Unbundling universities
Scott Galloway coined ‘Hedge fund with a classroom attached’ to describe Harvard - but really it’s a hedge fund + hospital network + research institute + elite club + social mobility policymaker … all with a classroom attached.
There’s many benefits - exceptional academics want to both research and teach; the hedge fund returns can fund research; the hospital has a supply of the latest research and study participants.
There’s downsides too - you can’t choose which bit you want if you only want a part (e.g. exceptional teaching) - you have to ‘get into the elite club’ too. There’s some intrinsic tensions (even hypocrisy) in an’ elite club’ also acting as a social mobility policy maker or closing the door to exceptional teaching.
Growing a person has been really expensive so bundle it up in this ‘university institution’.
But technology history is the history of bundling and unbundling.
Newspapers previously bundled information (news, ads, dating profiles, classifieds, entertainment) in one place because it was so expensive to distribute information to people.
Once cost (of info distribution in this case) collapses - that’s when you get unbundling - and rapid disruption. Anyone can experiment with new ways of getting that info to people.1
But at a time of dramatic change in cost structure - prepare for an unbundling disruption - and it’s possible it could happen in education
Universities have steadily bundled up many different organizations over the last 200 years - the collegiate classroom, prestige selective communities (think the freemasons, California’s Bohemian Club), personal tutors for the very wealthy, research institutes (17th century Royal Society), philanthropic endowments - all steadily bundled into the mega institutions of today
But when the cost of growing a person (broadly ‘teaching’) can be done at a fraction of the cost - because of for example LLMs (and more AI tools to come) - it becomes possible to disaggregate that work
The cost structure of aspects of the university is about to shift dramatically. Incredible AI teaching tool are emerging - one launched yesterday - Opennote - emulating Feynman (supposedly the greatest teacher of the 20th century)
It’s just beginning - the cost structure of aspects of the university is about to shift dramatically.
Harvard knows it - Charles R. Nesson, Harvard Law School Professor & Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (that I used to go to talks at) published a piece essentially saying Harvard needs to pivot - from IQ to EQ
When Harvard’s publishing that you know it means potentially significant disruption but also a wave of experiments in new ways to do different parts of a university
All the more so because these rapid changes are also accelerating the change in what skills are needed to thrive - from a multi-decade cycle (in the 20th century) to a 5 year or less cycle
Coding bootcamps (or tech school’s like codesmith) had the goal of helping navigate that new speed of change. But lots more experiments are needed - coding schools got a lot right - responsive to industry/tech changes - but also missed the need for people to continue to grow their higher-order ‘capacities’ - like how to solve complex engineering problem and become autonomous in their learning throughout their careers
These are the sorts of ‘transformative’ lessons people typically experience in university - dividing people into ‘high flyers’ or not. I use the term ‘high flyer’ here because it’s the term the Economist used this week to describe the increasing sense in research that this disruptive transition is going to reward ‘high flyers’ able to strategically think about how to use AI and leave everyone else behind
So let’s make it possible for anyone to become this mythical ‘high flyer’ - outside of the bundled university. I particularly love the idea of that transformative growth behind unbundled from the ‘prestigious club’ part of a university.
And it is possible - I experienced at the small coding bootcamp I studied at before starting Codesmith - where the learning was more transformative than my time at Harvard
This deep growth of a person though requires high-touch investment in someone’s learning that’s tailored to their journey. The changing cost of doing so opens up the possibility of new models that do so outside of universities at a far greater scale.2
And that brings me to what does this disruption mean for teachers - I’m from a family of public school teachers, and I love the teaching I get to do at Codesmith and beyond - I’m part of teaching a session at the Oxford/Cambridge Women in Computer Science conference in May
Back to newspapers - journalism has experienced immense disruption but if a journalist is a person researching and telling stories about the world then the growth of youtube, ‘social’ is an explosion of a new journalism
The collapse of cost of reaching people via digital doesn’t mean less journalists/storytellers - means different and more. It should be the same way w education - it will give rise to new forms of learning and teaching - which will mean different teaching - more learning for more people for more of their life.
Disruption needs adjustment time - Yale shouldn’t necessarily give up it’s $40bn endowment tomorrow - although I think it could consider its class size returning to the levels of the 1970s (when it was a third bigger than today) - and France did shut the Grandes Ecoles (their Ivy League) as an effort to reset an open market for learning
But I’m excited for the new experiments that will come from this disruption and I’m confident as has been the case with every collapse in cost that there will be leaders who use it to expand access to the best of the old (transformative learning, opportunity for hard work to pay off) at a whole new scale to audiences previously left out.
After a bit you see the re-bundling start to happen - once new platforms/technologies become established the benefit of bundling (ease of access for users) means a shift back to aggregation.
It’s a struggle to develop a new mindsets & capacities - one that I think people always benefit from the support of other people to help sustain them through - so seeing these new tools as enabling that at a greater scale