Marc Andreessen: commitment

Transcript context

…Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let’s say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who’s been close to a university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild. Because the problem right now, the folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort, and I hope that they succeed and I’m cheering for them, but the problem is you’re now inserting. Suppose you and I want to start a new university, and we want to hire all the free thinking professors, and we want to have the place that fixes all this, practically speaking, we can’t do it because we can’t get access to that money. I’ll give you the most direct reason we can’t get access to that money, we can’t get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding? Federal student loans? They’re accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly. They’re not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right. es. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right. And so we have a government funded and supported cartel that has gone… It’s just obvious now. It’s just gone sideways in basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being the wrong religion. They’re just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it’s all on the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there’s no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, it’s like everything else in life. I mean, in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, and that’s how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution. Why does anything ever get better? Things are tested and tried, and then the things that are good survive. And so these places, they’ve been allowed to cut themselves off, both from evolution of the institutional level and evolution of the individual level as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we’ve just stalled out. We built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system, where we’re surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form. I disagree with you on that. Maybe it’s grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize a system from within, because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important.…

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