Higher Education’s “Napster Moment”
Annals of Disruption: will a new initiative from Sal Khan change college forever? Plus, dueling tradwife articles, “Spider-Man” and “Ted Lasso” trailers, and more! (Issue #210)
Before we get to today’s main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…
My business travel once again got the best of me and I missed last week. Since I’ll be traveling again next week, the next Dispatch will come out Sunday, June 28th.
Dueling “tradwife” stories
The New York Times ($) profiles Hannah Neeleman’s new Ballerina Farms store in Midway, Utah. Neeleman is a Juilliard trained mother of nine who is an influencer extolling the virtues of being a tradwife. The fact that her husband is the son of the founder of JetBlue and is worth $400 Million shows that she is far from a tradwife: she is a Martha Stewart-like businesswoman with a large staff to help her create the illusion she is selling.
As the NYT article shows, lots of women are buying into the story: the new store is a success. It’s another impossible standard, the mom equivalent of photoshopped Instagram images that play into the insecurities of teen girls.
Meanwhile, The Atlantic article, “The Unglamorous Truth About the Average Tradwife: Most stay-at-home moms simply can’t afford child care,” talks about the economic precarity that is the reality of moms who run the household.
Marketplace had an interesting story about how teens are less interested in being summer camp counselors because it doesn’t look good on a college application. In response, summer camps are making that work look more like internships. It’s worth a listen. (It also connects with the main story, below.)
From the U.K.’s Grocery Gazette, GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have wiped out over a billion dollars (£780m) from what Brits spend on groceries.
Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files in today’s NYT Sunday Magazine ($) is based on reporting from a forthcoming book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. I can’t say that I enjoyed Haberman’s 2022 book Confidence Man because the subject matter was so chilling, but I couldn’t put it down. I look forward to reading the new one.
R.I.P. Anthony Stewart Head. I loved him in Buffy and Ted Lasso, and also in those old Nescafé commercials. I wonder if he’ll be in the new season of Ted Lasso coming to AppleTV in August? Variety obit here.
This week’s main story is about disruption and higher education. My colleagues at the Center for the Digital Future, Jeffrey Cole and Harlan Lebo, have a book about disruption coming out on September 22—Disrupters at the Gate: When visionaries, trailblazers, and two guys in a garage turn the world upside down. Watch for it or pre-order it now!
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On the lighter side…
James Spader on The Tonight Show: it’s 10 years old, but James Spader talking about his friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and one embarrassing story is worthwhile… particularly because it would still be a good story even if the folks in it were not famous.
The first trailer for The Social Reckoning, a sequel to the 2010 movie The Social Network, came out this week. It looks good.
Likewise, I’m excited about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which comes out in July. Here’s the trailer.
On to our top story...
Higher Education’s “Napster Moment”?
An April story about the new Khan TED Institute (KTI) had a moment then faded away. It deserves a second look.
KTI is the brainchild of Sal Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, TED, and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), alongside what Khan, in his announcement video, calls “corporate thought partners” (a bloodless phrase) including Microsoft, Google, Bain, Accenture, and McKinsey.
KTI’s first offering will be a $10,000 bachelor’s degree in Applied AI. It will take two to three years for students to complete the degree. Coursework will mostly be asynchronous and AI-driven. Progress will depend on mastering skills rather than completing courses. The corporate thought partners will help to define the skills that graduates will need to get jobs.
At first blush, this is both a) a good idea, and b) nothing new. Google launched “Google Career Certificates” back in 2020 along the same lines, promising a six-month duration of classes that would then qualify candidates for in-demand jobs at Google and elsewhere.
What is new about KTI, and what surfaced in the April coverage, is that it is seeking academic accreditation.
This is a big deal. It distinguishes KTI from the many courseware, EdTech, MOOC, corporate Learning and Development platforms, iTunes U, The Great Courses, numberless videos on YouTube, and other unaccredited instructional ventures that emerged over the past few years.
Instead of a nice certificate of completion that a student can print out or pin to a LinkedIn page—but which does not translate into any other educational currency—if KTI gets accredited its courses will participate in the currency of academic credits, allowing coursework from other universities to translate into KTI and KTI credits to translate out to other universities.
All currencies are consensual hallucinations; the hallucinations are powerful moats that keep some things inside and some things outside. Every other new form of education since the dawn of the web has not been able to get inside.
To see why this is a big deal, it helps to look back to 1999, when the music biz faced its own industry-shattering disruption.
How Napster changed everything
Before Napster burst onto the scene, the record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA, the industry trade association) controlled how music was created, packaged, distributed, and purchased.
In what my colleague Jeffrey Cole calls “extortion,” the labels and RIAA sold albums, tapes and CDs containing a dozen songs that a customer had to buy in order to get the song or two that she really wanted. Music lovers could create mixtapes for friends that combined songs from different albums, but that took time and effort. (It was also a way to convey romantic interest.)
Then came Napster. The platform allowed music lovers with internet-connected computers and CD-ROM drives to digitize (or “rip”) music from their CDs and upload the songs as individual mp3 files to what today we’d call the cloud. Other Napster users could download the mp3s for free.
Napster had no revenue model, was flagrant piracy, and triggered immediate and bloodthirsty lawsuits from the labels and RIAA. In its original peer-to-peer form, Napster only survived until 2002, but the damage was irreversible. The extortionist 12-song container was gone (as was, sadly, the album as a Pet Sounds-like whole greater than the sum of its parts). The atomized new container was an mp3.
The music biz story was far from over. From Napster emerged iTunes (which legitimized individual mp3 purchase), and from iTunes emerged Spotify (which replaced purchase with streaming).
What’s important about the KTI / Napster comparison?
Back in 1999, nobody sympathized with the record labels and RIAA. There was a Robin Hood glee to sticking it to the labels who had pillaged our savings accounts for so long. Plus, it was well known that the labels shafted the artists, the people who created the music. For every superstar act that made millions there were thousands of musicians who couldn’t make a living. As Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow showed in their remarkable 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism, not much has changed since.
The labels drove up prices, screwed the people doing the actual work, and made customers spend more money and time than they wanted to spend.
Sound familiar?
Today, even the most cost-effective university degree costs a lot more than $10,000. Between 1980 and 2025, the cost of higher education increased by 1,249.85% at a rate nearly twice the general inflation rate. $20,000 of education in 1980 cost $270,000 in 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The most elite undergrad degrees recently crossed the $100,000 per year mark.
Plus, a bachelor’s degree typically takes four years to achieve.
Like Napster with music, KTI shatters the typical four year container and is a bargain. It’s also far more get-a-job-oriented than the typical undergraduate degree.
Also like Napster, customers (that is, students) won’t have empathy for university administrations. The comparison looks like this:
If KTI both gets accredited and achieves any measure of success, fast followers will flood the higher education market with more options.
I have happy memories of college and think it was a good investment, but that is not the majority opinion today. In an eye-popping study from Indeed, 51% of Gen Z college graduates think their degrees were a waste of time and money; 68% think they could do their jobs without a college degree.
Knock-on effects
Over the last few years, smaller college have begun closing up shop because they can’t compete with cheaper online degrees. KTI and its followers will add pressure to these struggling schools.
Community Colleges will also suffer, especially those that are pipelines to four year universities with a value proposition under evolutionary pressure.
In a classic example of The Innovator’s Dilemma, today’s colleges and universities are unlikely to pivot fast enough to compete.
It’s obvious that KTI is bad news for today’s colleges and universities.
A more important question is “who is it good for?” Time will tell.
Thanks for reading. See you Sunday, June 28th.
* Image Prompt: “Create an image of the word ‘Napster’ dissolving into the words ‘Higher Education.’”
Links and Further Reading
April coverage of KTI from:
Sal Khan’s KTI announcement video on YouTube.
Google Career Certificates (Inc. Magazine, Aug 19, 2020)
I talked about mix tapes and the movie High Fidelity, among other things, in this 2015 column.
I wrote about Chokepoint Capitalism here.
Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Indeed study about Gen Z unhappiness with their degrees.
Always a delight to read your thoughts, Brad. I spend a lot of my time just emphasizing that reading can be fun, that understanding history is worth the effort, and that ideas that require more than 10 seconds of thought might deserve the extra effort. I tip my hat to folks who teach high school, as I'm sure that their lives have changed dramatically.
I found the KTI/Napster analogy provocative, and I think you’re right that accreditation changes the stakes. Once a program can convert skills into academic currency, it stops looking like another certificate platform and starts looking like a serious challenge to the four-year degree. Your point about the “container” matters.
My hesitation concerns what gets lost when the container shrinks. A $10,000 Applied AI degree designed with Microsoft, Google, Bain, Accenture, and McKinsey as “corporate thought partners” sounds useful, but it also sounds perilously close to job training with a bachelor’s-degree wrapper. That approach might help students get hired, and given the cost of higher education, I don’t want to dismiss that benefit too quickly. Nevertheless, a university degree has traditionally promised something more awkward and less market-aligned: historical memory, political imagination, moral argument, slow reading, and the capacity to ask who benefits from a given system.
I suspect KTI will teach students how to work effectively inside institutions. I doubt it will spend much time with Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire, labor history, anti-colonial thought, or other traditions that train students to recognize domination and organize against it. That absence matters. A degree in Applied AI that teaches students how to satisfy employers might produce capable workers, but it probably won’t produce many people prepared to challenge employers, platforms, or the social arrangements those technologies reinforce.
So I share your sense that higher education has made itself vulnerable. Universities have become too expensive, too slow, and too complacent. (Don't get me started on the Vice Provost of Pencil Sharpening.) But I’m uneasy about treating corporate-defined efficiency as the cure. The old university model deserves pressure. The replacement might deserve suspicion too.
Thanks for inspiring me to rant a bit. Nice work!
Another great newsletter, Brad! Do we hold college professors in any part responsible for not delivering education that changes lives in 2026 more than they are? Perhaps liberal arts are just really up against a big challenge vs economic precarity and general cultural nihilism, and I didn’t feel transformed by college myself, but come on!