00:24:04 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:24:04] S1: Yeah. [00:24:04] S0: That are adjacent to that. So I really like that. When I think about the admissions process itself, I mean, there's lot of work that goes into it. There's 30 something essays. There's all all sort of that preparation. One I'd be really curious about the way that this has evolved, particularly in the last couple of years. Now when ChatGPT launched end of two thousand twenty two, there was a lot of sort of combination of doom and gloom, and this is the end of ways. This is all of the students starting to generate their essays, starting to use tooling to to, you know, supplement their work. There was... On one side of it, the college is crying afoul and saying they're cheating. On the other side of it, saying, well, actually, no. They're using technology creatively. This is like the calculator all over again. I'm curious about how AI is changing this application landscape, specifically preparation when you think about tutoring, when you think about the possibilities of being opening up through having a, you know, private Albert Einstein on your shoulder teaching you physics must have influenced how you think about revision. What's changed in the past year or two in particular that makes you more excited about the future or has changed the way that you're building your So if
00:25:12 · Jamie Beaton
[00:25:12] S1: you think about teaching a while ago, you might go to a physical high school and you see your teachers for for certain hours in the day or even, you know, one or two hours a day. When you're stuck after school with a problem, you've gotta wait to maybe the next school day or even two days later to ask your question. Very slow feedback. The next iteration is, okay, you've you've got a one on one tutor. Maybe they come to your house, maybe you go to theirs, but it takes a bit of time to go there. Next up, you've got online tutoring, one on one online tutoring. Suddenly, same day, I can speak to someone online who's an expert in any field that I I want and get an answer quickly, but it still takes a bit of time, bit of admin, etcetera. They don't know you. They don't know the context. Now with GPT tools, most questions, I'd say more than 95% of high school students' questions, can be answered instantly by a GPT, which means that the feedback loop gets cut down by at least 10x on even one on one tutoring, which is pretty amazing. So think about essay writing. A lot of the time I tell students that the thing that differentiates a great English writer and an average one is just how many essays they wrote and how much feedback they got on the essays. In many high schools, it takes a month to get feedback back from your English teacher. But with GPT, you can get feedback on your essay in seconds. It's actually probably better than your average English teacher. So I think it is revolutionary. Recently, when I was at Princeton, when I was stuck in these quant finance math classes, I would use GPT as my tutor for a lot of different questions. Ask it, and I would learn all kinds of things, you know, when I'd, say, miss a lecture or, you know, had a challenging problem to work through. So So it's certainly a game changer. As far as the the downsides though, I do think we're seeing a wave of kids across the world using GPT to write their English essays and, you know, not as a learning supplement, but as the producer of work. And I think that's obviously dangerous because you basically could have high school students that go through all of high school. And if they're just submitting work online, they're not actually doing any actual work themselves. And, of course, that's a huge miss.
00:26:59 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
So I think in the future, there'll be a lot more live assessment in high school. There'll be more live assessment. You know, recently, I began a program in The UK, and they've moved the exams to pen and paper in person, which I think is pretty cool. But they're doing that in response to AI, messing with their ability to do online proctored exams or even online exams in general. So I think it's an amazing tool when used well, but currently, we're in this tipping point where most high schools have got no plagiarism tools, most universities have no plagiarism tools off scale, and they need to fix that quickly because it hurts the students and also, of course, the university's credibility to have these guys going through their degrees and and high school without that support. But I'd say net net, I mean, it's an incredible force. And the cost of private tutoring one zero one across every subject could be 40,000 a year in some countries. But with GPT, that comes way down, which is obviously a game changer. Yeah. [00:27:46] S0: Yeah. It's a technology tool, ultimately. It's like fire. You can use it to cook your food or burn things down. [00:27:51] S1: And some Will be an arsonist. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
00:27:51 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:27:51] S1: And some Will be an arsonist. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:27:53] S0: Will be an arsonist. It's a little bit like that, yeah, earlier push on the the sparks of of motivation. Like, if somebody is self motivated, they're gonna use tools around them to pursue their own goals. If they're not, they're gonna use tools around them to take shortcuts. Yep. So to me, it does. It comes back to the how do you get people curious to, you know, to achieve something or or to learn something in the first place. And certainly, you know, it seems like a lot more opportunity opening up. You've you've spoken a few times about lowering costs, about... I love the idea of if somebody wanted to get into Blackstone or somebody wants to get into an elite, whatever it might be, there just aren't opportunities for that for the vast majority. I know another critique of of Crimson, which I I actually don't think this one's necessarily, yeah, fairly founded, is the idea that... I mean, it's an expensive program. Not only that, but the universities that people get into are notoriously expensive. You can pay $300,000 US, you know, for a four year degree at an elite institution over here. One, yeah, critique would be, well, this is for people who can afford to pay for it. This is people who many years before the application process even kicks off, you have the the parents with the means to put their kids through it. How have you encountered that, and how have you offset that? I'm sure you've got a 100 examples, but specifically, like, how does this benefit sort of the broader spectrum of society?
00:29:10 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:29:10] S1: Yeah. So I'll give you a couple of examples. In New Zealand, we have a student, Sam Taylor, grew up from Mount Maunganui, young Maori boy, came through Crimson, got into Harvard, received a financial aid package that made it cheaper to go to Harvard than the University of Auckland. Cowan Hamana, a young Maori boy from Rotorua, he wanted to go to The States through life sciences. Again, gone to Harvard, full scholarship, cheaply going to any university in the country. [00:29:35] S0: Were the paths... Were the were the scholarships specifically available? Is Rhodes often go to The US? Oh, UK? This is handful [00:29:42] S1: of This is financial aid. [00:29:43] S0: Yeah. So Oh, so financial financial aid is coming from the college themselves to really assume this year. It's not scholarship provided by a third party necessarily. [00:29:49] S1: That's right. [00:29:50] S0: So this
00:29:50 · David Booth, Jamie Beaton
[00:29:50] S0: So this [00:29:50] S1: is this is a key a key thing that I think is, you know, warped from, like, Gossip Girl or something. So there's the idea that, you know, NYU or Princeton costs $80 a year and everyone's gotta pay that. At Harvard, two thirds of students at Harvard are on financial aid. Off that one third pay nothing to go there. So one of the great things that's happened since I launched Crimson is many more of the top universities have what we call need blind financial aid, which means when you apply for the university, they don't care if you can pay the full rate or nothing. They admit you based on your meritocratic skill, and then they look at, okay, how much funding do they do they have to give you so you can make it financially affordable. The universities are actually highly incentivized to go on this talent's arms race to find the best kids anywhere in the country. That's one of the services Crimson basically is indirectly providing this network by sourcing kids from all around the wood, bringing them to these top universities. So, you know, of course, there are some families that are, you know, a New York three generation family who's been to Columbia three times and pays the full fee, but a huge portion of Crimson students. It's the first time they've gone to America, the first time they've gone to The UK. They need funding to be able to afford financial aid. And actually, we're doing is helping them figure out a affordable path to go from Pakuranga to Caltech [00:30:58] S0: Mhmm.