I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea.

Today, the future of the American University in the Age of AI. Is going to college still a good idea?

Elon Musk says,

college is basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores,

but they're not for learning.

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has called the college diploma a dunce cap in disguise.

And he's putting his money where his mouth is, writing six-figure checks to more than 300 young people

who agreed to skip school. Ben Horowitz, the venture capitalist, has called college

a scam. Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, has made the point that the famous college dropouts we think of,

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, are exceptions to the rule. Bezos said, I started Amazon

when I was 30, not when I was 20, and I think that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed.

So that would always be my advice, he said. I finished college, and I think it's been helpful to me.

This is not just some kind of theoretical debate. It's personal. About 15 minutes ago, I processed a payment for my 20-year-old son's spring semester of college, always painful.

My 17-year-old son, meanwhile, is in the middle of his college application process.

And I'm not alone in this, the question of the future of the American university, not to mention more broadly, how

our education system needs to evolve, touches most of us.

And of course, it's a precursor to a larger question.

What world are we preparing our children for?

And how best can we prepare them?

What jobs will we have in a few years, not to mention a decade from now?

And is the purpose of college to prepare us for work or for life more broadly?

I recently had the pleasure of discussing these questions with four people unusually

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