Supercharging Universities

In my previous post, I introduced a framework for identifying high-impact problems and teased what I believe to be a high impact problem: supercharging universities.

The following paragraphs summarise my thoughts on why I believe this challenge fits within the four key questions of the 80,000 hours framework:

1. Why is it an important or pressing problem?

Universities have global reach, expansive infrastructure and an incredible wealth of collected talent. And whether stated explicitly or implicitly, the key goal of most universities is broadly the same: to prepare the next generation for the future ahead.

I'm quite convinced by longtermist arguments for doing the most good you can do. And I believe that the goal of preparing students for the future ahead (along with many of the other goals universities have) cut across many, if not all, existential risks and risk factors and directly impact many areas of human flourishing.

Even if you don't buy longtermist arguments, I think there is still a strong argument to be made for universities being critical to improving the human condition for those alive today.

2. How effective is our solution?

Large amounts of learning and teaching is done extremely inefficiently. There are many teaching processes that waste enormous amounts of students’ and educators’ time and energy. If we can save instructors just 1% of their yearly teaching time and make the learning process just 1% more effective for students we will collectively generate enormous amounts of value.

We have good reason to believe this is possible too as there are a number of common workflows we’ve identified that are either unsupported by software, extremely clunky or prohibitively expensive.

Scaling up these evidence-based teaching practices could provide a huge amount of value to educators, students and the world they go on to influence.

3. How much leverage can we apply?

Software is one of the few things that can provide a huge amount of value while also being relatively easy to scale. There is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 250 million university students today and no reason I can see that our software shouldn’t be within the reach of every one of their instructors.

4. Are we the right people to do this?

I think we are the right people to work on this for two reasons:

1. We have been lucky enough to grow up surrounded by incredibly thoughtful and intelligent people who have bought into and are working to deliver this vision.
2. We are all naturally curious about design, engineering, education, psychology and philosophy and, we’ve been lucky enough to spend almost 10 years thinking about and building educational software for universities.

In my next post I explain what this software might actually look like.