YouSaid · the spoken record
Ben Horowitz
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- 2024-02-08
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- 2024-02-08
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“Yeah, absolutely. And I guarantee it comes out very different across different populations. And I guarantee it's not the same populations that score high on the SAT, right? And so you get into these. And to me, this is probably my greatest disappointment about the lack of evolution of the universities is, you know, we kind of rely on them to help us. The idea of like we're going to help you get to much more of the population and get to much more of the talent. And we're going to really help you kind of map our students to your needs.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have never done any of those things, right? Most people. Most people have no interest in doing any of those things. Or, by the way, maybe most people haven't been encouraged to do those things because they're not valued highly enough, right? Or because they don't think that it translates to having a future path in life. But for people who have done those things or might want to do those things, you could have a completely different kind of criteria.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then all the way up to, I have won a National Poetry Award, right? Right. And the same thing, classical music. I don't know if you're playing classical music instruments. I like to practice rhymes from time to time for fun and I performed at Carnegie Hall, right? It's sort of the scale from one to seven, right? And he said, if you apply this test to any kind of broad-based sort of group in the population, the average result, the mean result is overwhelmingly the result is zero. Yeah, yeah, right.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a psychologist there. I read about one. There's a psychologist that has a creativity testivity assessment battery test. And the test, if I remember correctly, it works roughly as follows, which is it's sort of two-dimensional. So it's 15 different kinds of creativity. And it's like poetry and literature and visual art and music. And by the way, it could be computer coding, whatever. You can just list all the different potential kinds of creativity. And then I think it's seven layers, seven degrees of sort of aptitude or potential. And it's like degree one is just take poetry as an example. I have written a poem on my own in my notebook that nobody else has ever seen.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would love to that coming in nobody's testing that like fine if you only want to test Writing and math in history, but you're going to get people who are good at writing and math and history and interested in it and whose culture puts them that way. And so, like, yes, if you kind of mix up the population, throw the cultures together, do a freaky Friday on everybody, and then have them take a test maybe to work better. But you're kind of dealing with what you're dealing with. And so if you're going to go find talent, go find talent. But don't make talent being the color of your skin or your gender. Like that's dumb.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, look, if you want to diversify what you're getting through that credentialing system, then widen it. Widen the bar, take more things, have them do a poetry test. See what their rhyming skills are like, actually, you know, add music to it, like these. This isn't these are real tangible things, right? Like, you know. I think it would be very helpful for us if they would say, how good are you at human relationships? Would”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you talking about? Exactly. So to go back to the credential link, to go back to the credentialing. So then I think what you're saying, see if this is right, is what you're saying is you want to think harder leading one of these institutions. You want to think harder about the credentialing on the way in in terms of how you're actually sourcing talent and how you're thinking about talent and how you're thinking about bringing in lots of different kinds of people. And then correspondingly, you also want to think about the credential out. So the value of the credential that you're then generating. And they're related, right? Because to your point on the SAT, the incoming credential is actually part of the outgoing credential. And so you want to think hard ultimately about how that all translates downstream to the potential employer”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you want to just have something I would do for fun sometimes is if you just Google Newsroom Diversity Crisis. There are these just absolutely hysterical reports just excoriating the same news organizations that criticize everybody else Of course they're not”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, you get into these abstract ideas that, you know, at the very surface level makes sense. There's talent everywhere. Yes, people are different or like not even people are different. Like, you know, people are there's racism out there, yes. So therefore, every job, every category and every company's got to be exactly, you know, the percentage that are represented by the population. Well, how'd you get all the way there? Like that's the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, or like there may be engineers who are good at it, but I'll bet you I can find somebody else who's way better at it. And we have. And so, and that's my point about the world. Like, the world is very diverse in terms of things that need doing. And to kind of force people into a path because they're not yours. You know, buddy who's covering diversity at the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever, and you're like, okay, the last thing I want to be doing is getting tagged with racism for there. And by the way, those organizations are not diverse in that way either. You know, like, so they're telling you how to run your business. They don't know how to run their fucking business. The whole thing is just stupid.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and I think that's clearly the right approach. And look, and I mean, I have to say, like in business, like, look, we're a technology venture capital firm. And we end up needing all those things. Part of our advantage is that we're a firm that has some poetry to them that can tell a story, that can do these kinds of things. That's how we built the whole brand. It had nothing to do with math. And that's kind of one aspect. Then we're a network. And so we've got to make friends, like a lot of friends. And not just friends in Silicon Valley. We've got to make friends in Washington, D.C., we've got to make friends in Hollywood. We've got to make friends on Wall Street. like this isn't a great job for an engineer.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poetry, and then all these different psychology and all these different things and so forth and so on, and then have sort of equally good engineering programs or math programs or whatever. And they have just like everybody in every program is there because it's the thing that they really want to do in life and that they're the best at Without the kind of trying to force fit everything to be equal representation across all fields. Is that the, it sounds like that?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so at that point, the differences in the outcomes that are based on pure choice maximize. Yeah. They don't minimize They maximize, right? And so the freer people are, the more you're going to have dispersion in exactly the way that Mace kind of prevailing morality just like completely freak out. But to your point, the reason we're going through all this, to your point is you can imagine a university that has this polar opposite view and would have these spectacular programs and things, music and many different areas of everything performing arts.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. Need you, right? And so if you're like a highly capable person who happens to be a woman who would love to be a literature professor, but in that system, you can't do that. You're not going to do that. And so you go do the thing that you'd rather not do because it's the same thing to do. And then in contrast, if you do this rank ordering of societies by gender egalitarianism, the Scandinavian countries are kind of top of the heap. And I think it's the case in the Scandinavian countries today that like engineers are like 85% men and nurses are like 85% women. And so it's a much more unequal outcome. And so the explanation for it turns out to be very subtle. It's in the statistics for what's happening, which is if you take out all of the societal bias or all the societal level determinism and you take out all, you know, whatever, if you take out every possible restriction on what people can do and you let them fully express themselves, then what you're left with is pure choice. Right.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, by the way, everything else that women might want to do is much more dangerous, right? So being a literature professor and Stalinist Russia was super dangerous. Very good point.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And so the true, like, for example, for STEM, the truly representative STEM systems at the educational level and at the professional level for science and math and engineering where the Soviet Union and then apparently even still today Iran.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something when you dig into the data on representation of different groups in different professions, there's something in the data, the social scientists who study this referred to as the Scandinavian paradox, which is that it's very counterintuitive. It's consistent with what you're saying, but it's very counterintuitive, which is the societies that are most egalitarian have the greater dispersion, have the greater difference between representation of groups, but for example, by profession.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Test into or whatever because you know, oh, we need another person of your race doing this, so we're going to make you do that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talent, their skill, their passion, their interest. And then they don't enjoy it. I'd be resentful if somebody did that to me. And then I'm not going to make much money. And I'm going to be like a low performer wherever I am. And there's no need for it because I'm a super talented person. Like, why are you doing this to me? And I think, you know, and it's these ideas of people who want to make the world fair that they impose this thing on people where like, look, life is not it's not fair in that not everybody is exactly the same amount of good at everything, but there's so much variety that there's a place for everybody. You know, like I do believe that there's a place for everywhere anybody can contribute and we got to find that for them. And that's what the university should be doing is finding people's contribution, not channeling them into something they don't want to do or didn't.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very sharp on this. He's a person I probably rely on most for ideas in this area. And one of the things he says is, look, we get guys, we kind of have to reclassify them because I got somebody as an engineer, but when we kind of, you know, look at their personality and so forth, they'd be way better in sales. And we reroute them and their career goes much better. And so if you're like a genius psychologist, social networker, like, you know, these kinds of things, and we forced you into STEM, that's not good for you. It's not good for anybody. But that's what these ideas do, right? Like they force people into things that aren't there.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just smarts, it's effort. Effort is a big thing that goes into not only a grade in school, but Goes into like performance on the job. And look, I would say the other thing, you know, just in life that you learn when you employ people, and every employer knows this is not everybody is good at everything. So the important thing is, what are you great at? And then how can we put you in a position for your highest and best use? We use this term all the time, you know, like where can you make the biggest contribution and let us get you there and not have you do something you're no good at. And I think this whole, you know, anti-credential kind of way that we've gotten universities, you know, people come out of the school, we don't know what their highest and best use at. They might get, you know, they may be like the greatest. I tell you Robert Smith, who's the, I guess he's CEO of Vista. He's the founder of Vista. He's kind of rent it.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the other response I think would be like, look, every professor, every teacher, and every manager and every employer are fully aware that you have a distribution of talents and capabilities and results and performance in every group, right? So there is no employer that does what you just said a few minutes ago, which is they hire the thousand best people. Nobody ever does that. I mean, everybody would love to. Nobody ever does. You always have”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, guess what? You owe $300,000 and you can't get a job. And that's the problem. So to me, that's a much bigger problem than the self-esteem problem where the, you know, your three D standard deviations below the average and you flank the class. At that point, you probably don't know the material well enough to get a passing grade, let alone what you get now, which is an A minus.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you grade it that way, you don't actually, I mean, you know, if you feel like, okay, the failing point should be lower than the whatever two standard deviations below the average, then you can do that. But the meaning of who's the top student at Harvard to have clarity on that is pretty powerful. And then also to have clarity on, oh, this is what it takes to get through four years and get a degree, a bachelor's degree. To your point last time about conscientiousness, it really kind of fulfills that promise. And so, you know, look, we've gone into this self-esteem is all that matters thing, but the result of that is massive student debt. We just lied to everybody, so you're doing fine. You're doing great. It's all good. Give us your money.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This need to mix in the absolute level. The other thing is that companies that were famous for it, Intel and Microsoft would actually fire the people at the bottom of the curve. And that has implications and so forth. One could argue Intel and Microsoft did pretty well. They started with those programs before they were giant monopolies and they became giant monopolies. That actually kind of worked. So it's kind of a retrospective that that stuff is bad. But in the university, you know,”
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 it's different at companies and in universities, by the way. So I think it actually works probably in some ways better in universities in the sense that the trouble you run into companies is you're. Your relative to the next employer. So if you hire the top thousand employees in the industry and then you rank them on a curve and then you fire the bottom 10%, those are better than the people on the market. And so like you get into that kind of thing and so forth. So there is.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, grading on a curve used to be more common, I think, both in educational settings and also in employee evaluation settings. And companies like Microsoft used to do it kind of famously, and GE. And then it feels like it's gone very much out of style. Because the criticism, right, is it sort of forces you, it sort of guarantees that you're going to have people who don't make it. And so the criticism is like, you know, what if everybody in the class is actually really good? And then you're singling out people who have to be cut from the bottom because you're forcing the greater-than-curve thing. And so isn't that unfair? And so I haven't seen anybody greater than the curve in many, many years. And so how would you kind of reexplain that to people in a way that they would think it's a good idea to bring it back?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're talking about kind of trying to zero in on the absolute grades once the indicator, are you talking about literally grading on a curve and having a force distribution?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you'd like to have some aptitude measure. And if you don't like the aptitude that's being measured, then enhance that. But to get rid of that is kind of nutso from the student perspective. And then the second thing is grade inflation itself. And in a way, it's easy to fix because you just go mandate a grading curve and just go back. C is average. F is fail. A is two standard deviations up. B is one standard. Like, just have it mean something very straightforward, the grade.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you replacing it with? You're replacing it with grades, which we talked about last time. There's massive grade inflation. So that doesn't really work. Are you doing recommendations? Like, what are you doing that an employer can't do themselves? And the brilliance of the SAT, by the way, is as an employer, it's actually illegal to do a general aptitude test. So if you're looking for just whatever and as we sometimes call them in sales, an all-around athlete or an all-around kind of mental athlete.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one big thing is the credentialing system, which, and this, again, like this is probably the most important thing to the student is that once I pay all that money, once I spend all that time. At the end of it. I've got something that's very valuable. And I think that there was just a Report that like half of companies are dropping their bachelor degree requirement, which kind of says The credential no longer means much. And so I think that. If you don't like the SAT part, then you probably need to fix the SAT part so it, you know, like make it better, but it does prove something to employers. And it's very hard to. Know get rid of a measure like that because”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which turns out to be immigrants. Okay, good. So let's, you know, that's obviously a big chunk of the reform, fix the university thing. But let's walk through the rest of the university turnaround plan.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's right. The other incentive, if you're taking expenses through the roof, you need some people paying full freight.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other benefit to the Africans is they pay, they're more likely to pay full freight, right? So they're from a universe, from a financial standpoint.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's clearly not working also in the, yeah, I mean, there, you know, with the kind of ruling on affirmative action, there were so many studies that showed that. Didn't actually help African Americans 50 years. Forget whether you think it's a good idea or a bad idea or fair not fair. The results were really bad. And I think part of the reason the results were bad is the way the kind of programs were designed and the, you know, and that like most of the people were African anyway, not African American.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over categorization. And then, you know, specifically back to what everybody thinks they're trying to do, which is if you're trying to help African Americans. And your answer to it is we have to bring in lots of literal Africans in West Indians or other population groups to do it. Again, to your point, like something has gone wrong in pursuit of the goal of helping African Americans.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the weird thing about this race theory that people are kind of promoting is They're not even related to actual races. I mean, or actually genetics, and it's just some weird government category.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, look at an individual level, you know, fine, great. I'm totally in favor of having highly talented Africans.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take it a step further just to double down because this is a real issue right now and real issue for many people, including, as you said, the people that everybody's trying to help. So your friend Henry Lewis Gates, longtime professor at Harvard, actually pointed out 20 years ago, I think, all the way back in like 2004, there was a big article in the New York Times Archives that's really interesting from that era. And the two sources for it were him and then Lonnie Guinier, who was one of the top black law professors in the country at the time, I think also maybe also a Harvard professor. And later she was like almost on the Supreme Court at one point. So these two very highly respected black scholars, experts, professors. And they made this case at the time. They said, look, what these institutions are actually doing is they're bringing in African and West Indian immigrants to satisfy the African-American quotas. Yes.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making race the criteria. Your problem is you don't even know what you're looking for, you don't know what they're interested in, you don't know how to create an environment that's beneficial where they're going to have great careers coming out of it. You haven't done any of the real work. You're just trying to like meet some number that doesn't even make any sense. And that's, to me, that's the issue.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is just like, it's just the American epidemic and enumeracy is kind of affecting the whole logic of how these programs work. And the problem is it's to the detriment of the people you're trying to recruit. I give you a very good anecdote on this. So you and I just had breakfast with a kind of prominent trustee at one of the most important universities in the world. And he made a very offhand comment, which he thought was the most obvious thing in the world that really kind of stopped me in my tracks, which he said, look, even if we accept it, every black applicant, we went hit 14%. And so you're so unattractive as the top university in the world to that population that you can't even touch that number. So your problem is obviously, you know, like not in.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To society are important, and people may be like able to do better than our friends, the white nations, like over here. And so that's the choice you have. I mean, you know, and I think it's just a better choice. So yes, you're not going to get equal distribution just like you don't get equal distribution in almost anything in life. It doesn't even make sense math-wise, by the way. Like, because the population is 14%, first of all, like 14% in total across age groups, not 18-year-olds. So you're already fucking off. And then we're going international. So you're way off. So you're mapping to a number that's a fake number. And now you're not just mapping it to the university. You're trying to map it into every subject.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and the whole point of diversity is diverse interest, diverse talent, right, or ought to be anyway. And so if you're going into a population that's got a different culture and very likely different interests, and by the way, everybody's got different genetics too, then you kind of have to be a little more creative about just saying we're only going to, like if you say we're only going to look at these test scores and these grades and these kinds of courses, then obviously like those populations aren't showing up on that. That's why you have the program. You can either go, well, we'll just still put them there where they haven't shown an interest or an aptitude yet or like or some of these students haven't, whatever. Or we can broaden our criteria to things that make big contributions.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think there's something wrong with that. And then similarly, like coal miners are almost all men. People work in oil rigs are almost all men. MMA fighters are mostly men, although there are women who do it. And there's nothing wrong with that. And so there are, I think you do have to, in any kind of program where you're trying to get.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychologist, by the way, at the university level, we were just a psychologist, or it slept at us up like 90 or 95% women now. Yeah, we do.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, I mean, I think the truth of the matter is Look, different, everybody's in it. First of all, everybody is an individual and should be treated as such in that sense. But I think anybody with half a brain, well, who's observant can observe some Kind of very obvious things about different populations that they're interested in different things. Like, people have different interests. So forget about even talent or this or that. And it goes by group and by culture and so forth. And this is there are things like every comedian makes jokes about men like to sit around and watch sports and women like to watch other things and so forth. And that's very bad to say these days, obviously. But if you look at just job categories, you know, I think veterinarians are 80% women. And nurses is like much higher than that.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It feels like you're arguing that we should give up on that in favor of an approach that sounds like it involves stereotyping, which is we shouldn't take away the focus of recruiting black people in the engineering program. We should increase the focus on taking black people to the music program, and we should do that on the basis of a stereotype that black people are better at music than at engineering. How do you explain that? How do you explain that given the moral framework people are starting with?”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use my special skill here. I'm obsessive on all these topics, and so I try to be able to think about it from all the points of view as well. I'll play Super Well here for a second, which is like, look, Ben, the whole point of the DEI programs like the universities is to try to make sure that every field, like engineering, as an example, has equal representation by population.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why aren't you looking for the talent doing the right things to recruit them? Why are you looking for the color? And that's, I think a lot of the things that the universities, if you're going to take a systems view of it, you've got to start back there and say, like, how do we find the talent that we just are a regular process doesn't get to, change our process, change our way of doing things to get to that talent. And then it's going to be better for us, better for the talent, better for the mission, all those kinds of things, as opposed to letting some outside force tell us what we should be doing. And I think that's really emblematic of a lot of the things that I think have gone sideways in the university when it comes to diversifying the student body.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may know she's Mary to Larry Summers, who was interestingly fired as president of Harvard for saying something non-diverse. And she said, Ben, I've been reading Nas's lyrics. I said, you've been reading his lyrics. She said, yeah. I said, you haven't been listening to his album. She's like, no, no, just reading the lyrics. I'm like, okay, you know, the albums are good too. But whatever. And she said, you know, like he's so good. Like I can't even believe how good this guy is. Like I'm talking like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman. He's like that level good. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. But the thing that I realized when she said that is. Harvard never recruited Knott or anybody like Nas. And if you think about it, right, black people dominate, dominate music in the United States.”
2024-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities with Marc and Ben · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source