Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

The collapse of (most of) the university system's credentialing power (and *fingers crossed* an attendant local-level revolt against occupational licensing).

This implies a massive increase in information costs without a replacement. Are you betting on this resulting from macro-level decrease in info costs or a replacement credential that's similarly info-dense + higher signal?

What nobody wants to say: everything captured in a typical college degree could also be captured by an IQ test + the evidenced willingness to sit down and copy the Bible, word for word, by hand, over 4 years. The ability to credential *actual skills* has amassed a GIANT pot.

1/2 While I agree with your last sentence, I think there's more signal in a college degree. For a (relatively) small group of effective autodidacts, there's low or no value. But forced-ish exposure to new ideas builds useful frameworks for a lot of people.

2/2 I think the key insight is that universities are too expensive and inefficient as a mechanism to deliver that value. But they're well-understood (lower info costs), so more efficient methods still have a lot of work ahead of them to create a widely-understood credential.

Coda: capturing *actual skills* moves the info costs to a different place in the supply chain. A better credential-er still has to reduce the cost of assessing *actual skills.* One reason why replacement credential will start in technical fields, where skills can be measured.

The problem isn't that non-technical skills can't be measured; the problem is that a lot of non-technical students are leaving college *without skills.*

"I'm wearing beautiful robes, my people, but their beauty is impossible to assess because they are invisible."