“The reality is systems are the way they are because a lot of people benefit from them being that way,” Tade Oyerinde, the founder of debt-free online college Campus, says. “It’s not like there’s not a lot of smart people in higher education who haven’t realized that the add-drop problem was hurting a lot of students. That’s just not how it works.”
“The only real way to disrupt and actually get to the V2 or V3 of these systems,” he continues, “is to have a really clear petri dish modeling of what the future could look like. The only real way to do this is to be Campus.”
“It started with COVID and, for better or worse, AI is getting us here,” Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick says. “This is a make or break moment for many, many industries. Smoke and mirrors are making it feel like everything is fine, don’t worry about us, but things are about to fall apart. Hollywood is a really good example of this. Museums, fashion, political parties or branches of politics, marketing agencies: they are fighting for their lives and they don’t want you to know that. Schools are one of the biggest examples…It’s very real shit because they didn’t pivot quick enough.”
“These are the things that happen when you gatekeep too much and you don’t elevate younger people and younger thought and new systems,” Kyle adds. “It speaks to what we talk about, this need for intergenerational dialogue. When you don’t have that, things start to crumble.”
“Tade, to that end,” Ben Dietz says, “Who do you who do you look at and say, ‘Okay, this system approximates.’ or ‘This university approximates.’ the sort of thrust of what we’re doing?”
“We’re a part of multiple scenes,” Tade replies. “I’m a part of the Silicon Valley scene, but I’m also a part of the higher education scene. The big thing that was missing was that bridge. The Silicon Valley people don’t understand that higher education was not completely wrong in everything they were doing…America still has, in my opinion, the number one or number two higher education system on the planet. There’s some things that were completely broken that needed to get fixed, and vice versa. Higher education didn’t understand that technology was not optional. For a long time, learning how to teach online was this, ‘Do we really think that education should happen online?’ for decades. Most universities just thought of it as almost like an option, this joke, this nice little toy.”
“Who do you look to? There are a handful in higher education,” he says. “Number one is probably Michael Crow. He’s the president of Arizona State University. He figured out a long time ago that the old state school model, where everyone is trying to replicate the Harvard model, just wasn’t right. It just doesn’t make sense. You’re a huge land grant institution. You have all of these unique advantages by being a state institution. Why are you trying to copy an elite private? It doesn’t really make sense. He figured that out quickly and he took ASU’s enrollment from 30,000 students to over 100,000 students.”
“I’m 50,” Ben replies, “the idea that ASU would be mentioned in a list of top colleges at all in my lifetime was incomprehensible.”
“Crazy,” Kyle added.
“Literally crazy,” Ben says. “It’s funny. My son goes to Elon in in North Carolina, which is a school that — when I was in college — I’d never heard of. Many people my age who have kids, who haven’t gone through the college process, aren’t aware of it. Everybody that I know under 35 is like, ‘Oh, I have a friend there.’ Or, ‘Oh, that’s a great school I went to.’ These sorts of changes are possible and they can shift. For me, the interesting thing about all of this is…how do we figure out how to make the journey to and through college less monolithic? How do we make it less arduous? How do we make it, if not less expensive, then certainly easier to manage the extent of?”
A great question that…there are some clear and unclear answers too! We continue chatting all about the state of colleges, students booing at AI chatter, and the Backrooms with Tade in the full episode. Listen above, along with on YouTube and Spotify too.
Find more from HIP REPLACEMENT on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. Be sure to follow Ben Dietz over on SIC and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick over on The Trend Report™ too.
