What’s the Point of College?

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0:42Derek Thompson: That's J-I-R-A dot com. At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are, and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. It's September, and millions of students are back on college campus. This is an interesting time for higher education.

1:24Derek Thompson: In surveys, trust in America's colleges and universities is near record lows. The value of college is in question as tuition costs have soared in the last few decades, while the so-called college premium that is the expected benefit from getting a diploma has flatlined and even possibly declined in the last few years. The unemployment rate of young college grads seems to be rising. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus. It's created chaos in the job application process as large language models allow students to apply for hundreds of jobs with applications that are often written by and read by large language models, which at the corporate level filter for keywords, thus dehumanizing the entire process of moving from the college to the labor force.

2:10Derek Thompson: As higher education searches for its reason for being in this new age, Some people say college should just be for fun, for hanging out, you know, like a country club that happens to hold lectures. But even that identity is in crisis. The Atlantic has reported that loneliness and isolation are rising on campus and partying has declined, possibly related to our episode from a few weeks ago about how young people do not drink anymore. So to sum all this up, the costs of college are rising, the perceived benefits are declining, and nobody knows what to do about this infernal technology that can write full papers in one dumb prompt.

2:50Derek Thompson: Into this maelstrom, David Deming, the dean of Harvard College, sent a missive. Two weeks ago, in an email to students, he said he was embracing a policy of so-called, quote, AI encouragement. Encouragement? Hmm. The notion that Harvard would encourage the use of AI sent shutters to the faculty and student body, shutters that resounded across the country with many professors and writers announcing that arguably America's most famous university was launching an attack on academic integrity itself. Today's guest is David Deming. We talk about his email, the history of higher education in America, and we ask the two big questions.

3:35Derek Thompson: Number one, what is college for anyway? In 2026, what is college for? And number two, how should professors across the country, at Harvard and everywhere else, react to this technological threat to their core mission? Which is to teach students to become not only deep experts, but deep thinkers in an age where our computers often whisper that they're happy to do all the thinking for us. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

4:32David Deming, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Derek. You know, I think I've been on this show. This is my third time. And I realized that Matt Damon just made his third appearance on Saturday Night Live. So I'm going to refer to myself as the Matt Damon of plain English. That's okay. Oh, I love it.

4:44Derek Thompson: Great. Yeah. Also a Harvard alumni. So you're an economist. You're also Dean of Harvard College. I am. What does that mean exactly? Like what is your job? Yeah, right. I'm responsible for undergraduate education at Harvard. So, you know, there's the president of Harvard, President Alan Garber, who's responsible for all the different faculties, the business school, the law school, the medical school, the graduate school of arts and sciences. And I'm responsible for the undergraduate part of the university. And how does that work with your job as an economist? Because we're going to talk in a few minutes about a paper that you just published last week.

5:16Derek Thompson: So you're overseeing Harvard undergraduate education and on the side still wearing the hat of being an economist? Yeah. So Derek, I have these two hats that I wear. One is I'm a researcher and a teacher, and I've been on the faculty at Harvard for 16 years. And now I'm serving as the dean, but I'm still a faculty member and I still do research and I'm teaching a class next semester, as a matter of fact, about AI. But I'm also overseeing the undergraduate college here. So it's a lot to do, but it keeps me busy, and it's endlessly interesting. So a question that I have for you that's gonna basically animate this entire conversation is what is college for these days?

5:50Derek Thompson: What is college for in an era of artificial intelligence at a time when costs of college are rising, when some people feel like the benefits of college are declining, and when as a matter of public survey opinion, college is less popular than it's been in basically any period of recorded history. Like, what is college for these days? And one way into answering that really big, broad question is history. That the role of college is not in 2026, what it was in 1926, much less in 1826. And in a recent essay, you talked about what you call the three eras of undergraduate education in American history.

6:29Derek Thompson: I wanna walk through each of those three areas and start off this conversation with a little bit of a history story. What was the first era of college? When did it start? Why did it end? Yeah, so thanks for teeing me up, Derek. So at least at Harvard, this is the subject of a recent convocation speech I gave, the first era of undergraduate education began in 1636 when the university was founded. And the founding gift of Harvard was a gift by John Harvard of 400 books to the Harvard Library. Now, 400 books doesn't sound like a lot, but it was actually about two thirds the size of a manual college at Cambridge.

7:03which was John Harvard's alma mater. And so that was a founding gift that was roughly two-thirds the size of an established elite British university. So overnight, Harvard became a repository of knowledge that was scarce. And a lot of our founding story was built around providing access to people to knowledge that was scarce. So the first printing press in the American colonies was housed, President Henry Dunster's house in Harvard Yard. And for a long time, it was the only printing press in the American colonies. Another interesting fact is that when our library caught fire in the 1700s, the Harvard Corporation, which is the governing body of the university, sent students home and said, go study in your local communities.

7:41And that was because without access to these books, there was no reason to be on campus. And so at the beginning of this university and many other universities, access to knowledge that you can't find anywhere else was the founding purpose of the university. But that didn't last forever. You know, as early as the late 19th century, early 20th century, access to knowledge proliferated. So our library was no longer the only library. Our printing press was no longer the only printing press. And knowledge proliferated, and, you know, the world became more complex. And so the great presidents of Harvard and other universities, so in our case, it was President Eliot, President Lowell, recognized this and said, actually, we're going to open up the curriculum.

8:20We're going to create more electives. People can study. People can specialize. And the second age, I think, became the era of expertise. And that's really the modern university, Derek, as we understand it, which is a flourishing of disciplines, studying philosophy, history, English, economics, biology, and developing deep expertise in those different areas, bringing in faculty who are the world's leading experts in a narrow domain to teach students and curate their access to expertise and curate their learning journey. And so that's where we are right now, which is we are, I believe, at close to the end of that second era.

8:54Derek Thompson: There's two themes that I'm picking up from the story of the first and second era of undergraduate education in American history. The first theme is about the transition from, let's call it, scarcity to abundance of information. That information and the ability to transmit information used to be scarce, and then it became abundant. And so the value of undergraduate education had to move from information to something else. And you're saying it moved toward expertise, the ability of individuals to go deep on a single subject and to transmit that deep, deep knowledge to other people. I remember a couple of years ago, I did a lot of reporting on this idea of the end of the Renaissance man, that the students of the 17th and 18th century, they learned a little bit of physics.

9:39Derek Thompson: They learned a little bit of biology. They learned a little bit of literature. and they were incredibly well-rounded without necessarily being deep experts in anything because the scientific revolution was so young that it was difficult to be a deep expert in anything. Is there a way that you think the age of experts, while it clearly led to many of the wonderful things about the world today, is there a way that it was also a step back, that something was lost in the fact that people became more narrowly focused in their education rather than more broadly well-rounded. And you saw this, therefore, the death of the Renaissance man.

10:19Yeah, so I agree with that diagnosis. And the way I would say it is that it was a step forward for scientific research, for research in general, to develop deep expertise and then apply it to different domains in a complex society that requires that. So the fact that we don't just have family doctors anymore, we have radiologists and cardiologists and oncologists. And then if you live in Boston, you've got interventional cardiologists and lots of different types. And so the proliferation of expertise and the narrowing in is actually the key to a lot of human progress. So that's a very good thing.

10:48But I think it had a trade-off, had a downside, which is that it fragmented us. So the more specialized you are as an academic, the less you really understand the intellectual life and the culture of other disciplines. So if you look at the way undergraduate education worked and still does to some extent, there is a general curriculum. So in the early days of Harvard, everybody studied the same thing. It was a narrow classical curriculum. as you mentioned. And so that's enabled Renaissance men or Renaissance women because you could be broad. And so then instead you come to a place like this or any other university and you hone in on something and you become an expert.

11:22That's great for society. It's great for producing great research, but it also pushes us away from each other. And so I think it pushes against some of our communal instincts and pushes against some ways, in some ways, the idea of a university. And so what I think we're seeing is as that expertise, again, like expertise is important. It's very important. The question is whether the university is the only place you can get it. And I think that used to be much more true than it was. And so now the question is, what is the value of a university in a world where you have other ways to get access to expertise besides this education?

11:53Derek Thompson: So era one is the era of the library, the era of scarce information. Era two is the era of the faculty lounge, the era of expertise. What is era three? Well, you know, I don't know. We're building it as we speak. But what I think it is, is I think it is in some ways a return to the founding purpose of a college or a collegium, which is the medieval college, which is a learning community of scholars, of students, people learning together, learning the kinds of things and building the kinds of skills and habits of mind and virtues that can really only be built in community. So there's an academic side to it.

12:27There's also a social side to it. But the question is like, if you want to learn how to work well in a team or how to be a leader, or how to be led, how to give and receive criticism. You know, those are things that you really can't learn from behind a computer screen. You can't learn on your own. Also with virtues, you know, you cannot learn virtues like integrity or honesty unless those are tested in community with other people, in some sense, whether they're costly to you. You have to behave with integrity even if it's personally costly. You can't learn about justice or fairness unless you have to adjudicate competing legitimate claims to resources within a community.

13:00And so I think that what this means is that this is a thing that we can still do uniquely, which is we have the most, in the case of Harvard, some of the most talented young people in the world coming here for four important years in their lives to learn together and to learn, you know, from experts, from faculty, so that won't change. But I think we need to double down, reemphasize the communal aspects of learning to build skills and habits of mind and virtues that, again, we can't get from behind a computer screen or from a YouTube video.

13:25Derek Thompson: Your story is in some ways a technological story. It was the technological proliferation of knowledge that forced us to turn the page from the first era to the second era. Is there another technology that you think is forcing us to turn the page from the second era to the third era? I think there might be. Is that too easy an alley-oop for you? Right, right. This technology is artificial intelligence. And, you know, I think obviously AI is controversial. It's both the source of great hope for technological progress and a source of great concern these days. And so, you know, I think it's important to say this isn't the way I think about this is not AI boosterism.

13:58It's not saying, oh, the university needs to embrace AI and we all need to use it all the time. It's more an acknowledgement of the fact that when AI models that are trained on the collective expertise of humanity can actually provide you with personalized learning and personalized access to expertise. So people who are sufficiently motivated can get expertise on any subject in my own discipline of economics. I see examples of where a frontier model can write an economic model better than I can, better than most economists can, can explain things to an eight-year-old better than I can in some cases.

14:30And so this is a technology that I think -

14:32Derek Thompson: Or an 18-year-old maybe. Or an 18-year-old, exactly. So this is a, it's not a right now kind of thing, but if you look down the pipeline and you see what this technology will bring about, I think it's clear to me that we will no longer have the monopoly on expertise that we once did. And so it doesn't mean that expertise doesn't matter, but I think it does mean that we can't rely on that monopoly to sustain the university in this third age. And so I think it's the recognition that AI will commodify expertise and increase access to it. And that will be a good thing for humanity in the same way that the expansion of knowledge in the first era to the second era was a good thing for humanity.

15:07But I still think, you know, if you're another way to say it, Derek, just to be concrete is, if you're a young person living, you know, in your poor country and you don't have access to a place like Harvard, AI is a tremendous boon for you because you have access to expertise, you know, from ChatGPT or from Claude or whatever that you never would have had before. And that's a great benefit to you, but you still don't have access to the ability to learn in community with other people who are talented and motivated like you. You still need to come to a place like this. And so I think it just acknowledges where we are that we have to innovate and we have to build on our strengths and build on what we think we can do best and what only we can do.

15:41I think it's important to say that the idea that artificial intelligence

15:45Derek Thompson: is forcing us to change what a college is and is for is a contested notion. There are people who think AI is a scam, a fad, a bubble. There are people who might respond to your last few sentences by saying, Wikipedia has existed for decades. It hasn't suddenly made the world smarter. In fact, if the only two things you knew about the world was the fact that Wikipedia exists and PISA test scores, it would look like the existence of Wikipedia is mechanically driving down the world's ability to read and do science and math. So the availability of knowledge on the internet does not automatically guarantee any particular increase in edification intelligence.

16:30Derek Thompson: And one analogy someone might draw here is to say, well, 15 years ago, remember all that excitement around massively open online courses. People said MOOCs were going to change the world. I think Clayton Christensen, the famous business theorist, said half of all colleges and universities are going to go extinct because of massively open online courses. Can you remind us what are slash were MOOCs and why isn't artificial intelligence just MOOC 2.0? Yeah, well, I think I should say it might be, you know, I don't know the future. I'm not making a prediction. I'm just looking down the pipeline and trying to guess at what's coming like everybody else.

17:11I think with a MOOC, what happened was that people misunderstood the entire purpose of education. So what a MOOC is, is like a lecture. And this is still true today. You go on YouTube and you can access the best lecture at any topic you like, economics, any topic you want. And that lecture probably is better than whatever you're going to get in your college course, just as far as a lecture goes. But that's not the only or even primary purpose of an education. Part of it is to meet your individualized learning needs, to not just kind of deliver the content to you, but also help you understand it in a way that speaks to you, to meet, to diagnose people's gaps in their knowledge.

17:49and then to provide an experience that helps people learn together. So learning is communal in part because there's a little bit of suffering required for learning to be successful. Most of the important things I've learned in my life, I didn't understand the first time I learned them and I needed a little bit of a push to focus on it. Some people are autodidacts and they can learn on their own, but most people don't buy textbooks and take them home and master subjects on their own, even though they'd like to, because it's hard. And so the community of learning together, which is what a college education provides, is a way to tie ourselves to the mast and do hard things, suffer together.

18:21And I think the MOOC revolution misunderstood that actually education isn't just the delivery of content. It's actually the ability to learn together and to customize learning for the learner. And I think that is the thing that AI can do that MOOCs couldn't do. So AI will meet you where you are. You can have a conversation with an AI tutor and say, I don't understand this. Explain it to me. Explain it to me again. And so you really, and there's been a lot of, studies showing that when people take advantage of these personalization features of AI, including, you know, and it's important to say with guardrails.

18:54So if you do the learning, do some initial piece of writing or take a test yourself and try to establish a baseline of knowledge, and then you use the AI to refine, give you tutoring, give you individualized feedback, it can really boost learning gains a lot. So that is the thing that is different about AI versus MOOCs, but AI still doesn't do the communal aspect of it, which is the, you know, learning together, binding ourselves to the mast. And so that's exactly why, Derek, I think that's where we need to go, because that's still a thing that AI can't fully cover, the most human aspect of our education.

19:21Derek Thompson: I want to settle down on this question of how colleges should treat artificial intelligence, because I think it might be the key question to answer today. There's a live and quite ferocious debate, I think, over how colleges should treat AI. And different schools are coming to very, very different conclusions. Caltech faculty voted to strongly encourage in-person seated exams to make sure that you weren't relying on take-home exams that could be spoofed or faked or passed off to ChachPT. Faculty in the Social Science Corps at the University of Chicago went as far as announcing an AI ban and a prohibition of all classroom technology starting this fall.

19:56Derek Thompson: I've read that other undergraduate and graduate programs around the country, including, I think, at places like, is it maybe Berkeley, have thought about banning all use of AI in various schools. Two weeks ago, you sent an email to Harvard students on the first day of class. You said that you endorsed a policy of what you call, quote, AI encouragement. What does that mean? Yeah, so here's what it means. I think that we have to account and honestly acknowledge the fact that everybody, not just our students, but everybody is using AI all the time for everything. And we have to design our education around that reality.

20:38And so what I said in my email was actually, I favor what I would call a barbell strategy to dealing with the challenges of AI, which is that you either have an enforceable way to ban it, and I would support that in many cases. Like I actually think using the AI to do the writing for you and the thinking for you is bad. But as a 47-year-old man, like I have developed my skills and habits of mine to do that. It's not that hard for me to put the AI down to write on my own because I grew up in a pre-AI era. But for students who are coming to college today, they were probably, you know, most or all of their high school writing experiences where this tool is available.

21:09And I think many of them need help to build guardrails around that. So I don't think it's sufficient to say to people, look, don't use AI, it's banned, but not enforce it and give a take-home paper and expect everybody to comply. Some people will comply, but they'll feel bad about complying because they'll look around and they'll say, well, if I behave with integrity and follow the course policy, I'm disadvantaged relative to my classmates who are going to secretly use AI and get a leg up on me. And so we don't want to be in a situation of creating rules and policies where you are rewarded for doing the wrong thing and you feel like you're being punished for doing the right thing.

21:42And so my statement was not AI encouragement in the sense of AI is awesome, everyone should use it all the time, no matter what. It was, if you're not going to have an enforceable way to ban it, you may as well encourage it because everyone's going to use it. And so you should just adapt to that reality and build resilience to it in your class. And so I think there's a lot of ways to use AI without having it do the writing for you. So one way I use it, I don't ever use AI to write for me, but I do use it as like a mechanism for feedback. So I'll write a column or write a paper and I'll say, you know, interrogate this.

22:14Give me, you know, is this clear? Give me feedback. And so AI can be very helpful as a way to refine, hone your arguments, do fact checking. But that's different than doing the thinking for you. And so what I was encouraging faculty to do is to embrace it as a tool and to build guardrails around it in a way that makes sense in their own classroom and just acknowledge the reality that students are using it. And I think what's important about that, Derek, is I think what happens in these conversations is we get into this idea of is AI good or is AI bad? And if you say you're encouraging it, that means you're in the good camp.

22:43And if you're in a position like mine where you're responsible for undergraduate education, you can't really afford to take a position. You have to think, well, given what's happening now, what is the best way to design guidelines and policies to be resilient to the fact that students have this tool available to them and to preserve what's really important about their teaching and learning?

23:00Derek Thompson: So let's be really specific here. Let's say that you're teaching a class on economic history. And this class is mostly writing essays about the economic history of higher education in America. So very similar to the conversation that we've already had today. Yeah. How exactly, how exactly are you going to both encourage, so to speak, the use of AI and also ensure that people are learning and not just passing off Claude and Chad GPT prompts as the simulation of their learning with take-home tests and take-home finals. Like, walk me through exactly how a policy of AI encouragement in this class would work that simultaneously encourages the technology without creating the kind of cognitive atrophy that you and I both know is inevitably going to result in classes that are inscrupulous about allowing AI used to basically proliferate.

24:00Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one I thought a lot about because I'm gonna be teaching a class in the spring called Economic Possibilities for Artificial Intelligence, where we go into some of the history of this. And so this is very real for me. Here's one thought I had. Again, this is just my, I'm experimenting like everybody else. So I don't have all the answers, but here's what I plan to do. So I will have students write a basically rough draft of their thoughts after a bunch of feedback and discussion in class in controlled conditions. So I'm going to tell them, like, I want you to come and sit for a few hours and write a rough draft of your idea in a way that

24:31Derek Thompson: is totally makes it in a blue book pen and paper on a computer that like is on airplane mode like how like does it have to be pen and paper like can it be on a computer like i i want to know like literally exactly yeah how you how you want to do this i think if we had if we had um the ability to if i if i had access to computers that could be cordoned off from the internet then i would do it that way but we probably i probably won't do that i probably will use blue books uh and because i think that's fine i think it's actually and there's a lot of research suggesting that writing actually does encode information in your head better than typing.

25:03And so maybe that'll be good for students as well. The point is to get people to commit, get students to commit to an idea or a set of initial ideas in a controlled setting where I know the initial ideas and the inspiration is their own. And then they'll bring it back, you know, we'll, in a supervised way, help them use AI to get feedback on it, to do additional background research, you know, turn in a second draft, turn in a third draft, make an oral presentation to me about some new thing you added so I can verify that you actually did the work yourself instead of just having AI do the thinking for you.

25:33So I think there's a lot of things like that where you actually, one way to think about it is we need to get into the process of writing an idea generation much more deeply to understand how students are getting from point A to point B, rather than just saying, go forth and come back with a 20-page paper. So I think it's costlier. It may mean classes need to be smaller. It may mean we need more expertise in the classroom. I'm not really sure. But I do think it's that kind of thing we have to do more of. In other words, get into the process of learning with students in a way that gives us much more knowledge about how they came to have the ideas and the exposition that they got to.

26:07So that's my intention. And I also plan to have a no device classroom when I'm teaching the class. And we'll have a very intensive conversation where people will be expected to do the readings, but come in and then possibly even write a short reaction paper at the end of the class, again, in controlled condition, so I can see what they think and how the discussion in class changed their point of view. So that's my own thinking about how I will do things. But again, I'm going to try it this year and see how it goes. And if you have me back for visit number four, maybe I'll have an update for you on whether it worked or not.

26:34Derek Thompson: So my wife just finished her PhD in clinical psychology, and she had to defend her dissertation, which is a funny, archaic verb, right? Defend the dissertation. She writes a paper, and then she gets up in front of a bunch of people who have PhDs in psychology, and they ask her a bunch of hopefully difficult and interrogating questions. And she has to stand up there basically like a lawyer for her own position. and defend it, defend her conclusions in the face of these hopefully mildly adversarial questions. What's the case against making undergraduate education, especially in classes like economic history, history, philosophy, writing, classes about the presentation of ideas, where in many cases the essay itself has been the coin of the realm?

27:24Derek Thompson: what's against what's the case against just turning it all into dissertation defenses where the grade is the ability of the student to defend their written ideas and the truth is the defense is its own proof because if it seems like they don't understand what they wrote they get a d because they clearly don't understand what they wrote which is incredibly indicative the fact that They didn't write it. They used AI. But if they worked with large language models to conceive of a brilliant argument that they have absolute mastery over, well, isn't that exactly what College 2.0, the secondary of college, the era of expertise is all about.

28:06Derek Thompson: Create the most expertise with whatever tools are at your disposal. So what is the case against going full on dissertation defenses? I love dissertation defenses. I think, you know, I've done many of them myself in exactly the way that you described your wife is doing. What I tended to do in dissertation defenses, and this is before AI, was, you know, we'd have students write a kind of research statement about where their dissertation is going and what they propose to do, which has a bunch of citations in the literature. In my case, it was in economics. And we do a defense. And I would just keep asking them questions about papers that they thought were important to their work until they couldn't answer them anymore.

28:41So just keep digging deeper, explain that, and just keep going. And I always just say to students, the point is to find the limits of your knowledge, because this is what really being an expert means. It's like there's some frontier out there, and you have to get to the frontier before you can see on the horizon what the most important unanswered questions are. And my job is to get you there. And I think an oral defense is a great way to do that. So I think that's a great vision for higher ed. I think you could ask students to write something, but if they understand they're going to have to come and defend it, then again, you have the incentive to use AI in the right ways, but not in the wrong ways because you're going to need to be accountable for your ideas.

29:13The problem historically has been it's just very hard to do an oral defense in a 50-person class or 100-person class. It's just expensive and intensive. And so maybe we need to find a way to do that. There may be a way to use technology to do it better. Some people I've talked to have done that, you know, creating oral defense, AI oral examiners and things like that. I'm not sure if that would work. I haven't seen a great example that I would endorse. But I think the point is exactly what you said, which is we need to use, we need to acknowledge this is happening, Use these tools when we can to make learning deeper and better and more fulfilling, but also still make it human because that is the core of it.

29:46Like stand in front of the people who've been advising you on your dissertation for the past few years and defend your work and defend your ideas. I think it's great. I think it's a great way to learn.

29:54Derek Thompson: What was the reaction to your policy of AI encouragement from the faculty and students? Yeah. You know, I think people had some concerns. I think when people hear the word encouragement, exactly the way you asked the question, they think, does this mean that we're trying to replace writing? It doesn't mean that. And I think people who saw the full email and understood the context of what I was trying to say appreciated that. And I've had an opportunity to clarify that in many cases. It's hard to go into your full ideas in an email to students on opening day. But mostly what I was trying to do, and I think we succeeded in a sense, was get the conversation going.

30:26Because I actually think it's quite urgent. I think many of us, many adults, I'll say, in society don't realize what it's like to be a student. I'm sure I don't fully realize it, but I talk to students a lot. And so I've heard from them so many times, this idea of, I don't want to do this. It's like social media. Like, I don't want to do this. I know it's bad for me, but everyone else is doing it. And I feel trapped. And mostly what I wanted to do was say, that's not an acceptable status quo. We have to find a way to do this better. And so what I said in my email to faculty was, we need to push toward a set of guidelines for AI use in classes by the end of the year.

31:01Not like, I think the guidelines need to be X, Y, and Z, but it's my job to set the agenda and say, we need to push forward on this because we need to give our students some clarity. We owe it to them as curators of their learning experience to try to tackle this in a way that is sustainable and realistic and fair. And so I hope we can have that collective discussion over the course of the year. And maybe if we can do it here at Harvard, we can do, you know, lots of the other universities are doing it, as you mentioned. So I'm not going to say we're the only ones doing it. But for my part, I feel it's important.

31:30It was important to get the conversation going. So it was a success in that sense.

31:34Derek Thompson: What is the smartest, fairest argument against your position that you might disagree with that you heard in the last few weeks? I think the smartest, fairest argument that I've heard is that learning should be done for the love of the game. You know, and that when you start to create a whole system around enforcement, you don't acknowledge the reality that actually, you know, if people want to cheat in their classes, they're only cheating themselves in the long run. And really these institutions, these great universities are meant to be places that build the love of learning. And I've seen people say this, and it's a great idea.

32:08That's like, we should create the kind of learning experience in our classroom that makes people not want to use AI because it's so much better the other way. And I have a lot of sympathy, Derek, for that argument because I want it to be true so badly. I really do. Like, I don't want to have to make the changes that I think we may need to make. But I've also heard the other side of it. And I've seen the other side of it with a rise. You know, this isn't unique to Harvard, but rise in cases, you know, cases of academic integrity related to AI. It's happening everywhere. Students really feel caught in advice.

32:38And so I kind of, it's nice to live in the idea, in the space where you want, you know, you just kind of wish that these things are true and that, oh, I know my students won't use AI because they care too much about the subject matter. I think in many cases that will end up being true for people. But, and so I think that is the strongest argument because if we could actually make it happen, it would be better than anything I'm proposing. So in that sense, it's the strongest argument. I think it'd be great if people just were so motivated they didn't use the tool to shortcut their own learning.

33:05But I also, I mean, living in this reality and having to actually be responsible for the education of undergraduates, I've seen too much to believe that that argument will actually work the way we want it to.

33:19Derek Thompson: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to the last thing that you said, which is that you want to create a policy that serves both the world you want to build and the world that you know you can't outlaw by decree, right? Like, I believe that a reliance on AI for writing, for thinking, is truly a one-way ticket to cognitive atrophy. I think people will forget not only how to write, I think they will forget how to think. I'll think they'll forget how to do the thing that I've sometimes called cognitive time under tension, which is to sit with a set of complicated ideas and just hold them in your head and not exactly like puzzle pieces, but a little bit like puzzle pieces, move them around to create new kinds of connections, which are the wellspring of all new knowledge connections between previously disconnected ideas.

34:07Derek Thompson: I think we'll get worse at that and we'll hand more and more of that work off to machines without realizing what we're losing and our ability to even enjoy the act of thinking, which I think is important. Speaking of the love of the game at the same time, almost like on another shoulder, I don't know if this is like a devil or an angel, fallen angel, whatever. I think college has many jobs. And I think one of those jobs has to be to prepare students for the workforce. And if schools treat AI as a demon, if they treat AI as something that is illicit and then deposit their students into the software industry and the legal industry and the marketing industry and the design industry and the finance industry, in all of which AI is already ingrained in the daily workflows of most companies, that's an abdication of responsibility.

34:59Yes. It's an abdication of responsibility as much as teaching somebody to be a journalist,

35:07Derek Thompson: but telling them that podcasting and video is the devil. So definitely don't learn to talk or speak in front of a camera, but also be a successful journalist for the 2020s and 2030s. There might be validity and even nobility in that position, but you are manifestly preparing your students within a pre-professional program for a set of jobs that absolutely existed 50 years ago, but will not exist 15 years from now. And so that's that's the tension is as I see it. It's like I really want to ban it. But I also I don't want if colleges prepare students for jobs that don't exist. It even strengthens the question of why even go to college if they're exclusively preparing me for a labor force that only existed 15 years ago.

35:55Yeah, it's spot on, spot on. And I couldn't agree more. And it's something just to be honest, just for people who understand, we are not just me, but everybody who's in a position like mine is wrestling with this right now. I don't know the answer, but I do feel like the status quo is not working for us and we need to adapt. Like we need to be realistic about how people are using this technology and also build guardrails around it to protect learning. You know, I think my colleague Tarek Masood said that education should be like a mental gym. You know, it's not supposed to be easy. We're supposed to take these tools away and controlled settings so that you can build the muscles of learning and thinking for yourself so that then you're more capable of using these tools when you get outside in the real world.

36:31And so that argues not for a policy of Luddism or pretending it's not there or just banning it and not talking about it, but actually reorganizing the way we teach and learn to account for it and to get the good things out of it while protecting against the bad things. And I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I do feel strongly that we have to do that adaptation now. In many ways, we should be going faster because it's just so ubiquitous in our world. world already.

36:55Derek Thompson: Yeah. And we're, we're, we're circling this big question, which is really maybe the question I'm most interested in here, which is, you know, what is college for in the 2020s? And one answer to that question is that college is for motivation. And you saw this with the MOOCs or with Wikipedia, that, that was information without motivation. There was no one forcing you to read that Wikipedia page about, you know, whatever the Austro-Hungarian empire. If you read it, great. If you didn't literally nobody cared. You wrote this in a piece in Substack, quote, schooling serves partly as a commitment device.

37:27Derek Thompson: Few people buy textbooks and read them in their spare time because learning is hard and often requires some suffering. That suffering is eased by placing oneself in a learning community. End quote. You circled this point earlier in our conversation, but can you go one level deeper on in what way do you think the purpose of college, the purpose of college is not just to serve as an environment for learning, but to provide the motivation for learning, which can only happen or can happen most specially in the community that we call the college campus. Yeah, so I think it operates at two levels. One is the one we're just talking about, which is if I know, if I build a relationship with a professor and with students in my class, I will show up and do the work and I will work harder and I will go deeper and understand more because I'm doing it together with them.

38:19So it's a feeling of community And it's also a feeling of accountability to a group of people whose esteem you want and whose respect you want to earn. Just to give you one example, when I was in graduate school, like we had our graduate school, grad labor, different classes. Those were hard classes. But one of the most important experiences I had was fellow grad students and I, we would divide up the papers on the syllabus and kind of go and read them deeply and write a summary for each other and present them to each other. And so that kind of discipline of, okay, I really need to understand this in a way that I can explain to others and be accountable to community is just such a powerful motivator.

38:54And I think that's the kind of thing that we can really only do here in community. So I think at that level, learning as a commitment device is really powerful. I think people underrate it. I think there's some people out there who are mostly, again, autodidacts, people who just learn everything on their own. Those people do exist. And I think they tend to underrate the value of education because most people don't do that. Most people need to do it together. And then there's another level of it, Derek, which is learning changes the learner. So when you come to a place like Harvard or any other great college, there are many of them in the universities and in the US that do this and around the world, it helps with formation, character formation, virtue formation, intellectual formation.

39:32You become the kind of person who wants to go deep on something, the kind of person who wants to understand different perspectives on a tricky issue, who wants to be in a diverse community of learners. All these things that we talk about people do not come to us with those habits of mind with those intentions they are formed in a community when you look down down the dorm hallway or look down um the in the classroom you see somebody who you admire doing the kinds of things that um that lead to good learning and you become the kind of person that wants to be a lifelong learner that wants to contribute to society and again you know we are social animals like we are wired to learn these things from each other And of course, the university has been doing this for forever.

40:16I think it's a question of emphasis. Like we need to talk more about that, be more intentional about it and invest more time and energy and money into creating a learning environment that takes advantage of these communal aspects and takes advantage of our desire to be together and to learn from each other.

40:33Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by Workday. Guessing it's for game shows, not for your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24-7 and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new Workday. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to explain complicated ideas to folks who have better things to do than read white papers. But even dream jobs have not so dreamy parts.

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42:02Derek Thompson: But the safety doesn't stop there. Uber requires every driver to pass a thorough background check before they can start driving. This consists of a multi-step screening process that checks for impaired driving or criminal offenses, followed by annual background checks each and every year moving forward. Share My Trip and annual driver screenings are just a few of Uber's many safety features that put safety at every turn. Learn more at uber.com slash safety. Annual driving history reruns do not apply in New York City. I'm thinking about what you're saying in the context of the three eras of education that we discussed earlier.

42:40Derek Thompson: And tell me how you feel about this gloss. The first era of education was about information, and the most important object on the college campus was the book. In the second era of education, the most important object shifted from the book to the lecture because it was the expert who became like the critical object of the college campus. But now we've shifted from a world where college was about information to college is about books to now college is about community. And the critical space is not just the book, not just the lecture, but like it's the space between people. It's the classroom. It's the peer effects.

43:19Derek Thompson: It's those weak and strong connections between students that is providing and faculty that's providing motivation, that's shaping habits of thinking, that's shaping habits of being that hopefully people carry from college. And one thing that I think that sets up is this troubling idea that there's mounting evidence college in the age of AI, the age of whatever social media is actually becoming less social, not more social. And I'm quoting here from Rose Horowitz reporting in the Atlantic, quote, in 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent.

43:59Derek Thompson: The percentage who spent more than six hours a week socializing face to face declined by about 10 percent. Meanwhile, the share of first year students reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. Yeah. End quote. Is this something you've seen? Is this something you fear? The declining community of college at a time when you are defining the value of college as community itself? Yeah, so it's something I worry about a lot. I'm actually pretty optimistic that we've turned the corner on this, Derek. I mean, we'll have to see what the data show.

44:34But I have seen students in the past few years become more interested in community. And again, not just in a kind of, we're going to go party, kind of what I think is an intellectual side to this too. There's such view that Tyler Cowen and others have said that colleges might become like country clubs. And I think that's kind of a cynical reading of this. I think there's some of that that'll happen. Like you go to college to have a good time. But I think it's also about, again, learning skills with others that you can't learn by yourself, like social skills, leadership skills, that really is about a good education and not just partying.

45:03But I think students want this. And I'm seeing a growing desire for it. And that's a lot of what I talked about in my opening message to students in my speech was like, here are some things that we're going to do concretely, like increase hours in social spaces, you know, do more social events. We rolled out this pilot program. We're going to roll out this pilot program rather to provide phone pouches so people can lock their phone up if it's voluntary and have phone tech-free social spaces. We're trying to get faculty and staff into the dining halls with students eating meals so that they can get to know each other in a more informal setting.

45:36And I encourage students to think about engagement with each other as a form of social exercise, building on your very important work, of course, on loneliness and social fitness. I said, look, the thing about social, I told them the story. I said, look, I walked by a sign on a street in New York City, I don't know, 10 years ago. It said, I really regret this workout, said no one ever. And the point of that was exercise is something that it feels daunting to do and you kind of don't want to do it. but almost every time after you do it, you're glad you did it. And my argument is that socialization, socializing is like that too.

46:13That I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to just come home and sit on the couch, but I got to go to some student event in the evening. And I just like, oh, I don't feel like it. And then every time I do, I come back feeling recharged. So I said to students, you think your social battery is drained? It's not. You can actually do more. And I saw heads nodding and people who, so who knows? But I do think students recognize this. And the students I've seen, at least here at Harvard in early days, The freshman class seems more socially engaged than classes of years past. So I'm optimistic about that.

46:41Derek Thompson: You talked about a couple of policies that you're exploring to encourage students to be more social. Yeah. What have you seen that's worked either at Harvard or at any college campus? Maybe you go to like these like, you know, dean conferences where people talk about how to solve problems among undergraduates. Like, do we have any evidence that there's a new way to get young people out of their dorm rooms and hanging out with each other for the benefits of, as you called it, social exercise? Well, free food always works. So that's an easy one. You know, young people like to show up for free food.

47:15So that's a pro tip for any dean out there who wants to get students to show up for something. I also think, you know, the more, you know, the more they get the sense that adults are planning the party, the less interested they are in showing up. So in my experience, there's an art to this, which is providing spaces that students can and student groups can book, providing funding for them to plan their own social events and supporting them in their efforts to do this rather than trying to be the person up front is almost always the successful approach. and listen i've found that most good ideas we've gotten about how to encourage students to get together both both in the classroom and outside have come from students themselves so i i as a kind of um habit of mind i guess you could say i try to get out in to the community so i go and eat lunch with students just like sit down and ask them questions and talk to them a couple times a week rather than just waiting for people to come to me in my office because you want to get like I think of it as getting a representative sample of what's on the minds of students instead of just waiting for people who have some particular question they want to ask you.

48:22So I find listening to them and translating what they're feeling into something that we can actually do is by far the most effective way to encourage this.

48:32Derek Thompson: So we're working on this theory that there's something powerful about mechanisms that force people to come together and share information. And, you know, I wonder if, you know, one quirky way to test that proposition would be to study meetings, as in like company meetings, like the most dreaded, most despised feature of white collar life. And one might think, you know, it'd be interesting if someone had studied whether meetings were valuable at all. Well, you had a busy last few weeks because in addition to roiling the faculty lounges of Harvard by encouraging the use of AI, you also published a paper entitled meetings on the value of meetings.

49:07Derek Thompson: So maybe by way of wrapping up this conversation, can you tell us what you discovered, how you did this study, how one studies the value of meetings and what you found? Well, like most good economics papers or many good economics papers, it starts with Norwegian administrative data, Derek. So my co-authors and I gained access to this great data that tracks people across companies. And then we administered a survey where we asked people a bunch of questions, actually, but we had a whole section on meetings where we said like, you know, how much time do you spend in meetings? What are the purpose of the meetings?

49:37Are you, how big are they? And just all kinds of just descriptive questions about the nature, purpose, length, intensity of meetings in their companies. And it was a pretty big survey, about 9 ,000 people. And, you know, I was interested in this question because as somebody, like a labor economist, somebody who studies work, you know, the meeting is the thing that everybody scorns and everyone talks about, oh, that meeting was terrible. This email, you know, the meeting could have been an email and all this kind of stuff. And yet it seems like people are spending a lot of time in meetings. And it seems like they're necessary to get work done in the modern economy.

50:09And so it's interesting to me that something that feels so scorned is also so seemingly necessary. And so we did a bunch of just basic calculation of this in the paper. So one fact is that the average worker in Norway spends about one hour per workday in a meeting. And that includes people who don't have any meetings. So if you're a custodial worker, if you're a retail sales worker, if you're a construction worker, you're not really meeting at all. And so if you're in an office job, it's more like two hours per day in meetings. And firms are spending about, you know, one out of every$7 on their total labor costs are spent on the cost of meetings.

50:46So this is a real cost for companies. And yet it seems like in the data, and somewhat to my surprise, to be honest, that the companies that have more meetings tend to be higher paying firms. And the way I can describe that is, we have this data set where you watch people move across companies. And so if you move, let's say from, I don't know, from the Atlantic to Substack, how does that increase your wages? And then we look at people who move from Substack to the Atlantic, how does that change your wages? And then we basically look at companies that tend to pay more when people move to them. and those companies have more meetings.

51:20And also if you spend more time in a company like that, you have higher wage growth. So, you know, greater earnings increases in early career. And so it seems like even though people hate meetings, the kinds of companies that have more meetings are also the most successful companies and the workers who spend more time in meetings are doing better. And so it's kind of a contradiction, an interesting one. I think the way I would describe it, the findings, is that the meeting is the cost you have to pay to realize the benefits of specialization and coordination in complex production activities. You know, so if you've got to ship a product, you've got to land a client, everyone's got some small job in a larger process and you have to get together and coordinate on that.

51:59And so the meeting itself feels like, oh my gosh, this is taking forever, but it actually serves an important economic purpose. And so that's why the last line of the paper was, or the abstract was, meetings are the broccoli of work, widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.

52:11Derek Thompson: And it's interesting that that theory of why meetings are necessary feels very much like an era two theory, that there are communication costs between silos of experts. And the only way to break down those silos and have people understand, what's the finance department doing? What's the marketing department doing? Is to bring them together in a meeting and have them briefly explain and coordinate on strategies to go forward. It'll be interesting to see if the third era of AI changes the value of meetings. You know, that meeting could have been an email. Maybe it's like that meeting could have been pooled data fed to our local corporate LLM for the purpose of writing us all a message about how we should maybe go forward to coordinate this stuff.

52:50Derek Thompson: I will say that's a little bit of a joke. What is not a joke is that sometimes in, when I give talks, people will ask me about what I think their children should major in in college. And I always say, A, I don't know. I think the future is really uncertain. I am definitely not going to like predict. I'm not going to like predict which major is going to have like the highest expected value in the 2040s. Um, but I would encourage everyone to take more theater classes, take more acting classes, take more improv classes, be more comfortable presenting because in a world where large language models become more expert than any expert, large language models are still not very good at presenting their information.

53:32Derek Thompson: They certainly can't like stand up inside of like an optimist robot and like guide a meeting. And in a world where you're right, where meetings are one sixth of work and one seventh of labor spend, the ability to be persuasive in and comfortable in meetings and comfortable with the ideas that you want to present at meetings. It seems like that skill of presentation might be underrated on many college campuses where it's sort of assumed that if you get an A on the econometrics paper, that makes you a good economist. It does to a certain extent, but the ability to represent what you've learned from your economic research in a meeting, I think is, and maybe will increasingly be in a world of AI, just if not more valuable.

54:16Derek Thompson: So I do think everyone should take theater classes in college. And I think maybe it's because, or maybe this meeting paper helps to prove that I'm right. Well, I mean, I actually agree with that. I did some theater myself in high school and college. I didn't know that. Yes, I did. And I always tell people, you know, it turned out, this is an example, the way I say to students is, you know, you can, if you do things again, for the love of the game, sometimes they pay off in instrumental ways that you never could have foreseen. So it's not like I said, I'm going to do theater when I'm 18, because one day I'll be the Dean of Harvard college and I'll need to stand up in front of people and talk all the time.

54:50But it turns out it was, it was pretty helpful. And so there's all kinds of ways that, um, building a skill in, in the past, you know, you, you, you can't always see down the, down the, into the future and know how it's going to pay off. So you should do the things that you enjoy. So I think that's part of the lesson I give people. And then I think you're absolutely right that in the long run, the ability to relate to others, to present others, to persuade, you know, to make a good point, to change minds is one of the most human skills at all. And I think a good forecast is it will become even more important in the age of AI.

55:20And that's a lot of work I've done, a common thread on both the speech I gave that we're talking about and the meetings paper and some of my older work on soft skills and teamwork is all about this. And so maybe it's not surprising that this is where I landed as a dean, that we need to spend more time talking to each other. I think it has an economic purpose as well as a social and a moral one.

55:37Derek Thompson: Yeah, I absolutely agree that people should follow their sincere interests. But also, as a last point, you mentioned that sign that I don't remember if it was Equinox or some other gym in New York that said, I regret this workout, sign, nobody ever. I do think there's a similar sentiment with regard to comfort with presenting your views to crowds. Yes. No one's like, I feel really comfortable presenting my ideas to groups of people, large and small. And I really regret my ability to comfortably communicate my ideas to people. And I will say this about theater people, love them or hate them, they are not shy or embarrassed about talking in front of large groups of people.

56:21Derek Thompson: So again, I will - It's a great point. We'll do mandatory theater classes here at Harvard. And you'll come teach. Yeah. Teach them, okay? There's a good left front. David Deming, thank you very much. Thanks, Derek. It was a pleasure to be here.