00:40:48 · Jamie Beaton
[00:40:48] S1: The first thing that I would say, and I think Obama did this as well during his presidency, is there needs to be huge information transparency around university graduate debt levels, salary levels, completion rates, turnover rates, etcetera. A lot of universities have survived because they are able to convince students that they're much better than they are. But if you have a full transparency into the data, you can't hide. If your if your university doesn't graduate good people or, you know, if everyone's dropping out, the market will discover that quickly. You'll get a bad reputation. You'll go out of business. So what's happening is Boston University, again, used to be considered more like a safety school. Now it's highly selective. And more and more schools... It used to be the top 30. Now it's top 50, top 80. It'll keep going down, and more of those schools will be considered, like, world class. And, you know, a university that that fights hard to be ranked seventieth in the world will be of great significance, and a lot of people will wanna go there. Then there'll be low cost opportunities that pop up, you know, more community colleges, online community college programs, online university programs that are very vocational focused, you know, future evolutions of general assembly, for example, and the coding boot camp land. So I would say what you need is you need the reckoning actually to purge all of these bad And then, you know, you want more online scale from many of the good ones. And certainly, certain schools like Harvard, they will basically prestige maximize. They're not gonna try and... They're not gonna increase the undergraduate role. And they could, like, 50 x if they wanted to with the with the endowment they have, but the whole, you know, virtuous loop of the top universities, you know, based on the fact that it's highly selective. And probably one of the most powerful signals they give its graduates is just the admissions office selecting the student because that is the signal that then fuels Blackstone and McKinsey to then chase students. It fuels Y Combinator to throw capital at these guys. And so if you broaden the if you broaden the pool of students getting in, you actually hurt one of the most economically valuable functions the university plays, which is like a sorting function. And so they won't do that.
00:42:42 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
They might have some online programs, but they won't increase the undergraduate size. But that's fine because you can have the hundredth ranked school have more students. And think about University of Toronto. Today, takes... I think it's got 70,000 students, I think. It's, like, more than 10 times the size of Harvard. So you can have a couple of schools that wanna do the Harvard thing, but you can have other schools that have a 100,000 students and are really good too. And so, you know, the market hopefully should adjust for that too. And, you know, you see also it's a global landscape. So kids can go to Canada, kids can go to Australia, kids can go to Singapore. There are plenty of good schools. I would say there are probably 500 good universities in the world, but there are thousands and thousands and thousands of ones that probably aren't so helpful. [00:43:24] S0: Yep. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Tell tell me, shifting into your journey a little bit more because I think there's some really fascinating insights, all of these entwined, but your journey has been a very international one. The journeys of your students that follow through have been very international. When... Do you recall the moment that you said, I've gotta go to America. I've gotta study in these places. How do you think the right time to get out? You look at some... You know, Laura Deming went to MIT when she [00:43:49] S1: was Yeah.
00:43:49 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:43:49] S1: was Yeah. [00:43:50] S0: 14. You look at some examples of people who might sort of stay at home all the way through undergrad and then try to get into Stanford postgrad MBA or whatever. When is the right time to get international international experience? Experience? And And and and I don't know why, but I think... But I'd love to hear your take on on, like, why is the international piece so important for young Kiwis?
00:44:06 · Jamie Beaton
[00:44:06] S1: Great question. So I would say in general, the more self disciplined you are, the longer you can stay in your home country. But if you're the kind of person who's very affected by your environment and if the people around you aren't so ambitious, you gotta go faster. So basically, if you're the kind of student who your whole school can be chilling, and age 13 to 18, you're grinding in your room doing academics and you're fine with that, you can stay in high school. But if you're the kind of person where if all your friends are out, you know, relaxing during high school, that will influence you to calm down, then you should go you should go sooner. So long story short for most students, undergrad is the best time to go. Undergrad's formative. It's before your career begins. It sets your social networks. It gives you insights into, you know, main skills, different career pathways. Undergrad's usually best. Some students should go during high school, but that's usually quite expensive, and there isn't as much funding and financial aid and scholarships. So I would say my default is undergrad. Postgrad is a lot worse than undergrad because a lot of the time, the undergrad degree is the most pivotal for kinda getting a lot of this stuff started. Your So postgrad is useful, but I would say it's distinctively not as useful as undergrad. So that's where I'd recommend most students focus. And, you know, you see this and that there are some universities that have all kinds of postgrad programs. Many of the graduates actually don't do that well. The undergrad ones are the ones that really create the fire in people's careers. Yeah. And then I would say for Kiwis, you know, everyone, we just need to create a more aspirational culture in the schools and make sure that students are really motivated to finish high school. There are horrible stats. For example, I think the bottom 40 schools in New Zealand, only 3% of the graduates go to university. The harrowing stats. Even even the top 40 schools, I think only 80% go to university. Now we need to make sure the university is actually teaching things that are valuable. But on the whole, you know, we can't have huge portions of society not being able to access these opportunities.
00:45:49 · Jamie Beaton
So I would say, you don't need to have this kind of Harvard dream for every kid at New Zealand High School, but you do need them to finish year 13 math to a good level, finish maybe a bit of computer science, finish English to a high level so they can really, you know, be effective. Because I think if you drop out when you're 15, 16, you're gonna have big problems. And so that's where I would obsess over. I also think that, you know, having some paths for acceleration. Recently, I've heard of horrible things where there are public schools across New Zealand that are removing their accelerated tracks, and they're not enabling kids to be streamed at different levels. Yep. And so everyone's just thrown together. And that's usually a bad recipe for everyone. You know? Yep.
00:46:25 · David Booth
[00:46:25] S0: Yep. Do you think about sort of the New Zealand undergrad regime? And in particular, I mean, if if I recall my university days, I had a lot of fun in Otago. I would not call it an aspirational environment. You know, to your point about, like, that you are the product of your environment, I I think it perhaps was unique in being motivated to go and build businesses and do things while studying, but the vast majority of people weren't. They're just there for for a good time. There's this idea of sort of... It's almost finishing school that comes after. It's that sweet spot between high school, you've stepped out of home, you're out in the world, you're sort you're sort of building your character, building yourself before the workforce. And I wonder if you were put in charge, you're now the minister of education in New Zealand, what what can you do without just sending people off around the world? Totally. Though that may be the answer for some of them, what can we do for the sort of the core of the the undergrad ecosystem in New Zealand?