Alan
co-founder
mailVU

Once a college degree is removed as an absolute requirement for hiring corporations, colleges and universities will not be able to justify the prices they are currently charging.

I’d advise against the feds trying to recoup value from funded research; here’s why. Most universities charge too much for their patents in negotiations with investors who want to commercialize technology. They have the “academic” view that most of the value is in the intellectual property, and they don’t understand how much work is required to build a business. As a result, not much gets commercialized, and the U.S. economy loses. The most experienced universities, notably MIT, charge reasonable and predictable licensing fees. That is a big reason for MIT’s success in technology commercialization. If the feds claim some of this income, the universities, especially the naive ones, will raise licensing fees further, and that will dampen innovation.

Rather than loan forgiveness for STEM graduates, I suggest that the federal government make more money available to those pursuing STEM degrees, and less to others. The STEM graduates are actually able to repay their loans. The others often cannot. This is rational resource allocation, much as a business would do.

- It is fueled by cheap federal debt, like the housing bubble. If all that fed money were not flowing, higher ed would need to be much more pragmatic.

- The household income numbers you quote need to be examined more closely. People who go to college are generally more able, so we need to separate the value of ability from that of education. How much do similarly able people make without a college degree? And, what does the ROI look for if you are in the bottom quartile of college graduates? I’ve seen data for business schools that says that, if you are in to bottom half of the distribution, the ROI on an MBA is about zero.

As an angel investor, I watched a women’s group testify before an informational hearing in the U.S. Senate once tell the members of Congress that they should incentivize VCs to “look” at more women owned deals by paying venture capitalists to do so. The committee asked for comments. Risking offending the several hundred women there, and not going to let the opportunity go by, I testified that, with all due respect to those making that dumb suggestion, paying VCs to “look” at more women owned deals was not the answer.

The answer: If women wanted VCs to “look” at more deals then they have to give them deals they want to look at….. simple!…..and that key word is “scalability.”

Fact is that women tend to do service businesses which are rarely scalable in a way which interests most VCs..including myself. Does that make me a sexist? Of course not. I further stated that if Congress wanted to spend money wisely (assuming that would actually be a truth!), then Congress needs to invest in technical education for women….educating women in the maths and sciences – engineering, chemistry, robotics etc.. …all of the technical fields which tend to lead to greater discoveries and scalabile technologies…..companies which get funded the most.

While women still make 80 cents for every dollar earned by men there are many other advantages which women get which men don’t.

As far as other reasons why we need more women in business, thats a whole other issue….. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678854/the-world-needs-female-entrepreneurs-now-more-than-ever

But first and foremost we must not conflate the two.

This is an example of someone who got where he is with good old fashioned hard work, motivation and ambition!!!!! Isn’t that what the American Dream was built on?