| Context: "Vivek Wadhwa is .. a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University." Wadhwa is a beneficiary of the college fees he is advocating paying. He's doing it under the guise of promoting education in general and has conflated Theil's argument with an anti-education argument. The title of the article he's refuting is: "Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education." One of Thiel's best points in the original article: If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates? It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true. |
Universities are a result of Theory of The Firm, since a university is generally restricted to small geographic region, it can decrease the transaction costs between the various components of higher education. However if you franchise a university across multiple locations, the net transaction costs go up.
E.g. University of California system can be considered as an affiliate system. However you would still find one UC e.g. Berkeley more reputed than other e.g. Santa Barbara.
Peter Thiel incorrectly assumes, that a University system can share a lot of resources between distant geographic locations. However most of the resources such as faculty, labs cannot be shared. Thus you are better off increase capacity of students rather than branching out.