Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Silicon Valley's Biggest Investor Is Opening a College With No Degree, No Grades, No Federal Aid and Stanford's Price Tag. Sam Altman Teaches. Fifty Kids Get In.
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the people who took the bottom rung off the ladder are now selling a new one. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Andreessen Horowitz is putting thirty-five million dollars into its own college in San Francisco, for kids sixteen to twenty-two.
- 0:16[Guest] Its own college, with no degree at the end. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy is unaccredited and for-profit, and it's run by Gagan Biyani, who co-founded the online course site Udemy. The Journal's summary of the pitch is, don't drop out to start a company, come do school with us instead.
- 0:33[Host] Honestly, that sounds like the fix, since half of what college teaches a chatbot can do now. Who teaches at this thing?
- 0:40[Guest] The founders. The firm's own announcement lists Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen running courses that last days or weeks, not semesters. Their line is that instead of learning from the people who write your textbooks, you learn from the people the textbooks are written about.
- 0:55[Host] And what does a kid actually do all day?
- 0:58[Guest] Three things. You build your own project, you take those short founder courses, and you spend the summer in paid work at a partner company. That list includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Nvidia.
- 1:10[Host] Paid work at OpenAI as a teenager. Where do I sign my nephew up?
- 1:14[Guest] You apply, and applications are already open. The school says selection is by proof of work, meaning what you've built, shipped, or earned, though Fortune notes it still wants a transcript and test scores. The sample applicant it shows off is a teenager whose AI book-indexing tool already brings in real money.
- 1:32[Host] Okay, but what does it cost?
- 1:34[Guest] The first class is free. About fifty students start next fall, each with fifty thousand dollars in computing credits. The year after, if regulators approve, it becomes a two-year program charging what Biyani told Fortune would be sixty to ninety thousand dollars a year.
- 1:48[Host] That's Stanford money, for no degree?
- 1:50[Guest] For no degree and no federal student aid, because no accreditor has signed off on it. Biyani's answer on how families pay for that was, we will see over time how students will finance this.
- 2:02[Host] That's the answer you give when the customer isn't the family.
- 2:06[Guest] Ben Horowitz said as much on his own firm's podcast. He said they don't care about serving the alumni or the donors or the parents, that this is about the young people and what they need.
- 2:18[Host] Hang on, these are the companies selling the tools that do a junior's job. Now they're running a school to make juniors?
- 2:25[Guest] Every entry-level job was secretly two businesses. One was the output, the deck or the code. The other was manufacturing a person, years of boring work under real consequences until someone came out the far end with judgment.
- 2:38[Host] Who was paying for the second one?
- 2:40[Guest] Nobody. It came free with the first. Automate the output and you cancel the factory by accident. What this academy is, underneath the branding, is somebody reopening that second business on purpose and putting a price on it.
- 2:53[Host] Isn't that good, though? Someone had to.
- 2:55[Guest] For this class, yes. Fortune asked George Mason economist Bryan Caplan, and his read was that something that works for fifty handpicked people isn't going to work even for the top five thousand.
- 3:06[Host] So it's the old rung, just with a price on it?
- 3:10[Guest] A price and an admissions office. The old rung was cheap because your employer paid you a little to do the boring work while you learned. This one asks the family to pay Stanford money for the boring work, and the boring work is a summer job at a partner company, which Fortune notes is typically paid but not guaranteed.
- 3:30[Host] What about the kids who never had a shot at the old rung either?
- 3:34[Guest] Horowitz's own framing is that college works if you want to be a scholar or a professor, and that they still think college is great for most kids. So this isn't a replacement for school. It's a second ladder next to it, for people who already built something in high school.
- 3:51[Host] And the teaching itself? Is it Altman flying in for a talk and leaving?
- 3:56[Guest] The firm says assignments are meant to be so hard you can't solve them without AI, which is the right instinct. But the difference between a tutor and an answer machine is whether you're allowed to skip the part where you're wrong, and a founder who flies in and flies out isn't the one enforcing that.
- 4:15[Host] So who enforces it?
- 4:16[Guest] The announcement doesn't say. The Journal describes the school as an independent business, and the whole first class fits in one classroom. When the first rung gets automated, the market's answer is a private one, priced for people who can already climb.
- 4:30[Host] Patrick Deglon's version of that rung in Unscarcity is Civic Service, years of real work with real consequences for your community, and no admissions office deciding who gets to climb.
- 4:40[Guest] The academy proves the demand is real, and then sells the rung to the families who can already reach it. For more on what school is for when the machines take the entry-level work, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.