SAN FRANCISCO – Gavin Newsom’s staff didn’t want him to give this talk.
How would it look, they feared, if California’s lieutenant governor – someone who sits on the boards of the University of California and California State University systems – appeared on stage with the CEO of a controversial start-up working to upend college education?
He did it anyway.
“This is code red,” Newsom said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference this week, speaking in no uncertain terms about how he feels about the state of higher education. “We have to do something dramatic.”
What exactly that means, of course, is still anyone’s guess. But Newsom agreed to debate it with Sebastian Thrun, the co-founder of Udacity, a company that creates online college courses focused largely on science and technology.
The future of college is the topic du jour in this back-to-school season. Amid fears of rising tuition costs and declining state funding is the concern that colleges are simply not preparing students well enough for the working world.
Newsom said institutions had to change their approach to meet the needs of companies like Google, Twitter, Salesforce.com and others – or risk becoming irrelevant.
"It reminds me a bit of Kodak," Newsom said on stage. "You have to wake up before the world that you've created is competing against you."
Thrun went even further, saying that colleges had graduated far too many liberal arts majors and not enough with computer science degrees or programming skills. “Very few of the companies are saying we need more psychologists or English majors,” Thrun said. “They’ll come to me and say, look, ‘Give us tech.’”
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