The test-optional era hurt the students it was supposed to help. Low-income students were less likely to submit strong scores, and Dartmouth's data showed the SAT is a better predictor of success than letters of recommendation or grades.
Where this was said
At 9:27 · chapter starts 8:40
Beilock recalls how she stumbled into administration by arguing with UChicago president Bob Zimmer on the Faculty Senate's Committee of the Council — and getting recruited to join his team as a result. After serving as executive vice provost, she was recruited to lead Barnard College in New York, where she encountered a cultural mismatch with the institutional neutrality framework she had internalized at Chicago. She then reveals a striking counterfactual: she had planned to wait and become a leading candidate for the Columbia presidency, but the Dartmouth offer arrived quickly and she took it — potentially sparing her from the upheaval that eventually cost Minouche Shafik her job. The segment concludes with Dubner and Beilock naming the three Ivy presidents who were ousted — Shafik, Penn's Liz McGill, and Harvard's Claudine Gay — as Beilock's 'class' of leaders.
Dartmouth was the first Ivy League school to reinstate SAT and ACT scores in admissions after the COVID-era test-optional wave, citing data showing it helps identify talented low-income students.
Research by Raj Chetty at Harvard shows that socioeconomic resources help students with non-quantitative admissions factors like summer activities and letters of recommendation.
A baseball-playing junior who learned about compound interest now wants to quit the sport to start working and investing. George says let him decide and own it. Jade says team sports build something a job can't replace — try doing both during off-season first before making the call permanent.
May is 33, carries $69K in combined household debt, and wants to spend 11–13 years training to become a forensic pathologist at $14K/year in tuition. The prerequisite is non-negotiable: zero debt before a single class. Then, with the spouse earning $4,500/month and able to run the household debt-free, cash-flowing medical school is genuinely possible.
Kavak launched the Jedi Academy, an internal program where every employee — from CEO to mechanics — completes a 6-week training and ships a production-ready AI agent. The message to staff was blunt: train and adapt, or this may not be the right place for you.
The worst AI outcome for young people isn't cheating on homework. It's that passive, mindless consumption strips away the motivation and agency their brains need to develop. The second worst outcome is banning AI from classrooms entirely. The winning path is giving students AI-powered agency.
Prompting AI effectively is a skill that should be taught in K-12. The best prompter in history? Socrates. His method of relentlessly asking precise questions to uncover truth is exactly what powerful AI interaction looks like — and schools should explicitly teach it.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Fei-Fei Li's first move was to email her child's elementary school principal and offer to lecture teachers and students. No investor or tech company did that. Teachers are scared, forgotten, and lectured at — and if they're not helped, neither are the kids.
After the KSI show exposed how hard physical comedy really is, Andrew Santino sincerely proposed doing a semester at clown school in France. Bobby agreed. This is apparently a real plan.
K-12 schools ask students to sit still, raise their hand, use fine motor skills, and be pleasers — behaviors that describe girls more than boys. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior, and five times as likely if they're Black. The system needs male teachers, national service, and kindergarten starting at 6 for boys.
Sunk costs are gifts from your former self — and like all gifts, you're allowed to decline them. Godin reframes every stuck-due-to-sunk-cost situation as a single question: knowing what you know now, would you choose this again?
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.