The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education

The cruel truth of what pretends to be a meritocracy but is a caste system is that your degree largely indicates or signals your lifetime earnings.

There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level.

The university would be responsible for the accreditation.

Colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what to do next year if students can’t come back to campus.

It feels like a really wonderful opportunity to create a generation that develops greater cooperation, a comity of man, appreciation for what it means to be an American through some sort of social service.

When you go to Penn, you know that your classmates are solid citizens who are qualified and have good EQ [emotional quotient].

Last year, he called WeWork on its “seriously loco” $47 billion valuation a month before the company’s IPO imploded.

I gained resilience when I had my heart broken.

That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night.

Now, Galloway, a Silicon Valley runaway who teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, believes the pandemic has greased the wheels for big tech’s entrée into higher education.

I met people from different economic backgrounds who gave me a sense of empathy.

So why would MIT and Harvard, with their insane margins and enormous endowments, want to threaten that by partnering with big tech?

Because isn’t the online college experience just inherently inferior?

Can you walk me through what that kind of online curriculum might look like?

According to Galloway, these partnerships will allow universities to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees, the affordability and value of which will seismically alter the landscape of higher education.

The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points.

The partnerships he envisions will make life easier for hundreds of millions of people while sapping humanity of a face-to face system of learning that has evolved over centuries.

If you get a job at Google, there’s a certain belief that the HR department has vetted you enough to certify that you have very strong skills.

I think a lot of the progress we made in the ’50s and ’60s, in terms of legislation and bipartisan efforts, was a function of the fact that many of our elected leaders had served in uniform and they felt a sense of America first.

Universities are still in a period of consensual hallucination with each saying, “We’re going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering.”

University administrators have unwittingly become mental-health counselors.

A four-year liberal-arts-campus experience is going to become something that’s largely relegated and positioned to the children of rich people.

There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education.

Even wealthy people just can’t swallow the jagged pill of tuition if it doesn’t involve getting to send their kids away for four years.

In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000.

Isn’t another solution to adequately fund public institutions?

They have done a fantastic job creating the most thorough and arduous job-interview process in modern history, between the testing, the anxiety, the review of your life up until that point, the references you need.

It’s in that second tier.

You talk about tech swooping in to rescue schools in a way you would expect states to do.

There will be a dip, the mother of all V’s, among the top-50 universities, where the revenues are hit in the short run and then technology will expand their enrollments and they will come back stronger.

We’re going to see schools slicing and dicing programming and product management, and they will have a new weapon: remote learning.

The post-pandemic future, he says, will entail partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities.

The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points.

A combination of helicopter parenting and social media have stunted and arrested the development of America’s youth.

We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” and there’s a huge round of applause.

The partnerships he envisions will make life easier for hundreds of millions of people while sapping humanity of a face-to face system of learning that has evolved over centuries.

But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply.

You’re going to have a lot of good education, dispersed to millions and tens of millions of people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to computer science or Yale’s class on happiness.

The value of education has been substantially degraded.