My guest today Michael D. Smith is a professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.

His recent book The Abundant University, is a scathing critique of the US higher education system.

Everybody involved in the system is doing what their incentives tell them to do,

even though we know it's leading to really bad outcomes.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Michael Smith doesn't only criticize education.

He's also got a bunch of ideas for transforming the system.

And I've got some radical ideas of my own. of

a bunch of ideas for transforming the system. And I want to put those out there to see what Michael and you listeners think about them.

Michael, you've got a new book. It's called The Abundant University and it's a forceful indictment of our current system of higher education. Of course you're right in the

middle of that system, you're a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University and

this is a book that the powers that be will not like. I hope you weren't banking on any salary

increases anytime soon. Yeah exactly yeah I've now pissed off everybody at

Carnegie Mellon. I wrote a piece in the Atlantic in 2020 and the basic premise was higher

education in 2020 looks a lot like the entertainment industry did in 2015. We're fat and happy and so

darn pleased with ourselves and completely unaware that technology might

change our business. And the feedback I got from that really opened my eyes

to how much we are trying to protect the status quo. So let's talk about that

status quo. You argue that our current system of higher education is built on three

Scarcarities. Can you explain what you mean by that?

When we talk about market power, you get market power by being able to do something or

controlling some sort of resource that your competitors don't control or can't do.

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