Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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."

I'm not sure these are completely separable problems. If there were easy ways to quantify and communicate (at scale) most non-technical skills, then I suspect fewer students would graduate without *actual skills*. Also, my robes *are* beautiful, trust me.