Universities discovered that master's programs — no labs, no costly infrastructure — could be enormously profitable if students believed the degree would boost their earnings. Research by Robert Kelchen found 14,000 new master's programs were created in roughly two decades, many of dubious value.
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At 18:05 · chapter starts 18:03
To understand why the system is so broken, Rachel Abrams asks Lieber to rewind the clock. In 1980, the federal government began backing student loans because a growing number of families couldn't cover the last few thousand dollars of annual tuition, room, and board. College attendance was lower, borrowing volumes were modest, and the assumption was that students were decent credit risks who didn't need strict vetting. So the government set no caps and did minimal underwriting. Flash forward to 2005–2006, and the same logic was applied to graduate students: surely people getting master's and professional degrees would earn enough to repay whatever they borrowed. That assumption, Lieber argues, was the original sin — a reasonable-seeming decision in a small system that was never revisited as the system grew into a $1.7 trillion machine.
Higher education researcher Robert Kelchen found that 14,000 new master's degree programs were created in the roughly two decades leading up to the mid-2020s.
When master's programs proliferated, schools encouraged students to rely on Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a program canceling debt after 10 years of nonprofit or government work. But many borrowers misunderstood the rules, picked the wrong jobs, or got bad advice and ended up stuck with massive payments.
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?
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