong project and that's kind of where the book concludes by thinking that, you know, what if instead of trying and inevitably failing to really prepare people to like lead the good life in four years and then the rest of our relationship with them is about like begging for money from time to time, we engage them as learners for as long as they're willing to learn. And again, I think the reason we haven't done that is because well, they left. We were a place and they came to us and then they went away. But I think that those barriers or distance are collapsing and so there's new potential there. And I think, I mean, we should throw it up in the audience, but I also think that then that makes us ask a lot of questions about the K through 12 experience as well. Cause it's sort of hard to rectify a love of learning if you've had it beat out of you for the past 13 years. Yeah. So do we have someone with a microphone? Why don't you call it people? Ah, right. We have someone with a microphone, just so people who are online. Have you ever heard of Nebut Sanford? I have not. Long ago in another time, like the mid 60s, he wrote a book called Why Colleges Fail. You should look that up. This is like, there was a time when innovation flourished in higher ed in that moment, there was a great deal of questioning when everything was being questioned. And then I think the higher community consolidated itself, all of the innovative new colleges, there were a lot of campuses that had new colleges set up within their structures and through the 70s. And it just, they all failed. I don't think any of the ones I knew are around anymore. And so here we are again. It's just interesting to me. And what I wonder about the future is that while this could fragment and deconstruct where we think higher ed will be, maybe not. I don't know. Maybe, despite how radical technology could become in the higher ed community, I just don't know. Yeah. I mean, like no one's gone broke betting against colleges staying the same over time or colleges staying the same over time, right? I mean, they've proved to be very adaptable and very enduring institutions in some ways. And to your point, there's a, I in the book, I talk a little bit about Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was the president of the University of Chicago in the 1930s. And what was so fascinating about Hutchins is that he, unlike most college presidents who are older when they become college presidents, he was, he went to Yale. He was dean of Yale Law School at age 28 and I think was hired as president of Chicago when he was 32 or something. And so his undergraduate experience was still fresh in his mind and he basically created the University of Chicago to be everything Yale was not because he thought Yale was terrible from an educational standpoint. I thought it was a completely unserious institution in terms of undergraduate ed. So he did all these, what have become kind of famous things sort of tied to the great books, but like that wasn't all of it. It wasn't just about the great books that you could take exams to sort of pass through classes and he really believed that the university had a fundamental obligation to construct itself in a way that was like focused on provoking students and helping them learn. He said that, he said, I think, he was like the typical college diploma is evidence of nothing but faithfulness, facility and memory and like evidence that people were here for a while and didn't do something like, didn't get thrown in jail, that's all it is. And so he did that and then he left and inevitably over time, well I think the University of Chicago retains like the flavor of all that. It's still fundamentally kind of like all other universities and he, in reflecting back on that said, I thought I was changing things but I really was just sort of a stopper in the bottom of the tub and once I left it all kind of went back to what it was and there's a very kind of well-recognized phenomenon in how we think about organizations called organizational isomorphism, which is just a fancy way of saying organizations in a given field become more like one another over time. Inevitably, not because anyone chose to but just for like reasons of kind of logic and behavior. And I think that is a very apt description of what's happened to higher education. So the question is just whether or not technology will be enough of a shock to provoke something different. This book is the thesis that the answer is yes, but you're right, it might be no. Right here. Thank you very much for the talk. So firstly I think so in it the model of online education it would presumably work very well for technological education and not as well for liberal arts education. So I'm thinking I mean to what extent it might create a two tiered educational system like we see in Germany. We see the technical education group that goes to the technical education and there are four times less likely to go to the higher educational universities and we see the mainstream education system, graduates of which are much more likely to get higher paying jobs and also be in a better social class. So I'm thinking to what extent would this system and technology would be perpetuating that inequality because on one hand presumably we will have Harvard and Oxbridge and they'll still have their traditional system but we will have the perhaps second tier institutions where other people go but their job prospects are not nearly as good. So now that's part of it concerns me a little but could you comment on it? Sure, it's a good question I think. I mean we should recognize that the system in which a few elite people get to go to the institutions that give them the well-rounded liberal arts education. I mean so that's what we've had in England for 700 and something years and everyone else goes someplace else. So that's where we are now. So it's in some ways like I don't think there's a lot to lose in terms of providing access to really high quality liberal arts education to everyone else since they've never had it and they aren't having it now and the institutions these relatively small institutions that provided here and everywhere else are becoming more and more expensive over time and more and more elite through this sort of like winner takes all system and so kind of per what I was saying before I actually feel like this could be and this is the optimistic point of view a very egalitarian set of developments if we can provide ways to teach the humanities using technology in a way that's much more accessible and much less expensive and accessible to people in all kinds of ways and different kinds of communities. There is this kind of we fall into these kind of class patterns when we talk about the dichotomy between sort of the liberal arts and things that are not liberal arts sciences and all the rest of it but let's not lose sight of the fact that most people are going to college as we define college so they can earn knowledge and skills in order to get a job. If you ask them overwhelmingly that is the answer. I would like to provide them as many opportunities as possible to not just acquire skills with value in the labor market but a lot of people really need skills that are valuable in the labor market that are not getting them right now or are paying too much money for them and that's a really important thing to accomplish as well and if we can be much better at that I would see that as a huge positive thing. I would add my concern I think I share some of your concern is when we dismantle some of these institutions that we might lose one of the really powerful vehicles that we've had in this country for racial justice which has been the ability to sort of point at the education system and say this is unfair and I look in particular at the move in Silicon Valley to sort of poo poo a college education and to turn to these alternate ways of learning you talk a little bit about the coding boot camps for example and I see the sort of replication of racial privilege, the lack of people of color the lack of women in the technology sector and I worry without some of these institutional protections that we might end up in sort of worse scenarios if we aren't careful about what this looks like. It should scare us a little bit maybe more than a little bit that it like those guys out there are driving a lot of this because it is a very... It should scare us a lot. It is a really strange culture. I mean I think it's interesting and kind of invigorating and there is I think a level of optimism and not sort of settling for what we have and trying to build new things that has made the world a better place in lots of ways but it is also hermetically sealed from a cultural standpoint in a lot of ways. Both the reality and the way of thinking about race and gender I think are worse than average in like a lot of ways. How much of that kind of culture sort of seeps into the technology I guess is a really interesting question. Yeah I think it's a really important question to think about. I mean I think coding boot camps are cool because I think coding boot camps are mostly competing with master's degrees right now and if someone can go and spend $10,000 in 10 weeks of their life in order to get a credential that will get them a first job as opposed to $60,000 in two years of their life to not even maybe get the same job I think that's a good thing. Oh totally, but who has $10,000? Right, because there's no financial aid or there's very little financial aid or sometimes there's sort of, you know we'll say we will offer some financial aid. Although I mean Kaplan bought Deb boot camps in there so we'll see how it goes. Yeah so the for-profit, the for-profit sectors right there to understand that innovation. You're right. Right there. I think a lot of people would argue that the purpose of a university is to support education beyond the classroom so it's the things you learn from living with roommates for the first time away from home or hearing a diversity of perspectives. What do you think, how do you think you can maintain that when you have support for an individualist self-motivated learning style that maybe does include interactions with peers and relatedly to the point about racial diversity if you're not having the conversations with people who are different from you which is something that the university does how can we fill that gap? I think that is a very important part of what universities do. There's no reason that we can't build more places that do that that aren't as sort of indifferent to education and unreasonably expensive as the places we have now because like right now the only place that you can kind of go and also get that credential you need are the universities that we've created and the barriers to creating new one are just they're just much, much lower than I think we realize. So an example I give in the book is that's only partly even a function of technology. It's mostly just a function of like logical thinking but there is a new public university branch in Rochester, Minnesota. I see my friend Chris Robinson is here from Minnesota. So they decided to build a new branch campus of the University of Minnesota in Rochester because the Mayo Clinic is there and also IBM has a huge factory there so there was a lot of things going on. The state of Minnesota did not want to in any way build a new campus because those cost a lot of money so they didn't. What they did was rent out some cheap commercial space that had been a like bad food court in the mall they built in the 70s that got abandoned like once the orange Julius in those places left like that place was empty. They rented it out. They built classrooms. There are only two academic majors there health sciences and like health sciences administration I think you get a four year degree in health if you go there and if you don't want to you don't go there. What's amazing is that all the classes are small you never are in a room with more than 20 students at a time. The biology professors, the chemistry professors the English professors, the philosophy professors which they do have actually coordinate their curricula throughout a semester so that they reinforce one another which is completely unheard of in normal higher education because students kind of take whatever they want and departments don't cooperate they don't talk to one another. People in departments don't cooperate and don't talk to one another. Students are paying the same tuition that they pay for other public universities but basically it's running off tuition so the government paid like only a few million dollars to kind of build this place. There's no gym. The students go to a YMCA to work out. They just rent apartments to live in. I went there, I visited that place. The students were all very satisfied I think with their educational experience. They were getting all of that socialization all of that interaction with other people all of the coming of age experience and you know what they weren't doing so much they weren't spending five days a week getting drunk and I mean that sincerely. I think you know one of the students I talked to was like yeah I have a friend who went off to like St. Cloud State or whatever and you know she barely made it through her first semester because she was boozing the whole time and I mean you know the part of the socialization is bad socialization. I'll just say it. I mean colleges teach young men and women things they shouldn't be teaching them about themselves, about how to interact with one another. I mean it is a strange kind of socialization and another reason that I think new organizations can kind of bring some fresh blood and some fresh life into a very kind of staid ecosystem of colleges that we have now. This is the other actually the other labor point that I didn't raise. The last time you and I met we were betting on what was gonna be the thing that would keep colleges going or cause them to sort of fall off the cliff and it was actually sports. Yes, yeah I think it might. So it is on the one hand so I hope that professional sports are in not in any way associated with the University of everywhere. And so like part of me feels like. The whole night will stop you. Yeah I mean so part of me feels like that whole thing also just has to end because it's so kind of corrupt and like despicable in so many ways. The other part of me feels like the Southern football universities will be literally the last ones to go because they fulfill this like incredibly important function, cultural function for the whole state. Not just for like the people who go there. Well this is you know, a Sebastian Thround blesses heart when he said a couple of years ago that in 50 years time there would only be 10 universities left. The only way we can get to 10 universities is if college sports goes away. Because. Yeah, well that would be great. I mean. No I mean. The college sports goes away. Yeah right right yeah no I mean the 10 universities things is wildly crazy. That's just not right at all. There will be more not less. College sports yeah it's a mess. So I haven't read your book yet but I imagine you propose kind of what you think a model of university for everywhere and everyone would look like or at least aggregate research on it based on the title. So I'm just curious to hear if you've ever thought of starting a university or kind of a new brand of university that leverages a lot of the hybrid model of leveraging the resources of a city with some of the online and technology tools you've described. I've never thought about it seriously because I wouldn't know how to do that and I would not do it well. I'm decently good at writing books but I don't think that I have sort of the skills and the wherewithal to do what you're talking about and the book doesn't propose a model because I also I don't think that I'm I don't think there will be a model and I can't see far enough into the future to understand what it will be. The book confidently predicts that there will be a lot of new models and that they will be sensible economically. They won't spend lots of money on things that they don't need to. And that they will be more focused on what students need than the institutions that we have now. I think a rich person should do what you're talking about because that's like a lot of who's not from Silicon Valley. And there are some, right? Yeah. A lot of the most well-known colleges in America are some rich guy decided to take a bunch of his money and create a university because that was a pretty good it's a better than other ways that you couldn't spend all your money. And it's also a fantastically good way of like cleansing your name of whatever sins you committed to make all the money. So like Duke Vanderbilt, like these are names that we feel good about now. Carnegie exactly, right? So yeah, I think that I mean I think about Andrew Carnegie. You can have lots of opinions about Andrew Carnegie and how he made his money. But like Andrew Carnegie's legacy now like many years later is like very positive. So I talk in the book my father grew up in Pittsburgh and one of the reasons that he is became who he is and therefore I became who I am was because there was this huge Carnegie library system that he could walk to. And there was a university and an institute there and he was lucky in that sense that he had a damage to all those things. And he like my dad came from a working class family like a lot of people and worked really hard for everything he had. But if he had lived like 20 miles in any other direction I think he would have lived a really different life because those things weren't there. And the only way you could get to them was to walk. So I think it actually surprises me in a way that given that we are now in a new gilded age like in a way that hasn't been true since the last one and given how in some ways inexpensive it is to you don't have to actually build buildings as much as you used to. I think that a rich person should actually go around and do something like the Carnegie library system where he or she says we'll build a real place in your community like a physical place that will be the center of learning. The community has to support it like Carnegie libraries have to do but that place will be connected to an online educational network that puts them all together and makes them accessible to educational resources that are vastly more impactful perhaps than what was possible 100 years ago. Of course the public library system in Chicago is sort of not doing something very similar, right? Offering their space as a space for people to come and do sort of kitchen table work with MOOCs. Kitchen table work with coding, for example. So the library, they could still be the library. I would say that, and I agree with Audrey, we've kind of choked learning by the eighth grade these days and therefore when we talk about a gap of those who know and those who don't know, it's just getting larger because we haven't gone back to the basics of how learning occurs and how people are intrinsically motivated to learn through curiosity. And so it's not about MOOCs and technology and it's about going back to the basics of people like Dewey who talked about education and experience, a kind of thing, I think. I think the technology may be worthless if we don't go back to the basics about how people learn and energize them about learning. I completely agree. I mean, technology is not a substitute for good educational design. And we get into this kind of odd way of dichotomy where we compare technology-enabled education to non-technology-enabled education without actually asking whether the education was any good in either case. So you're absolutely right. I mean, mostly I think it's about education for more people who are farther away for less money. And in some cases, doing some interesting things that only technology can do. And I think that there are many of those things and there will be more of them. But if we're not really careful and we don't proceed from a deep understanding of how people learn and empathy for other people, it won't work very well. I mean, doing things that are meaningful. That's why the remedial class has completely failed. It's because we didn't have an understanding about the learning of those types of individuals who you can give them all the remedial classes in the world and they'll just continue to feel because they feel awful about entering an educational institution because it only brings back the idea that I'm dumb and dumber and therefore I can't do anything. Yeah. I mean, we didn't really talk about students' intellectual property, students' work. But I think that that's something that we need to really think about changing radically in education. Who owns it? Certainly. Particularly as we have more and more data mining. Who owns student work? But are students doing things that are meaningful? Are students doing things that matter to them? And not just matter because they were assigned a problem set to do, but that they are deeply relevant to their lives, to their day-to-day lives. Yeah. One more question. So I work at a traditional university, a liberal arts institution. I am an administrator there. The institution just up the road. I also happen to be German so I could take some issue with some of the things commented on the German system. You raise the issue of cost a lot with higher education and one of your big criticisms of the current system is that it's too expensive, it's out of control. We're not measuring value and worth of education as, well, you're equating it more with a bang for your buck. And I would like to suggest that the model that you are proposing or you say you don't propose a model but the alternatives of the university of everywhere in fact may cost us more. It comes with opportunity costs. It also comes with additional assessment costs. A lot of what universities do now is to help guide students in ways that the young woman behind me was mentioning also the mentoring, some academic socialization that we may, in order to replicate that in a technological environment or in a virtual environment or in a more informal environment, will in fact cost. That same MOOC that you took at MIT, you now have to pay a fee in order to get an assessment and a credentialing for that. And people want that, they're willing to pay for that. So I just would take issue and perhaps have you respond to this notion that somehow we can, that the problem with universities is that they are budgets run a MOOC and not providing value and how we define what that value is, thank you. So a couple of things. Colleges and universities over time have been remarkably inquirious about their own educational processes in the sense that there's very little evidence that would meet university scholarly level of standards that tells us what the value is. What does this practice work? Does that practice work? We have some feelings and some opinions and some kind of received wisdom around all these things but if you were to really say, again, given the standards that will get you published in a good journal or not, can you prove that this or that or the other is valuable? Is it effective? Is it, how valuable is it relative to how much it costs? I mean, I think these kind of basic questions remain unanswered and increasingly I think the onus is going to be on institutions to show their value in kind of more concrete and more reliable ways. The cost is also, I mean, it's not just a problem for students, it's a problem for institutions. So I think probably most of us here noticed with surprise and maybe some dismay that Sweetbriar College in Virginia shut down yesterday. Not because I don't think it was particularly wasteful. I'm assuming it wasn't. It just simply couldn't attract enough people who were willing to pay enough money for them to provide the kind of education that they were providing. I think, and I don't blame anyone at Sweetbriar College for this, but I do feel like all of our colleges and universities have sort of been swept along in a set of organizational structures, labor models, values, competitive circumstances with other students that really only work for a fairly small number of institutions that have a lot, a lot of resources and are not gonna work in the long run. But because we kind of hoped and prayed and wished they would, institutions haven't gone through the kinds of difficult changes, including the use of technology to make some things less expensive that don't leave them vulnerable to that kind of disruption. It's a great loss. Like no one's gonna build another college, I don't think, in that place. One of the really neat things about the American higher education system is how kind of idiosyncratically dispersed a lot of these institutions are. And because they're in places, they haven't kind of gotten sucked into our great metropolises as they've created, but once they go away, they're not gonna come back. And I hope that we can find ways for institutions like that to persist. So I think that's time. We're a little over time. Please join me in thanking Audrey for doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you.