with the tools to optimally navigate the reality and at the very least to tell fact from fiction but what if this narrative in itself is a myth and expansive self-serving and highly ineffective well that's what our guest today argues as he takes on the ivy league universities which according to him don't teach what they're supposed to teach and charge too much for it ben nelson founder of the minerva project welcome to the studio and thank you for the time pleasure to be here thanks for having me now when you talk about higher education you always make a distinction between information knowledge and wisdom in fact you called your own venture after the roman goddess of wisdom which leads me to conclude that you believe you provide the latter but what about the rest of the system what do you think it's selling well what it's selling is not necessarily what it's delivering but if you go to any website of almost any university in the world certainly any

university in the united states you will see claims such as this university which he tried to think critically it will solve teaches you how to solve problems it will teach you how to communicate well and work well with other people it'll teach you to be global in your thinking that all sounds wonderful and in fact i think if anybody thinks about what is the role of higher education we all would all agree that those are things that we want universities to teach but when you actually look at the curriculum none of those things are taught. what is taught courses in departments largely around information sometimes around analysis of that information but very much in a field specific way and the reality is is that in order to teach these broader capacities you cannot deliver it in a disciplinary way you have to deliver it in a cross contextual way so essentially you're saying that the universities are not

delivering what they're promised to give you is that an unfortunate happenstance you know a good system in a bad shape or is it actually fraud claiming to provide what you know you cannot provide and charging a fortune for well i think it's volved to be i don't think that was ever the intent and i don't think that it was malicious in its beginnings and in fact if you think about the of the broader concept of a classical education. the goal really was to provide you with the various disciplinary activities that you need in order to be able to think critically and 200 years ago that was possible it's because humanity did didn't know much right and so in one degree you could teach science and math and philosophy and history and basically cover what most of the professors knew and you could impart that to the students and they would get

a very broad and systematic education now it had flaws certainly at the beginning but certainly from what professors knew with the time it was effective as information exploded what we know about the world has become so vast universities have tried to keep up with it and they've devolved into at least in the united states into more of this departmental approach in fact and for the rest of the world they never left the departmental approach and so the education has become spending more and more time learning less and less much like research has been spending more and more time trying to discover more details around specific sub areas and so what we're left with today is this pursuit of the dissemination of information that is very specific as opposed to the usage of tools that you can interrogate and that it's not only very specific it's also

widely available for free. universities particularly in the united states but also around the world are charging a lot for their services you know i i wrap somewhere that for example alzheimer's drugs. make about a $1000000000.00 market and do united states even though everybody knows that there's no drug that works against it and that some of the madison's on the on the market actually exacerbate the condition and from what you describe it seems that higher education has the same. iatrogenic a fact when it crime assists to make people's lives prospects better but in fact it makes them worse if not cognitively done if they financially yes and this is in this is one of the difficulties is that systems once they get into a particular position they have to find ways to defend themselves and so they'll point out to things to say oh well look college graduates make so much more than people who didn't go to college but of course this is a fallacy i have just again through a fortune but this is

a make it into if that's what the claim is of course what the actual analysis needs to have a control group which is to say let's take the same people from the so sick and i would back around from an intelligence background then let's take a group of them not have them go to college to have a similar group go to college and then see the income differences and it turns out that the few pieces of information that have shown elements of this for example a long running study at a very prestigious university that showed what happened to students that were accepted to that you very prestigious university but then decided to go to a different university including public universities are not as prestigious and it turns out that their lifetime earnings were identical and so the value of actually going to want to versus another was shown to basically not it i mean much of the current economy is build on day appeal to human vanity brand names don't

necessarily provide better quality products but they provide the power effect the status kristie to promise of social and valuable social connections isn't it the same in higher education i mean you may argue that higher harvard doesn't provide what it claims to provide but it also gives something that a new startup cannot do right so this is a fascinating dilemma and we know i often say that minerva is based on a very controversial idea and that idea that education matters. and so when i say that most people say well that's a controversial law everybody believes that education matters and then of course i give the example i say ok well let's assume that you would have a child and you were designed to figure out where your child should go to school they could go to harvard or they could go to a school that is 100 places ranked lower than harvard but where you know they would get a superior education almost any parent would say oh no no no i'd send them to harvard

now i think that's a wrong decision absolutely because now i ask the same people i say ok now think of your job you're an employer you're interviewing 2 candidates for this job one candidate has a degree from harvard university you ask them questions in your interview and they do 5 the other candidate goes to university that is ranked 100 spots lower than ard but boy in the interview they can take a problem that you've posed to them break it down into its component parts they can put those component parts back together in interesting ways and provide novel solutions to the problem you posed they then think about what happens when you implement the solution in the unexpected outcomes and 2nd order affects of that solution then modify it accordingly and they can explain to you clearly what that solution is and how that would work with a team to implement it who would you hire. and every parent that said oh yeah it's a make at harvard with immediately says i'd hire the 2nd person and so you have

this bizarre dichotomy which is when we make decisions for our children we optimize those decisions knowing what we know as people in the real world where education and your ability to think systematically is vastly more important than the brands on your residency you say that because i think it's a recurring theme that's been voiced by people as different as say the dalai lama and jordan peterson and young people today are taught a lot about the world but not how to be in that wild and that seems to be your niece to teach them how to be how to operate in various circumstances that's right and circumstances include in different cultures and context but also include across different levels of analysis and in different fields of analysis wisdom is the application of practical knowledge in appropriate ways in novel contexts but if you learn a particular scenario could be in

a class could be your experience and you encounter that exact same scenario knowing what to do is just memory that's out wisdom that's not learning it's just memorizing something. wisdom comes when you are facing a brand new context and you can draw upon tools you've learned in other contexts systematically to know what to do and i know that it's that fact at your school students dedicate our 1st year exclusively to learning about critical and creative thinking as well as effective communication and that looks to me more coaching didn't teaching and i wonder how do you source your educators because this is not what your typical university professor is trying to do and no the certainly not but it's not something that is hard to train the professors to do if you provide them a highly structured curricular 'd approach. when you think about critical thinking

or creative thinking facts of communications effective interactions with others those are catch all phrases but they themselves don't mean much they really are a combination of a whole bunch of other things so for example you talked about different being claim in effect distinguishing between those 2 things is a form of critical thinking but another form of critical thinking is making a decision trade off to take path water path to the techniques you need to do where to deploy in order to decide what path to take in a decision matrix or it whether or not something is a crime or fact are completely different one has nothing to do with the other and there are subcomponents of each of those and so if you actually provide students a taxonomy for the habits of mind that they need for the foundational concepts they can deploy to bring to bear critical thinking with large creative problem solving writ large and you do that in many different contexts you have

a chance to actually provide students with a systematic thinking and what we have done is created a system that increases those chances. dramatically in fact that we ensure that our students learn how to deploy more than 80 of these component parts 2 scenarios that are as far flung as thinking about how you analyze problems all the way to how you actually have nuance in the way you communicate with others and your approach to them now i mention jordan he is a. famous or infamous canadian psychologist a you tube sensation who also sat his sights on revolutionizing higher education and he's made before that is not only the cost but also what he sees as ideological indoctrination abbé expands of critical thinking i wonder what's minerva says relationship with political correctness because this is a pretty hot subject when it comes to american higher education it is and i think

it's not just american our education by the political. order the very brave. all over the world actually if you look actually if you look at russia it's also back and academia another where is that and why is that it is because academy has grown up in context but if you look at pretty much every course at a university almost every course not everybody almost every course the context is central you will study south asian studies you'll study russian history this is a context based perspective and when you take that approach somebody has to provide you an interpretation of the context and so over time that interpretation can become biased if your educational process is cross can text sure will. cross contacts show indy's case means having 7 facilities around the world that he

didn't have through the course of that so it has means culturally across contextual both in where the students learn but also in the student body it means cross contextual in the sense that when you do your studies you learn these pieces of practical knowledge not within a field but apply to many different fields right but the subject matter isn't the field of study it is the tool that you use to analyze it all of a sudden your approach to political correctness is very different because you no longer are teaching a context will interpretation you're teaching tools one of the problems that frankly jordan peterson and other have is that they don't like the bias that is being taught they want to different bias right and they will claim that that is critical thinking even though they may also have their own bias we are above that fray we don't pass judgment on whether or not a student should say this economic model right the keynesian model is superior to

the chicago school or vice versa however what we try to demonstrate to students is that when everyone actually has you dan alison the west you can do the analysis yourself and there are legitimately a variety of perspectives that could be correct even though there's a much larger variety of perspectives that is certainly incorrect and that believe distinguish between those is important i have to stop you here because we have to take a very short break but we will be back in just a few moments states. join me every thursday on the alex salmond. and i'll be speaking to us of the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you then.

just one magic bullet you could actually come up with something to talk about his baby bond talking about ways we get access capital and capitalism couples important so we could actually have programs that actually help folks who want to do that but when you give everybody a $1000.00 i'm a poor person i'm going to consume that and then you're rich you're going to invest that equity the wealth the spirit is going to grow because you're not using your money to do it can so you're literally buy more crazy things and then my landlord knowing that i got a $1000.00 and you just go raise my ribs so then you get your inflation going on and they're back. welcome back to worlds apart with ben nelson founder of the minerva project than i

generally out of your students i wish i could quit my job and then ply to school but. the question is how scalable is that model because you know how many students you have a few 10600 students as undergraduates we also have an asterisk program to ok so even even when you have a few 1000 it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the 99000 at town state or even the 23000 at harvard do you think those big legacy schools can really do what you are trying to do giving this individualized attention while also dealing with such a massive number of students yes so the reality is that when you look at the underlying costs of delivering what we have provided is a fraction of the costs of delivering what the existing american university provides. and if you think about 2 the resources that harvard and other elite universities claim to deploy they certainly have plenty of capacity to do this for

example if you look at the student faculty ratios at most universities of minerva we have about one faculty member for every 10 students which is very very good but if you look at harvard or others ok and they have one faculty member every 5 or 6 students and so they have the ability to actually save a great deal of money and dramatically increase the quality of their education and the reason for that is that we focus on the student experience and the education and the actual development of the student and where it matters whereas if you look at the traditional university where they spend money is actually nothing to do with the education and where they spend money is a flat rate based search i mean speaking about athletics. i heard you say that it may cost around town $1000.00 per year per student regardless of whether he or she

participates in the college for where what is known a division one school and usually dull together and that's one of the ways you've been able to substantially cut the fees but. when it be a shame to see. teams like the penn quakers disappear i mean like. you know college sport is it is it is a good attraction i mean if it does public service in other ways i think it's a lovely thing and universities if they think it's important should price of a la carte right and so if they believe that it is a good use of student donation or student tuition dollars they should spell it out and make it optional and then we will see how much the student body really cares about penicuik or basketball anything that much i mean i bet you didn't go to die games where you are starting to. predict that it would not be a high take rate i think if you actually go to students and say you could save

$10000.00 and not have any professional or profession or summer adventure sports programs or pay 10000 hours to have them the likelihood that students would actually pay that $10000.00 will be low there will be some but eventually it will actually change the nature of those sports i'll give you an example at duke university the salary of the head coach of the basketball program costs the university $7100.00 per student just for his salary now you best of all generates a lot of income and generates a lot of it's like marketing to marketing tool mission for the university but what happens if that were all a cart. what happens if all of a sudden no university would really be able to pay millions and millions of dollars for well they maybe if they you know they should just ask their students whether

they were you wouldn't support to pay because at the end of the day it's the student. now another way of cutting fees is not offering professors tenure and not subsidizing research with. the way it's done in the united states and australia and i know you would say that that model doesn't exist anywhere in the world but i think it's also fair to say that the amount of research that's don in the united states is unparalleled no other. and it's very good yeah absolutely so if dad model of financial cut plaintiff research and fees is scaled don't you think that they would lose quality research well i think it's a it's a problem the the united states is going to have to face and it's already started to suffer from that why do we have the situation we have now. at the time when the united states realized the value of research funding the government which was at

the height of the cold war the government funded universities to do research and they were happy to do that there was a public conversation about the value of basic research and what it leads to in the future and then beginning towards the latter part of the 20th century when that conversation no longer was so imperative all the sudden the conversation shifted and it shifted to say oh we need to provide access to students and so government funding started to rather than being concentrated at the best research universities it started to distribute distributed to focus on universities that educate students but the research universities still needed that money so what did they do this. well ok give us more money to educate students but will just take that money and use it for research that's not good for the country and eventually it will break because at some point the government will wake up and say why are we

subsidizing $100000.00 per year cost of education this makes no sense i think you're giving some ideas to the current president of the united states hopefully he will not why is this program just now athletes i'm sure many of your colleagues at traditionally universities hoping that brilliant idea will not come to his mind even though he would be very prone to act probably but we have to anticipate that something like this can occur and so as a sector we have to have a public august conversation about how critical basic research is and we've got to get in the united states a bipartisan consensus on that but frankly for the rest of the world there are good models that have done this i mean you look at british research british research is really fantastic and it is very clearly decoupled in fact in some ways research funding sometimes subsidize undergraduate education and that's a better model for for funding now speaking about the rest of the world correct me

if i'm wrong but around 80 percent of your student body are international students reaches i think roughly the inverse of the figure at traditional american schools aim for what is it like 1015 percent of international students why does it live to you have the united nations in your in your classroom isn't it hugh much diversity for your american students know and it's it's really fascinating 1st i don't you know when i go to china or russia or anywhere else i always get asked how are your chinese students how are your russian students you know this question is how much. i cannot tell you because i there is no characteristic. that is unifying for any group of students based on the country they come from it turns out that the world is the 1st and it's not the 1st simply because of your culture where you come from it is diverse because of who you are and what your passions and

pursuits are and so we have students from the same country one of them wants to be a banker one of them wants to be an artist their relation to others who want to be bankers or artists are much closer than their relation to their own country men or women and to to not have a university that has labels and that why do we have such international student not because we've gone out and said oh well let's make a quota let's only let 15 percent of our students be from you know it's not at all we admit students based on their qualifications and that is it and we treat applicants from all over the world exactly the same and i think this new interpretation of diversity is to simply tainted by your model when students change location pretty much every semester you have facilities in berlin and then buenos aires since so all and high that are bought india a couple of other locations around the world but not moscow why not how can you.

discovered the world without experiencing russia it's very difficult so we only have 7 cities right sam cisco the city you mentioned london in taipei as well but there are giant chunks of the world that we simply can't cover we're not in eastern europe or in moscow or not in central aim and i know not in africa. so there are a lot of the world that we simply cannot cover the entire world when we decided where we would go this was about 7 years ago we had to look at a range of criteria cities out to be very globally prominent we try to have them as more affordable than not we had to have them be free and open access to the internet academic freedom etc they had to be compact enough where students can actually get around and navigate and they had to have a little certain regulatory facility for us to be able to operate in the world of

2012 must mean they couldn't make the cut on those criteria at a future wage sure so one example is when we initially thought of where we would go istanbul was one of the cities we were considering but as we were thinking about it and as we actually selected and said oh yes let's go to istanbul. there was a point where turkey there was a suspension of academic freedom academics were jailed we couldn't go anymore and so istanbul became taipei. and so we have a dynamic system of what we do even though now that we have logged and actually been in the cities we don't plan to change any not only the students but also the c.d.'s at the college that need to make your cut now the final question you have kids did you would it be an absolute for you as a father if your daughter failed to qualify for minerva or eve they prefer that the old school school on their own accord well certainly the latter would be would

be. sad for me as far as qualifying for minerva qualified from a nervous hard we're the most selective university in the united states by far i'm sure he also investing in you and your daughter's age. but a supporter of it isn't for everybody the minerva model of education is for everyone by the time my daughters were 8 and 3 soon to be 4 will be going to university my hope is that they don't have one minerva to choose from my hope is that minerva will be coming here to moscow not so that 150 students will be able to show up here once a year but that it will be new universities or existing universities that will adopt the minerva system to educate their students and by the time my daughter is have to university to choose from my hope is that they'll have a 100 different minerva curricula to choose from and to find

a curriculum that is right for them while back and let's keep our fingers crossed for that thank you very much for coming over and do you consider moscow as your possible destination i'm sure your students will learn a lot and certainly they will get a big culture shock and this contributes just because good. education i guess absolutely you can keep this conversation going in our social media pages as for me and a team here again next sunday on worlds apart. good

food descriptions sound up even for the owners so how to choose the pet food industry is telling us what to feed our pets really more based on what they want to sell us than was necessarily good for the pet. food may not be. people believe we have animals that have you know diabetes in our shreyas they have auto immune disorders allergies we are actually creating these problems it's a huge epidemic of problems all of them i believe can be linked to very simple problem of diet and some dog owners so heartbreaking stories about their pets streets the larger corporations are not very interested in proving or disproving the value of their food because they're already making a good 1000000000 dollars on it and there's no reason to do that research.

over to morrow morning because in dramatic scenes the french president has rushed out of a paris they're selling their hail of booze as a fear is protesters chanting mccrone resign trying to confront him. with a russian computer program arrested in greece at washington's request pleas for help claiming he's been tortured and denied his basic rights. that russia mocks 77 years since the end of the siege of leningrad one of world war 2 is most appalling humanitarian disasters. for those all the headlines for now and that's it from me jacqueline vega will be here in the next hour to take you through the latest news.