YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Horowitz

lines on the record: 195
first: 2024-02-08
most recent: 2024-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And of course, you know, when I went to college and I went to Columbia. So, like, and Columbia is like a pretty high end. So I imagine at like regular school, that's even more the case.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, when you Right. Yeah, so when you talk to professors, to put on a cynical hat here for a moment, when you talk to professors and university administrators about this kind of thing, basically what they tell you is like, look, you can't be naive about actual real world students. They say, look, like in practice, it goes to your point of the advantage of having a physical presence like an actual physical campus. But what I'll tell you is like, look, a lot of students actually don't want to learn, or they're not motivated to, or it's not something they would naturally do, and they're not driven to do it. And like they're going through the motions. And to the extent that they're actually showing up to class and doing the work, it's because they're in a specifically structured environment where the expectations are set high to do that and they're going to get kicked out if they don't. And, you know, their parents are paying for it. And like it's like they basically pressured into doing it right now. And of course, you know, a lot.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that challenge with the full college experience, unless you get to the Christopher Nolan version, is that it's a very big thing to sign up and commit to without a well-known credential, right? Like, okay, I'm going to go learn. You know, whatever calculus, or I'm going to learn, you know, advanced machine learning or something like that. If I'm really coming from outside the job market. Even if I learn it, will anybody believe me? And how does that work? So I think completely decoupling that one. From credentialing or jobs. May be tough, but like if you could link it into you take this class, you get a job, then I think that could definitely work. But otherwise, I just think it's a very small market of people who just really want to learn. That much about a subject.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's interesting because of the ones we named, the one that has worked the best is probably Khan Academy, which had the least amount of money going to it and is in its own format, right? Like it's not a university course format thing. It's like these little lessons. I couldn't even remember, you know, when AI started taking off, I had a hard time remembering how to do linear algebra or how hard it was. And I did the Khan Academy. I was like, wow, I forgot how easy it was. It's much easier than actual algebra. It sounds harder, but it's easier. And so like it is kind of like a magical thing.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It literally gets Stevens Fielbert, Christopher Nolan. Literally, yeah, the most mind-blowing, incredible course lectures you've ever seen with full effects and graphics and everything perfect. And so you can do that. And then we talked about the tutoring thing, but you could potentially have a thing where you have the super high production value general courses and then you couple it with like AI tutoring or you couple it, by the way, with like in-person tutoring and matching grad students to undergrads or whatever. And again, people have been trying to do variations in this for quite a while. How would we think about that as an entrepreneurial opportunity today, do you think?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And then I'll just give you a couple thoughts on this one. So, number one, actually, this has already happened, specifically this is happening in Korea. And so there are actual, they're actually teaching superstars in Korea that actually makes courses. I've had this idea for a long time, which is, you know, if you figure you've got a million kids who are going to take math 101 freshman year of college, you know, you get them each to do $100 for that. It's $100 million of revenue, and then hire Steven Spielberg to make Math 101 as a video miniseries, right?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Okay, good. Good. All right. Second is actual educational coursework itself. And of course, again, here there have been attempts. There was kind of the MOOC, you know, kind of online course movement. A while ago, Coursera Udacity, and then Udemy or Udemy, which is another startup that confirmed.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, it would really help get people into the right jobs as well because, you know, sometimes people get miscast. Like this is, life is like that. Sometimes, you know, you get assigned one thing and you really should be something else. And these kinds of rigorous assessment might identify that. And then, you know, like you can kind of find something that you're better at and that you do better at in your career. And that like, you know, we could use more, which would be great for us. This is a definitely high on the, it would be great for us, Criteria.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here you could have any kind of aptitude testing IQ or otherwise. You could have a dozen or a hundred different ways of measuring aptitude in whatever domain you want, including creativity, everything else we talked about. And it would all be, it's all completely voluntary. It's completely legal. It's because it's not tied to employment, right? And so I. So you could do like a super version of even what the employers universities did in the past and actually have it be a fully legal thing.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And that basically killed IQ testing at the employment level. And that was when the university degree took off because the SAT score was an implicit IQ test and it laundered through. So, employers outsource the IQ test to the university credential. But as we discussed, 1700 universities and colleges in the U.S. have stopped using standardized testing as an emission criteria. So the value of that is going to zero as an IQ test. And in fact, they're doing everything they can to get away from that. But the employer still can't do it. What's interesting about this is a startup idea is that the thing that the Supreme Court said specifically is illegal is an employer can't do this.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also something, and I'm not a lawyer, but there's also something in the law, so as you pointed out earlier, it's illegal, there's a famous Supreme Court case that made it illegal. Companies used to do generalized aptitude testing in the old days. And then there was a Supreme Court case.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody's bringing ChatGPT into the thing with them, like whatever it is, or maybe they are like, I don't know, you know, maybe you just have to know what to ask. But something that was like, you knew they could do that, then they would have that capability. And then as an interviewer, you're just really going, understanding motivation, cultural fit, these kinds of things as opposed to can they do the job because you know they can do the job.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'd be incredibly interested in that. And I think that people who didn't have college degrees, who might have gone to a state school or something like that that was a little cheaper that they could afford, all of a sudden, well, and then that would actually help fix the university system in a way in that now I can go to San Francisco State and I can go get credentialed here. And I'm actually more interested to Andreessen Horowitz than the person from Harvard who's got this degrading credential. Like how about that? And I spent a hell of a lot less money to go to San Francisco State. That would be incredible. So I think that to me, this is such a great startup idea. I've been thinking about since we started the podcast, like, how do we fund that one? That's awesome. You know, you'd have to do a great job on it, you know, it would have to be unfudgable. You'd really like.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then if you think about that. Among employers, people are worried about bias and this and that. Well, like, you know, like. You know, to have the ability to show your capability in any dimension and then have an employer know about that and have it be like valid.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be something that I think would be very attractive to employees. I mean, you know, like one of the, right, the SAT was invented because it used to be only like nobles, you know, the elite, the aristocrats, people from rich families got to go to college. And then you're saying, well, like what if I'm like, you know, some poor kid from New Lisbon, Wisconsin, how do I show? I can go to University of Illinois, well, like take this test. That's a fucking miracle. And I think that was this music.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think this may be the best startup idea of everything in education in that, look, if somebody Had an organization that aptituded personality tested people in not just a general test, but like in very specific things as well, like if you think about. Silicon Valley, everybody gives every engineer some kind of test in their interview, right? Like write this piece of code, you know, figure out this algorithm, this kind of thing. I think every job has some of that. So if you had a place that could reliably differentiate kind of people's capability and things you needed to hire for.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two ways to succeed in life in business. One is you can bundle, the other is you can unbundle. And so let's talk about the unbundling. So I'll just go through them in order. So we had our dozen functions of the major university. I stripped out three, which we can talk about at the end, but that leaves nine, which seems to me at least there's a case you could make for unbundling. So let's walk through them and let's think about these as like, you know, actual potential either startup ideas like actual for-profit startup ideas. Or by the way, maybe nonprofit or philanthropic ideas. So credentialing agency. Yeah, so we've talked a lot about credentialing so far, but all the different aspects of credentialing. And again, this concept of credentialing and credentialing out, like both the credential, the way that you're deciding who to credential and then the actual credential that you're giving them is that in your view, is like, is that something that could be abstracted out and turned into its own thing?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so with that in mind, let's go more radical from that. So let's talk about unbundling. Our old French M. Barstale has his famous line.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think it's good for most students, maybe not for you, but for most students. There are different personality types too. But like I think there's something very motivating to be around peerus, right? Like here you are, here's my cohort of people who are going to be in the world with me and what are they doing and what can I learn from them? You learn as much kind of from your classmates as you do kind of, I think, from the university. And that's hard to do. Like it's much harder to do online. So I think that the college experience, which is, you know, to Joe and University of Austin's credit, is a real thing with real value, you know, particularly for a young person for most young people. But I think you have to modernize it. We're not in 1910 anymore.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yeah, so when the topic of technology and education comes up, a lot of people sort of reflexively assume that you must mean just like the whole thing moves online, everything's over the internet. Like, that's not what you're saying.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then kind of then map it further into you know people like us or you know it could be us it could be the NBA it could be you know it could be Warner music it could be whatever part of society works but like you know like I said we Take people with all kinds of talent, you know, all kinds of different things is very valuable, like extremely valuable for us at the firm. In fact, I'd say I'd argue, you know, where. 550 people, which probably makes us the biggest venture capital firm in the world. Why? Because we do the most things. Why? Because we have the kind of people who can do lots of different things. And, you know, that's a... That's a heck of an advantage when, as an employer, you have people who can do all kinds of different things because then you have more capability as an institution.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“45 minute or hour and a half lectures are pretty hard like it's pretty hard to pay attention the whole time and retain everything whereas like smaller chunks of work you know I think have been proven out you know and like and then a kind of test to go like okay did you retain the information that you got or like some interactive part every 10 minutes is a much better you know like just in terms of these things and then you know like as you said like one-to-one tutor that kind of thing But maybe the machine is the one-to-one tutor in some ways because you can ask it questions now in English or in Chinese or whatever language you speak. So I think that I would definitely make it that and give the professors, the mega tutors, the kind of tools to both identify the capabilities of the students and then help them maximize those abilities.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Purpose and then guide you through your purpose with a team of other students who have a similar purpose and to help you study the right things, prove yourself in the right ways, get the credential and so forth, and using all the best tools to do that as opposed to waking you up at eight in the morning, walk to class in your pajamas because you were drinking too much last night, you know, sitting a class very bored, not really be integrated into the AI and the internet to get the rest of the information. So I just think there's like a whole ring thinking of the way your day would go. And like.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have access to the internet, you've got all these other things. And then your school experience right now in an industrial age world is you have instructors and you've got administrators filling out forms and you've got, you know, very little, I don't know about University of Illinois, but certainly at Columbia and at UCLA, very little kind of career guidance kinds of things help you find your highest and best use. The university didn't really do that. So I think that in an information age, AI university, all that form filling out, all that, a lot of the kind of instruction is taken care of, but what you really need is a university to help you find your”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is sort of the platform. So, what do you get? You get classrooms with instructors. You get dorm that you can live in big cafeteria with a meal plan and all that kind of thing. But look in the information age and a giant library, of course, or multiple libraries. And if you're an Ivy League You know, the information age, you have AI you can ask it any question, you've got.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so look, I think industrial revolution technology means you can build big buildings. You can drive there in your car or on a train. You don't have to ride a horse”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you sent me on the same topic building from scratch. You sent me a thing as we were prepping for this. I'll just read your own quote back to you. Today's universities are built on industrial revolution technology and that are therefore completely outdated for the information age, both in how they run and the product they offer. And so again, how would we advise this hypothetical new institution on how to do on that? What does that mean in practice?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is interesting where I'm learning and lifelong learner, all that kind of thing. And so if you can guarantee me that life, or if you can give me a better product to get me that life, that's what I want.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's probably where I would start. And then I kind of design the system to feed us and then to kind of feed the students in that way into all the most kind of Interesting job to line up with the curriculum. Now, you know, like, and if you're doing like, if University Boston was like had a whatever, a big focus on creativity, then I would want to wire them into some kind of creative output or whatever. So what happens after the University of Austin? Like I would start with that. Like, what's going to happen when we graduate? Basically, when you go to school, you're like, what are you looking for? You're looking for like, my life isn't going to be like, you know, for me, it was like my life's not going to be working at a fucking restaurant because I had been a busboy and I was like, I do not want to do that my whole life. I can't do it. I'll shoot myself in the head. Like, I can't take it. And I think that's a lot what people are looking for when they go to college. It's like, how can I have a life that kind of has more variety?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What if, like, during the recruiting process they come see us? And we go, like, we'd rather have you out of University of Austin than out of Harvard. That would open my eyes. I'd go like, okay, that's something. I may take that seriously. So I probably really lock in on how can I attract the best students and what does that take. And I think it's partly a function of faculty, but it's partly a function of like who understands enough about that university that they go, I'm all in. And by the way, I can be as big a help to you when you come out as anybody. So kind of artificially create what's like the alumni network, but better than an alumni network because you're doing it with people who 100% have jobs, like the top of the job market.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, like, I mean, As you know, our whole mission life is we're dream builders, not dream killers, so we would have for sure encourage them. And actually, you got me thinking about like, what would I advise Joe Lonsdale to do? Like one thing I wish I should probably call him is he should wire University of Austin straight into us and straighten to everybody in venture capital who's building new companies and kind of hiring lots of employees and all these kinds of things. And, you know, ask us what we're looking for. And then, you know, let's do a partnership and recruit straight out of there and so forth. And then that will really enhance the proposition to new students. So if I'm a new student and I'm going like, okay, I get a Harvard degree or I could get a university of Austin degree. Why am I going to University of Austin?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fit into the existing industry structure, and we don't want to take. The risk of innovating, we just want to be like the others, and we're just going to be a new and better version of the thing that already exists. Like, how would we advise them given those goals and given that level of funding, would we at that point say, you know, while that sounds like that might be a good idea and here's how you might do it, or would we still say,”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I've read. So let's just hypothesize. And I don't know whether, by the way, I don't know whether this is happening. Maybe I don't know. But let's just suppose a group of them get together and they're just like, look, we're going to put $2 billion or $5 billion or $10 billion. And we're going to build from scratch. And we're going to do the direct frontal thing. We're just going to like, we're going to build the parallel thing. And then, and then the logic we're going to have for doing that is number one, we have the money. We have the resources. Let's assume we have the money and resources at the level of some number of billions of dollars to do that. Let's say up to the $500 or $10 billion level just to swag it. And then let's say that, you know, look, we actually want to go for frontal kind of assault because we don't want people to have to rethink their assumptions. Like we want to just be able to bring the faculty over. We want to bring the students over. We want the parents to be totally comfortable. We want the government to understand how to deal with us. We want to.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's take it out of the realm of the realm of venture capital where we think about generating a return and so forth. Let's take it out in the realm of maybe, let's say, sort of philanthropy as an example or just somebody who really wants to make this happen. So, you know, look, we just happened, you know, there's a donor strike at some institutions right now and there's a very depocative donor, very deep donors that are on strike.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frontal assault on Harvard. So just from a VC standpoint, I think that now, like I think there's something very noble about building a new full out four-year Ivy League of the Future type thing, because if you believe these schools have lost their way, then it's time to build a new thing. But I'm not sure that university was invented so long ago. Like, why don't we invent one for today?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taught me to program in Pascal and C, like neither of which, anyway, it's a few times you use C, but not often. And like I said, these things don't last that long anymore, these kind of things that you're taught. Knowledge is evolving very fast, which is great. So like the four-year degree, you know, like that's one thing you might bring into question. And then if you had a shorter degree where you could get just as high paying a job, and this is something Lambda School does, of course, then all of a sudden you have a value proposition that's starting to look really good. Oh, maybe like 10 grand, you know, you lend me 10 grand for a year. This is what Lambda school does, and then you pay me back if and only if you get a job. Well, okay, that starts to sound pretty good. So like I think there's things that would be much more attractive to students potentially that weren't like a full”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, no, not. But, you know, like I think it's really, and we talk about this a lot, is, you know, like taking on an existing incumbent at what they do is tough. Taking them on on something that they really don't do like electric cars tends to work better. And I think that with universities, kind of there's such a huge opening. You know, different lengths of degree. So, like the four year degree. Is really something that doesn't make much sense to me. So to adopt that as like what your degree length is, given that people who aren't scholars need kind of skills and then new skills and new skills and new skills, I mean, could you imagine if we were trying to do our jobs based on just what we learned in college, right?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would probably warn people away from that idea that it's the same bundle. Although, you know, like Today is probably the right time to come at that idea. I think from a venture capital standpoint, that is a very long shot. So it's kind of like. You know, it's the difference between like, um, Tucker DeLorean and Tesla, right?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get access to federal student loan funding and federal research funding, and maybe you couldn't. Maybe you just get boxed out, which again would just translate to you would need a lot more money to get started. So Ben, think about, yeah, so kind of with your entrepreneurial hat on and your venture capitalist hat on, like, is starting new universities in the shape and form and kind of equivalent bundle to the current universities? Is that an idea that we would encourage or that we would warn people away from?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of very radical changes in admission policies. So you have like, you know, this is probably like the biggest golden moment and probably in 100 years to think about doing this. Some people are trying to do it. There's a bunch of reasons to think that this would also be very difficult. 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 the big ones are like hundreds of years old. Two is it would take a lot of money for a long time because of the network. You need to boot up a network effect and that would just be very expensive. In other words, like it's hard to get the great students until you have the great faculty. It's hard to get the great faculty and have the great students. And so like, for example, you'd have to really overpay faculty to get them to come over and you'd probably have to have a much cheaper student proposition. And so you'd have like upside down economics for a while while you're booting it, which means you would need a lot of funding. And then third is you'd be trying to break into a cartel. And so, you know, we talked about the accreditation process last time, but like it's, you know, maybe you could get accredited.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ferguson Lambda School is a for profit, a for-profit version, Austin Allred is doing, and then there's a nonprofit version, University of Austin, which our friends Sir Launcelot and his colleagues are doing. And then there's another one called Minerva. And people do try to start new universities. And so let's talk about that for a second. So let me just kind of frame the thing. So the obvious pro for doing this is the advantage of starting something new, which is sort of a clean sheet of paper. You can learn all the lessons from the people who have come before you. You can do what makes sense for today. And then look, probably this would be that just given the issues in the world today, this is probably the best time in 100 years to try to do that, right? Because you have a lot of people, you have actually quite a few donors at the moment, as well as quite a few parents and students, including, by the way, students who, according to the current policies, are actually very capable that can't get into DAP universities right now because of the, you know.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's keep going. Let's see. We already covered a fair amount of the fix it thing. We could probably spend a lot more time on it. Let's go to another option, though, which is basically starting new competition. And so you could start new universities, and it is worth saying, of course, some people are trying to do this, right? And so our friend Joe Lonsdale and a bunch of our friends actually do Lonsdale very wise.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big idea in the university is. You know, free speech marketplace of ideas, these kinds of things, but those ideas got shut down”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diversity is our strength. This is a thing that's so weird about the politics now is. We want diversity, but we want everybody to be the same, and like we got to make up our minds. And if we have diversity, then we've got to be able to measure diverse talents and degrees of diverse talent and distinguish in all those kinds of things. If we don't want diversity, then why have education at all? Like, just keep us all dumb as we ever were. So we can all be the same. That's the goal. The goal isn't to invent new things or build new stuff or create new ideas or write new movies. The ideas that everybody's the same. And this is where I think like theologic gets really wacky. And I think that, you know, like universities got caught in their own underwear because they weren't willing to have that conversation, which is crazy because the whole idea of the universe.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be just logical to expect to space everything we know that, for example, you'd have incredibly high Asian representation among the people who have higher than 800 math SAT. But in the view of the world in which we're looking for special and different, you would say, wow, that's fantastic, in the world where we need everybody to be the same, you would say, oh, that's horrible, right? But that opportunity is there. And then, of course, there's nothing keeping a university from developing a test like that for itself, right? Or an employer, right?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Cabin 800. It's kind of like capping and saying my students can only get a B in the class. So you just can't, like, there's just, there's just, because I'm not presenting complex enough material where they would be able to, you know, validate getting an A. But you could have a version of the SAT that basically has much, much, much harder questions as the test goes on. And then basically you could have kids, you could just have a scale that goes from 800 to 2000. And you could identify within the crop of people who are at 800 level, you could identify the 10% that are like a much higher level. Right. And so, and then, you know, and then this gets in the question of like, why is it captured 800? It's captivate 800 because there's just constant pressure on the SAT to equalize itself by demographic group. And so the overwhelming priority at the company that does the SAT is to actually try to reduce group distinctiveness, right, as opposed to unearthed talent. And so they already get just tremendous criticism for group dispersion of results. And if they let it go further up.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right. Well, so this is almost the opposite of great inflation. This is like grade capping, right? Grade capping, yeah.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the SAT. And in particular, and then this gets to the Asian thing, and this is why this came out of the Supreme Court case, which is there's specifically there are too many Asians who score 800 on the math SAT and do very well on the verbal SAT. And so it's no longer, so it's no longer an effective testing method to even get to the cream of the crop for people in STEM. Now, here's what's interesting. There's no reason why, for example, the Meth SAT has to cap out at 800. The test is designed and calibrated deliberately by professionals who do this for a living. They can make the test arbitrarily difficult. They can make the scale arbitrarily high. You could have a math SAT test that just had harder and harder and harder and harder questions. And then all of a sudden.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me give you my other credential thing, which is like on the other side of this, which I think you'll find very entertaining. So one of the things that came out, one of the, you know, there was this big Supreme Court case on admissions. And so, and Harvard just happened to be the university that was the target of it, although I think, frankly, they were just representative of the entire category. But it just turned out we got just a tremendous amount of data from the inside of at least one of these places in terms of how they do all this. And a lot of that now is public record. And one of the things that became very clear, you know, because universities are, these universities are constantly asked, you know, why don't you just basically admit on the basis purely of objective criteria? Why even do the rest of this? Why don't you just like, for example, why don't you just admit on the basis of academic merit, therefore SAT score. And actually, one of the very interesting responses, there are now too many...”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than doing that, they just wanted to pass this political litmus test. And it's just a blown opportunity. And really unfortunate because, look, I mean, you know, and I can tell you just like in my friend groups, the interests are just so different, right? Like people in my white friend group or my Asian friend group or my are always surprised at how much I know about popular music. Nobody in my black friend group is even surprised at all about that because that interest in music is just higher in the population. So, like, can we take it? These things are different. Cultures are different.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source