Bill Ackman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I still have hope. I think universities are really important institutions. When I went to Harvard, there were 1600 people in my class. I think today’s class about the same size, and their online education really has not taken off. So I heard Peter Thiel speak at one point in time, and he’s like, “What great institution do you know, that’s truly great, that hasn’t grown in a hundred years?” And the incentives in some sense of the alums are for, it’s a bit like a club. If you’re proud of the elitism of the club, you don’t want that many new members. But the fact that the population has grown of the country so significantly since, certainly, I was a student in 1984, and the fact that Harvard recruits people from all over the world, it’s really serving a smaller and smaller percentage of the population today. And some of them were most talented and successful entrepreneurs anyway. It’s a token of success that they didn’t make it through their undergraduate years. They left as a freshman, or they didn’t attend at all. For entrepreneurs, yes. But it’s still a place……

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