¶ Setting The AI And Jobs Agenda
The Feudal Future Podcast Hello and welcome to another episode of the Feudal Future Podcast. I'm Marshall Taplansky. I'm Joel Cotkin. And today, this is, by the way, this is the real Marshall Taplansky and the real Joel Cotkin. We're really going to be talking about AI today. And so be assured it really is us. And we're going to talk about the role of that AI is playing in job creation or job destruction. And to help us with that, we've got two phenomenal panelists.
First is Lisa Ansel, who is director of academic programming at the USC Kazdan Institute. And Dave Burkus, a super angel investor, a retired Board of Trustees member at Occidental College. And on 10 boards, six of them as chairman, 18 advisory boards. So certainly somebody who understands how companies operate. Lisa, Dave, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Looking forward to the discussion.
Well, let me let's start off with what I think I think is going to have enormous uh ramifications if the reporting continues, which is we we see with the with the tremendous amount of money being invested in AI and enormously high profits at at some of these big tech firms, and yet they're laying people off. It's not a good look. Um is this a short run phenomena or is this something we're gonna be living with maybe for the next five to ten years? I'd like to get your take on that.
Jump in. Lisa, you want to go first?
Sure.
¶ Profits, Layoffs, And Wealth Concentration
Um, my take on this, unfortunately, is rather pessimistic. I think we are experiencing the nation stages of what Joel has referred to as a distinctly futilizing society, where those at the very top who are able to really harness the capital and the production are going to see their wealth skyrocket with the more AI and automation are introduced into the economy. And labor is going to continue to suffer enormously as a result.
And this will definitely produce an even further widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. And when you interject the overlapping crises of an already existing climate of extreme housing and affordability, predatory student loan debt, and stagnant wages, this is going to even further polarize our society. And I see that as a very negative trend going forward.
Well, I kind of agree with Lisa, but I like to be uh one who quotes some statistics as I go along the line. So the first thing is 51 percent of uh NASDAQ is now the Magnificent 7. Heck.
Terrifying talk about concentration of wealth, right? Trevor Burrus Yeah.
I think it was 40-something percent of the S P 500. So all of a sudden it is so skewed that when we have the crash and it's gonna happen in AI, uh, it's gonna take down a lot of the indexes, which is not a very happy thing to think about. But the thing that I worry about is today there must be, and I'm gonna take a guess, there was a time when I could have said 3,000 AI companies. You know that there are 3,000 created every day.
So and I'm involved with several of them, and I know these are recent. Uh that's gonna get down to the magnificent seven plus another 20 or 30, and it's going to consolidate the industry. And you heard what Lisa said about that, and I agree. So there are some other things to kind of add to this for the discussion.
Uh, what about the what about the when you talk about AI, let's make sure that we're we're all on the same wavelength. When you talk about the creation of AI companies, are these AI platform companies or the diffusion of AI technology into business? And by the way, does that diffusion create jobs?
So none of these are AI enterprise companies. These are
¶ AI Enablers, Bubbles, And Manufacturing
all AI enablers. So I was about to say that uh Davos a couple of years ago had a report, and I love this one. Five million jobs will be lost in the next uh five years, but two million jobs will be created, all because of AI. And they named uh robotics, uh obviously machine learning, additive manufacturing, and biotech and genetics. And when you add those four things together, it's easy to see five million changed.
And one another stat that I thought was really good uh 75% of manufacturing jobs are repetitive and obviously at some point soon will be replaced with AI-based machine. 25% require some kind of human interaction that at this point the AI machines are not capable of handling. So 75% of manufacturing jobs ain't small because manufacturing is 18% of all jobs in the United States. So, yeah, what Lisa said is right.
It's gonna be uh it's gonna be like the wave is gonna hit the shore, and we're gonna see the water go out so that the shoreline, you know, shows more sand than it ever had before. It's gonna take a while for that second wave to come in.
The the uh one thing I I I thought would would was an interesting question, which is not so much on the manufacturing side, because that's been happening for a long time with automation.
¶ White-Collar Risk And Student Debt
Right. But but what seems to be different about this wave is that it's hitting very heavily white-collar professionals, um, you know, people who historically would have benefited um from technological advancement and are now being threatened. And I think that is really, I think from a social and political point of view, very disruptive. Any any comment on that?
No, I gotta say, I would definitely uh Joel, I would definitely agree with that. And this is an area, especially when we talk about uh white-collar layoffs due to AI. And I think this is what we have seen most recently with Amazon, um with Meta and some of the larger tech companies. This is really the area where I'm most concerned when we think about the student debt crisis.
Because when we think about uh those with advanced degrees who are really at the epicenter of these corporate layoffs at the moment, you know, 45 plus million Americans are saddled with close to $2 trillion of student loan debt. And this is something that spans four generations already. And when we think about those who are in these white-collar positions, these are people who usually have six-figure student loan debt from advanced degrees.
And this is going to create a situation where we have so many people who are all of a sudden completely removed from the economy and what this is going to do in terms of their level of financial security for themselves and for their families and the ripple effects this is going to have on the housing crisis as well.
Dave, do you see as when you were active at uh Occidental, was this a topic of discussion, or was it something that that just kind of was not discussed?
I remember a retreat uh three years ago where the board heard the first things about AI, because OpenAI had just begun to show off. Uh no, the board has gotten very involved. Uh there is an academics and technology committee. I think soon there will be a technology committee. I was head of that at one time, but it was before the AI generation. Yeah, I think there's going to be quite a change in the colleges and universities.
There's always this worry about how far the universities and the professors, the faculty, will allow AI into the classroom.
Well, this is a huge issue with Chapman, I know. Um I'm involved in that. I'm involved in that discussion. And I'll bet you are. There is a uh there's a kind of a uh polarization of camps. There is the traditionalist camp that basically says we want no AI
¶ Universities Grapple With AI In Classrooms
in the classroom. We want everybody to think for themselves using quote traditional, whatever that means. You know, it's weird to think that traditional sources include using Google, which Marshall, less like the Luddites. Sorry. But you know, I mean it's like, could you like to go back to the card catalog, you know, uh at the library system? Uh so that that's one group of people. And then there another group, which by the way, I'm kind of part of, which is I think we should be embracing it.
We should be teaching people how to use it effectively, how to make sure it doesn't, you know, how they they don't settle for the top layer of the onion, which is what that you can fall into kind of academic laziness on. So that those are the two camps, and and they're duking it out right now.
Well, except uh I would argue that uh actually you need a little bit of both. Uh I would say that the what astounds me, and I know it does Marshall and many of our colleagues, um, and not just at Chapman, but at universities all over, including Harvard, where they're basically saying these kids are coming into school, they don't know anything. You you know, when I went to Berkeley, and that was a long time ago, uh having eight, nine books on a syllabus was not unusual.
Lisa, you may be too young to have experienced that kind of uh of education, but you know, now I I we assigned what three books on our class.
Having eight or nine sentences on a syllabus is a lot is a stretch. Right.
I mean, uh even when I send an article of you know 2200 words, uh I don't know how many of them would read it. I mean, and they themselves admit that part of this problem, particularly in an AI environment, if you don't have some sort of unique skill take, and you've been kind of a lazy student, boy, you're screwed. I mean, and and then of course, if you live in Southern California or New York City, you're doubly screwed.
I you know, so I I I just think that there's a uh somehow we're we're failing this generation and they're failing themselves, not because AI is bad intrinsically, but because it will be used as a substitute for reading. I mean, I to me the idea, I'm not because I'm I'm an author, so I have prejudices, but uh you know uh it's very, very uh distressing when you have classes where kids don't know the most basic things. They've never they they've never read a book, including the Bible.
I I have I teach uh my propaganda class the first week is how did Christianity become the largest religion in the world? And and uh when I mentioned Saint Paul and uh his ability to travel in the Mediterranean world, which was unprecedented because of the Roman Empire, they didn't know who Saint Paul was. I mean, they they knew that there were Saint Paul Cathedral somewhere, but who actually the one of the most important people in global history was, they had no idea.
So you got this weird situation where the great-grandson of a Latvian rabbi
¶ Reading, Rigor, And The Skills Gap
is explaining who Saint Paul is to a bunch of Gentiles.
Yeah, but the question the question for these guys is do they need to know that?
What what you we've how ahead of our new world understand anything if you don't know who Saint Paul is.
Well, but so we're looking at a new world that's being reshaped by technology, by by new things, by new science. Are these what is it that somebody is going to need to know, and why is it that AI is necessarily a bad thing? What what do you guys think? Is there what what are they gonna need to know?
I mean, I would say that at its very core, what and this really talks to the disconnect between higher education and the labor market, right, is the absence of critical thinking skills.
Yes.
And this is this is really what underpins a functional society, right? No matter what field somebody is engaged in, no matter what major a student has, the importance of cultivating the critical thinking, critical analysis skills, and the ability to sort of engage with somebody who, and this is a huge issue in higher education, the ability to engage with somebody whose viewpoint differs from your own in a way that's productive and conducive to um helpful conversation.
That is really what I experienced as an academic is missing today in higher education. And so, you know, when we think about the introduction of AI or more the proliferation of AI in higher education, Marshall, I agree with you that we we can't harness this beast. This beast is out of the cage. All we can do now is shape the role of AI. And, you know, and just as, you know, when the internet first, you know, became sort of um mainstream, right?
It was the conversation was less about how can we prevent people from using the internet, but rather how can we teach students to utilize the internet as a resource, but to not use it as a substitute for one's own critical thinking. So that's where my thoughts are on this subject. Aaron Powell Dave, what's your thinking?
We're all academics in a way. I mean, in my case, I never taught. So Lisa, I'll defer to you for that. But here's a stat that I've been quoting for a couple of years that is so real. The average college graduate today is going to have 13 jobs in five different industries over his or her career. How do you do that without learning how to think critically? There just ain't no way.
Yeah. And actually, in some ways, the AI challenge means that you need more critical thinking and more originality because you're competing with a machine. Um, you know, like for instance, if if if you're making a great movie, um, you know, that takes a lot of creativity. To do, you know, a Marvel spin-off number 25. You don't need William Shakespeare for that. You know, and AI could probably do a better job looking at the scripts that I that I see that that are out there.
I I actually would say AI, would you please write the script? Because it's going to be better than the crap that's coming out. And so ultimately, in a way, people are essentially um disarming themselves at a time when they actually need to be more armed.
Well, and the question I have for the two of you is armed with what? Right. And the the simple piece on this, or my oversimplification of my own brain, is breadth versus depth. If we're going to take Dave's point about the
¶ Critical Thinking And Breadth vs Depth
multiplicity of jobs and careers that people are going to have, um, isn't it better to somehow incent them or train them to be broader rather than deeper? And how does AI play into that? What do you guys think?
Well, for the first thing is we shouldn't be talking about robots, but rather cobots. Because it is a question of who's going to program them, who's going to supervise them, and are they going to be completely autonomous? No. But uh overall, the uh latest stat from University of Oxford, I love to quote too: 47% of all U.S. jobs will be automated in one way or another by the next the end of the next two decades. And I believe that.
Yeah. And is that automated without a human entirely or uh with uh augmentation of the human by the by the robot?
Aaron Powell They didn't make it clear, and I used the word cobots a minute ago, and I'm gonna stand by that one.
Yeah. No, that's that makes sense. Lisa, what's your thinking?
Sure. You know, I think this is a really important question. You know, when we think about what skills we will need to, our graduates will need to have in a labor market that is shifting in ways akin to the industrial revolution. You know, I would say that instead of thinking purely about intelligence quotient, I would add the importance of thinking about emotional intelligence quotient.
And in other words, what's going to be the differentiating factor for people entering into a labor market that is now dominated by AI is going to be that X human factor that at least at this point AI cannot easily replicate.
So when we think about almost a return to the importance of cultivating these soft skills as well as the sort of hard skills, STEM hard skills, you know, this is the ability to connect on a human-to-human level, the ability to understand layers and nuance of human complexity. That is what I believe is going to allow someone to increase their market share in this direction of the labor market.
Well, of course.
And I I still come back. I mean, as an investor, I have to look at these kinds of companies that are in sunset industries and ignore them. And look at the companies that may be much more risky, but for me, are
¶ Cobots, Automation Stats, And Soft Skills
filling a void where that void is going to be obvious. For instance, half of all office jobs are going to be lost in the next couple of years. That's obvious. And uh, a third of those will be changed into cobotic jobs. There's a term I haven't. Maybe I made that up. I think you need to trademark that.
And uh it's true about the manufacturing jobs that I just said a minute ago, but it turns out that uh if people don't understand this, and companies who are coming to market, young companies coming to market, uh don't address this, it certainly isn't going to gain the favor of the favor of investors. Here's another number. 51% of all early stage investors now invest in AI-based companies. Interesting. That's a bubble. And that bubble ain't gonna last. That's gonna burst. Yeah.
And it would also seem to me that in an AI universe, where are there good professions, not just for college students, but you know, we were talking in class the other, you know, with um Shaheen Sadeiki, who runs uh these artisan centers. And you know should we be looking at getting kids into those things that cannot uh be done by AI like plumbers? I think we're a long way from robotic plumbers.
Um you know, there are there are about 600,000, there's a 600,000 shortage of highly skilled manual workers. That's going to be something that is more resistant to AI than a lot of other professions. Um and so maybe is there some way that we ought to be focusing a little bit less on traditional academia and more on training for skills? Because I can tell you one thing, trying to find a plumber. We, you know, we had a guest, he's got a lot of developments.
He says getting a plumber is harder than getting a PhD quantum computing, you know, genius.
That that gets to a really important point about really a societal shift in how we view the institution of higher education, right? You know, because we see very clearly that the return on investment in higher education is woefully short of what it used to be.
And so absolutely I agree with you, Joel, that the uh I would say the real necessity of looking into the industries that at least for the next what 10, 15 years, are going to be mainly shielded from AI and really looking at students in an individualistic and holistic manner to guide them into professions that really fill the needs of the labor market rather than
¶ Investment Bets And Vulnerable Roles
try to herd students into a higher education environment where they'll graduate with six-figure debt and no job prospects.
Thank you. I I've got a question for you about that. And this this is a little convoluted, so help me work it out a little. The notion that is going through my head is what is the role of leadership going to mean going forward in the AI environment? In the past, leadership has implied being able to coalesce people to follow you, right, by creating some kind of vision of where you want to go in the future, get everybody behind you.
And if we're going to be moving into a world where you're just going to need fewer people, how how important is leadership as a skill? Because that is one of those empathy-based skill sets that AI probably can't do particularly well. So, what how do you view leadership going forward?
Particularly at a time when when actually the incentives for the CEO, and Dave, you might be uh quite uh attuned to this, are very different than than what the people who are working for for that person is. Um I mean, you really have to be a different kind of leader, right?
So uh my blog this morning, uh there's a shameless post was about leaders who can look around corners. So there are two types of leadership. There is the occupational leadership that is really gonna be replaced, and then there is the intuitive leadership that uh can't be taught. But you can certainly help somebody learn in the academic environment how to think creatively.
Aaron Powell How do you define that uh occupational as opposed to the alternative
¶ High-Touch Trades And Skills Training
process?
Somebody who's overseeing process. Fantastic.
So the just if I if I follow what you're saying, the process leadership piece has been about helping to lead the optimization of a process, and that AI may be better at actually defining what that optimization path is than the than the human. But the intuitive part of it is something different. What what does that entail?
Innovation. Being able to drive a company to stay ahead of where the marketplace is and be able to not worry about having to catch up. Uh some of these companies become stagnant. The average term of a CEO today is six years. That's a lot less than it was before. By the way, that's the same as a college president today. The average term is six years. So let's all shaking our boots on that one. Search committees are going to become endemic. Right.
So the headhunters will be making a fortune.
Indeed.
Interesting. So this is a this is playing out on that, right? So if the role of leadership is going to be visionary in nature as opposed to process optimization in nature, um is it also going to entail an unmaking of the notion of economies of scale?
So in the past, right, if you think about the growth of companies, typically what's what's characterized the growth of companies is the desire to keep increasing scale so that you can get marginally lower cost in the next iteration, right, as you grow. But we're kind of in a new world now where I'm wondering whether or not the scale economics are breaking down because of AI. And I wonder what you guys think about that. I mean, are we going to be moving into a world of cottage industries?
Lisa, I don't want to keep talking. Go ahead if you have a second.
Um I I what I would say here is that I where I am optimistic going forward is that development of cottage and cottage industries that are driven by that human-to-human factor, right? And these are industries what come to mind are sort of the artisans, culinary, um, the uh express of the arts, the performing arts, uh, education in the arts, sports, you know, the industries that naturally bring human-to-human contact and human-to-human cultural exchange as their main commodity.
I'm hopeful that we see the development of sort of a shift almost away from the Amazons and into the mom and pop, more artisan-type um industries that are actively seeking to preserve uniqueness and authenticity going forward.
So let me hit on that one. First of all, what you just described could be uh summarized by stating it's the gig economy. Right. People are working for themselves, whether they're artists or whether or not they are technicians. So let me flip that if I can and worry everybody. I think that we're gonna have somewhere between 200 and 500,000 jobs lost in the United States in the next couple of years. And uh nowhere near that many created, just because of AI.
And so I made a list of what kind of jobs are gonna be lost, and that's gonna be shocking. And then you can uh kind of hit me on
¶ College ROI And Bankruptcy Policy
that one. Uh, because what I want to invest in are just the opposite. That's why I made this list. So I would never invest in things that are helping lawyers or pharmacists right now. That's terrifying. Middle management.
Well, that made me have some great social benefits.
Yes, indeed. Uh-huh. I would invest in healthcare healthcare, I'm sorry, but I'm talking now about the negatives first. Uh commodity salespeople, gone. Report writers, unfortunately, journalists, announcers, accountants and bookkeepers. Oh. Doctors without primary human interaction. Ouch.
Yeah. Oncologists as an example, right? The the AI does a better job of uh detecting tumors than the human does.
Aaron Powell.
So this is great. Flip of the flip is we're the last jobs that are going to be lost. Okay. Well, preschool and elementary school teachers, Lisa was right about that, and I guess into college too. We're all challenged because the amount of applicants, especially diverse applicants, and I'll say black, uh this last year has been shockingly decreased. And we won't talk about the reasons for it, but uh Harvard went from uh 11,000 to 8, no, 11 percent to eight percent uh diverse or black students.
And uh a lot of the other colleges, I know Occidental had less, I think probably USC and others too, had less diversity in the last couple of years. So uh still colleges are going to endure. Uh there are There are 2,800 liberal arts colleges in the United States right now, and I think 800 of those are at extreme risk. And it's because uh the number of student applicants is less. We have to prove that there is a reason to go to college.
We have to prove that the expense for going to college is worthwhile. And the way you prove that is to the parents by telling them how much more their offspring are going to make at the end of their college career. And uh Lisa, among those who are in the academic world, worry about this most. It is the biggest single problem that AI is bringing to bear right now.
Well, and the time frame for that ROI is obviously going to be extended, right? And I think that's Lisa's issue, right? Which is that if you've got all of this crushing student debt, the the logic was, well, okay, I'll get rid of that in the first 10 years of my uh post-college career.
And now it's just outstrips that you know, and really when we look at
¶ Leadership: Process vs Intuition
the culprit behind the student debt crisis, and it really is a national emergency at this level, um, you know, we have to think back to the removal of the constitutional right of bankruptcy from student loan debt, first from federal student loans and then from private student loans. Um, when bankruptcy protections were uniquely removed from student loans, uniquely as opposed to any and every other form of consumer debt.
You know, that action basically gave the universities license to raise tuition tenfold. And the result of that is that we have people graduating who are paying off their loans for decades and decades only to see the balances increase over time rather than decrease over time.
And an alarming statistic that not a lot of people are aware of, you know, people think about the student debt crisis as a young person's crisis, as a millennial and Gen Z crisis, when in fact there are more people with student loan debt over the age of 50 than under the age of 25. And they're they owe far more despite having borrowed far less since they went to college in earlier times.
So, you know, a really when we think about how to this the structural fixes that we have to start thinking about going forward with the advent of AI, right? We have to think about policy failures that need to be revisited. And, you know, Jerome Powell, you know, in recently stated that it was a very unwise policy to remove bankruptcy protections from student loan debt.
And that's something that we have to think about alongside what we want our society to look like given that AI is going to be encroaching further and further on traditional entry-level jobs.
My middle son is a bankruptcy accountant, uh attorney. So we have this argument all the time. What you just said is true, and all he can do is advise. He can't do anything more for those that have student debt.
You know, it's interesting that you're talking about it from a bankruptcy protection expansion perspective. Prior, in previous economies, another lever that might have been considered would be to treat the um repayment by an employer of student loan debt as relief, you know, not income for the for the student and a tax credit
¶ Scale, Cottage Industries, And Gigs
akin to an RD tax credit for the employer. But if we're going to have less, fewer people employed, it's going to be kind of an interesting, interesting dilemma of how you solve that.
I mean, some people are telling us we'll have as many new jobs as old jobs. Uh we just heard that one uh from, as I'm if I'm not mistaken. Uh it was Bill Gates who said that just recently. So uh the last jobs to be lost for AI, this will be as interesting as the first jobs. Preschool and elementary school teachers I mentioned, but how about professional athletes? Politicians. Politicians. Oh God. Mental health professionals. We need it.
Coaches, advisors, uh nutrition people, motivators, high-touch people. Big economy jobs.
People who have it's interesting, there's a uh a well-known investor in AI called uh Kaifu Li, who you may know, um, former head of uh of Google Asia and Microsoft China, now a big investor in AI, and he has two pivots that he looks at for job elimination. One is how social is the job, which is really what you're talking about. What is the high-touch nature of it versus can you do it in a cave? And the other is how formulaic the job is in terms of the actual substance of the job.
Is it something that reduces down to a formula where there is little variance in how in what that, you know, what uh in in the formula itself, or is it something where there's a lot of wiggle room, right? Right? Can I invent a new strategy? Can I come up with something creative, uh, not just from the way we think of creative arts, but from the creativity of business decision making.
And so his argument is that the more social and the more strategic in that sense, uh the less likely you are to lose a job.
And he also uh wrote, and uh our friend um Ronnie Alfovitz is uh who's one of the basic people creating AI, the uh anything tactile. Like, you know, like if you're a yeah, again, I I'm much more focused on the uh the opportunities of sort of the you know large working class population. A handyman has a different problem. Every house he that he goes to has a different set of challenges. Uh it you know, it's there's a lot of problem solving and you also need the skills, just the physical skills.
Uh and I think we're gonna have to uh look at those things as areas of opportunity in the future. Um by the way, I think particularly because our housing stock is now the oldest it's been uh in basically in American history. Um so these places are gonna need a lot of repairs.
¶ Who’s Safe: High-Touch And Strategic Jobs
Um so I I think that that we really have to start thinking about not just what we teach in colleges, but how many people maybe should be going to something else to get a skill that's actually worth something. Um, when I look at what's happening politically, I I see a large number of over-educated, underpaid people, and they are the most dangerous group of people that you could possibly have.
Because you know, most revolutions don't come from from poor people, they come uh they are started and led by uh you know very well educated people.
And and we could we could see this if this generation of people running around with their fancy degrees that you know, as we used to say in New York, that the subway token will get you a ride on the subway, um I think that's you know that that's going to be really a serious issue for universities and and for our education system, and by the way, also for uh uh basic education.
You know, we're not we're you know, uh the you know, like uh one one uh commentator said, the worst thing we ever did was get rid of shop classes at at the um uh in the high schools. You know, there were people who just had skills in that area, right? And they will do much.
Much good shop and metal shop in in college, in uh high school rather. These were these are great things. So so so let me just ask you that, uh, just to take it from from there. If you could summarize like the top one or two things that you would do to change the educational system, what would you do?
Mr.
Merkus, I'd like to go to the back of the phone.
Okay, so uh you'd defer to one of the three industries that I would focus on healthcare, education, and construction. Uh I'm following Mark Andreessen, who was the one who said this first. And uh he said together these account for 88% of all price inflation.
Really?
Think about that for a second. AI could prevent some of the price inflation that we're seeing. You're seeing the elimination of jobs. Right now we wring our hands over that. But after this wave has already crested and we begin to see an awful lot more of the sand, this example I gave a second ago. You may have lower costs, less price inflation. And yes, we have to find people jobs, of course. But there's a good side to this coin. Interesting.
Lisa, what's your sense? So I would actually focus on the actual cost of higher education itself. And, you know, we saw very clearly over the pandemic when we were all forced in, you know, a matter of days to pivot from an in-person to an online educational experience. Um we saw how functional and productive people could be in
¶ Aging Housing Stock And Hands-On Work
non-traditional learning environments. And I would really think about alternative forms of the higher education experience and really looking to expand the remote higher education opportunities in efforts to really cut down on the cost of higher education. Um, that's really gonna be key. And this, you know, I'm somebody I teach at a major university, um, and I say this sort of out of two sides of my mouth because I teach languages.
I'm a linguist, and um, you know, part of me believes that there's never any substitute, at least in my field, for that human to human, that high-touch, uh human-to-human interaction. On the other hand, we are failing our graduates by graduating them with such high debt burdens into a labor market that it can never support that return on investment. So we have to think about what higher education looks like holistically.
But I just wanted to actually uh Dave's been giving so many wonderful uh statistics throughout this discussion. I wanted to throw one back at him. Um and just because he opened the door with athletes, professional athletes, and how that is an area where there will never really be a substitute. I mean, I'm still coming off of our World Series victory. Yes, I'm a huge lifelong Dodger fan.
I wanted to give you a statistic that relates to the student debt crisis, and this is something that would really drive the point home, okay? I have this ready. All of the revenue that was generated by this past World Series, which is approximately $600 million, would cover only one sixteenth of the amount of money that the Department of Education takes out of California every year in interest only on student loans.
Wow. Wow. That's that's astounding. But I've got a question back to you, statistics aside. Isn't there some inconsistency there if we're saying, and I think you said it, right? That the one of the key things we can teach is empathy, right? To teach this high-touch sensitivity to people. And the cost side of going toward more remote education, can you really accomplish that? Or do you give up do you give up on one?
That's my quagmire as a language teacher.
Well, uh, you know, our our recently retired president, uh Daniele Strupa, uh, says that actually uh universities A should have A, they should be getting rid of tenure basically, or and beginning to have more and more people who actually have practical skills teaching. That's one of the great things I think we've been pushing at Chapman is people are like Marshall, you know, people who have run companies
¶ Rebuilding Education For Jobs That Exist
have that experience. There's a lot of crap that we're spending a fortune on, whether it's you know, you know, fancy buildings or uh uh and things like that, you know, um luxury dorms. I mean, I'll tell you when I went to college, the dorms were not luxurious. Um and and there are ways that we could drive some of those basic costs down and also have more interface. I think our uh a lot of our students would benefit enormously if they part of their education was actually doing a job.
You know, if if internships. Like if you're a business student and you get an internship on a on a factory ship in Alaska, you're gonna learn a lot about process, you're gonna learn a lot about how do you deal with with a with a less educated workforce, how do you deal with global markets. And that I think is what we we don't do because I think the academic monster is so huge and has such a a um uh uh a preference for theory.
I mean, I find this all the time when I I talk to students and they uh uh let's say in the communications, and they know all sorts of theory, but uh did they ever talk to anyone who actually published an article? Did they ever they ever talk to people who are have made documentaries? I think we have to change the very nature of the education.
And I also would argue that um the other thing I think we need are tutors, that people have to be able to have an individual person who like they do in the UK. We have to really restructure it. I think we we've made a education into a mass production industry in a post-mass uh uh industrial structure.
Aaron Powell So I don't think that is scalable. I think what we need is more community colleges for the first two years of education that is more job-driven. And then those people that really want to get into creative, intuitive uh thinking will be the ones that go on to the four-year colleges. And that will be less, if not. Yeah, yeah.
Which which, of course, challenges the economic, the existing economic structure of colleges, but they're already under they're already under attack.
So it's sort of uh it seems to me meeting real market needs in the long run is a successful strategy.
And I also go ahead. Go ahead and say, you know, if you know, if bankruptcy protections are returned to student loan debt, you know, something we're gonna see emerge is the colleges actually having some skin in the game in terms of what they are offering and what types of graduate, you know, this is the alignment piece that's missing from what is taught versus what is needed in the labor force.
And if bankruptcy protections are returned, I think we're gonna see a realignment of education and labor market needs.
That's an excellent point. Yes, right. I had not considered that, but you're absolutely right. If the if the universities are going to lose money by people uh declaring bankruptcy, they're gonna think twice about you know trying to offer things that will not bankrupt the students.
Right, right. Yeah, I think and and maybe what what things students study will also need to change as well.
Absolutely. There are a lot of GE requirements that really, you know, have no practical real world application. You know, I'm of the belief that you know, somebody who is a STEM major should not
¶ Cost, Remote Learning, And Practical Teaching
have to take an advanced literature course. And the flip side as well, you know, somebody who's more geared in the humanities shouldn't have to take, like what I had to take, three physical and three biological sciences at UCLA, which is a massive challenge for me.
So you know, I think also kind of revisiting what the GE requirements are because they, as they exist now, they simply add on to the total cost, the total bottom line of colleges that students have to bear regardless of what their their majors are.
Can I do the counter on this? A core survey for the first two years of college education is more important than anything specific. And we're losing those.
Yeah, I I agree. Actually, on this one, I agree with Dave because I think that we see students that have no context about life. Right. You know, they're they're I can't say that they're over-specialized in their education, but they're they've been they haven't been exposed to anything. But I think that's and and this is what you're gonna need. If you're gonna be a leader in the future, you're gonna need that, Brad.
But but the question is, who's teaching those classes? I mean, one of the problems we have at Chapman and it's national, is the humanities, English, sociology have been taken over basically by a particular ideology. That's what I think. And that's all uh that's all they get. Like I, you know, I one amazing uh uh thing to me was I had a very bright student woman, she did a great uh presentation on on uh uh uh on women, but her whole thesis was the problem was Western capitalism.
And I said, I just want to know, have you ever been to the Middle East? Have you ever been to to Saudi Arabia? Have you ever been to Japan? Actually, the only place the place where women are advancing the fastest are in the very system that the professors say are uh are uniquely oppressive. And or we'll have somebody who uh a friend of ours' daughter whose class uh went uh her her GE class was Shakespeare and race.
And I say, Well, but these are people haven't even read Shakespeare, the greatest writer who ever lived. And you're bringing it down. Uh by the way, Shakespeare probably never met a black person. Certainly didn't there weren't any Jews in in England at that time. You know, so I think that that if we're gonna do that, and I'm totally there. I mean, you know, this is a guy who's had seven years of Latin, so I'm obviously a bit of a reactionary in some ways.
But but the problem is that the people who've taken over those professions are of a of an ideology which is they'd be better off not taking those classes. I mean, one of the great ironies is uh Mandami's father is the Herbert Lehman professor um at um at Columbia. Herbert Lehman, the audience may not know, was senator, governor of New York, and a very ardent Zionist. So we can see that the that certain huge parts of the university system have been taken over by a particular ideology.
So I agree with you, Dave, that I would love to see that classical education uh pristane. The problem is the people teaching those courses are uh don't even believe in classical education.
Well, and to give Lisa her due on this, uh I I there may be less expensive ways of providing that education. You might like fair enough.
Uh yeah, I mean, for instance, a very good uh um uh uh program using AI that tells basic history might be the best way of getting to the to these young people and say, and just a very objective, this is what happened, instead of something
¶ Gen Ed, Ideology, And Core Knowledge
political. I think you're better off with a good YouTube j documentary than the version of history that they're being taught now.
You know, if I can just say something on that, on that note, Joel. Um, you know, this is an issue of particular sensitivity to me because um, you know, I teach in the humanities and I'm a I consider myself to be a sort of very enlightened, open-minded, progressive person. I've spent a lot of time in different countries. I've lived in third world countries. Um and, you know, not this past year, but the year before when the encampments were were happening across the country.
Um, you know, be it at a lesser degree at USC than other universities, you know, I was still subjected to horrific anti-Semitism and um really incredibly hurtful comments by colleagues in the humanities who for many years I considered to be friends, um, you know, only to discover that they were participating in the encampments along with their students and actively encouraging their students to um, you know, participate in the encampments and to um sort of equate, you know, Israel with, I mean,
I know this is not the direction of this conversation, but to sort of equate any sort of support of Israel, you know, with um sort of level of anti-Semitism and lack of tolerance for Jewish colleagues and Jewish scholarship. And that was very hurtful for me. So I do think that might um kind of color how I perceive the value of some of the gen ed classes that um, again, as you were saying, have kind of lost their intrinsic value and have become almost bastions of indoctrination.
And um I I've been hurt by that.
AI is not gonna help that.
Oh, for sure not.
Right. Yeah. Can I uh kind of summarize where I think we're going here? Leaving that for an hour. Um So with help from a friend Shelley Palmer, who is a great thinker, uh we put together a short list. And the short list is something like this. During this next five years, the bigger gonna become bigger, the small will survive, and the middle class is gonna perish. Well, that may be an overstatement. Consumers are gonna demand, on demand, right now, today, or it's not gonna happen.
Access will become as valuable as ownership. And I can talk about that one for a week. Anything you can talk to will talk back. That's interesting. The auto industry is gonna contract by about 20 percent. AI will start taking white-collar jobs more quickly than we're predicting today. New tech jobs will not replace all the jobs that technology displaces. Conversions of on-demand machine learning and autonomy will change the world. Data is more powerful in the presence of other data.
Anything that can be connected will be connected. Anything that can be hacked will be hacked. Distribution channels are being disrupted at a rate that we can't begin to understand. And we can't train enough doctors, dentists, and health professionals. I can keep going, but that's just No, this is this is phenomenal.
It's a wonderful crystal ball that doesn't strike me as being outlandish in the slightest.
So why don't we give uh Lisa the last word? Because this has been a great session.
Uh well, I first I just want to start off by thanking all of you for such an important conversation and one that clearly is so
¶ A Realistic Five-Year AI Forecast
needed when we think about the connection between higher education and the labor market going forward. And I I hope that some of my pessimism is um is proven wrong. I don't think it will, but I'm hopeful to see a return to that emotional intelligence quotient that will allow us to preserve our human touch alongside the further proliferation of AI.
Perfect.
Amen. Amen to both of you. Yes. This is this has really been a fascinating conversation, obviously very wide-ranging. Thank you so much for focusing your minds on this, and hopefully, people will find some real practical advice in here to be able to move their lives forward.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It has been a pleasure.
Thanks, and thank you for being part of the Feudal Future Podcast.
The Feudal Future Podcast.