We will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy. This institution will gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, [00:00:15] and make that material available to every American citizen online for free. Enjoy it, learn from it, and thank you. Donald Trump wants to make college free. Or at least make one college free. And it's a fascinating idea. I have to say. [00:00:33] I don't know if he's really serious about this. I don't even know if this could possibly happen considering how he would fund this university. But I want to give you the details. So he announced this newest proposal. It's a free university that he has dubbed the American Academy, [00:00:48] where people can learn trades or acquire a bachelor's degree in many fields. Of course, his reasoning for the proposal or basically creating this new system of higher ed is to kind of go against the grain in terms of the [00:01:04] traditional model for higher education, and he wants to reach out to and I think this is super smart, those who are economically disadvantaged, who can't afford higher education. So he wants this to be free for all. Here's his explanation for why he's proposing [00:01:20] this new form of higher education. In recent weeks, Americans have been horrified to see students and faculty at Harvard and other once respected universities expressing support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel. [00:01:36] We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they're turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can't let this happen. It's time to offer something dramatically different. [00:01:53] It will be strictly nonpolitical, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that's going to be allowed. Okay, so to be clear, he just referred to American students as terrorists. - Yes. - And listen, I get it. [00:02:11] Wokeness can be very annoying, but wokeness isn't really taught. Wokeness is more a lifestyle. I don't know if you can root it out of a college system, but what do you think about this was. I mean, I think he has good instincts in the sense that we need to make college [00:02:30] education more equitable, in the sense that more people being able to afford it. And a great way to do that would be to make it free. I don't think you can make anything unpolitical nonpolitical. And because, as you know, the political is personal. [00:02:48] So if you're a human being, you're going to have politics. And if you convene an institution that's comprised of human beings is going to be political in nature somehow, some way, like, like, again, I don't know that we need to be steering students in a particular political direction or not. [00:03:09] But, you know, I think I think that he's got he's got the right idea here in the sense that we need to make college education, bachelor degrees more accessible to people. The part about stopping terrorists and terrorist sympathies, and I don't know [00:03:27] where he's going with that one. Anna. Yeah. And look, also, calling these these once respected institutions is kind of funny. But I get what he means by that, right? I do get what he means by that. But anyway, I'll get into why I feel that way in just a moment. [00:03:45] But I want to get through the details of the story, including, well, how to fund this institution, because remember, it's going to be free for all students who get accepted to the American Academy. So how do the professors get paid? [00:04:01] How how is this going to operate? Now? He mentions that he's going to involve the private sector. The private sector ain't going to get involved unless there is a return on investment. Let's keep it real. Right? So that didn't really make sense to me. But then he had this novel idea of how to fund it. [00:04:18] Let's watch. Under the plan I'm announcing today, we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments. And we will then use that money to endow a new institution [00:04:35] called the American Academy. Its mission will be to make a truly world class education available to every American, free of charge, and do it without adding a single dime to the federal debt. Did the federal debt? No, I love that. [00:04:51] I mean, look, I don't know if this is even possible, right? Because. He would need, like you would need to rely on suing these institutions. Like what grounds would you sue them for or on and that would fund the university? It sounds like a shaky model to say the least. [00:05:08] However, I do want to mention that a lot of these elite colleges have an insane endowment. So for the most recent fiscal year, the value of the Harvard endowment stood at $50.7 billion. [00:05:23] That's billion with a B. Tuition, by the way, is $55,000 for students. So they have this massive endowment, but they're still charging that outrageous tuition, which means that the students are digging themselves into a giant hole with student debt as they're going to this institution. [00:05:42] And when they graduate, they start at a giant deficit. I mean, that's just the reality that American students are facing right now. And, you know, I do think that Trump has good instincts because he understands that there's a lot of frustration around this very issue. [00:05:58] And he's looked at the criticisms that Biden has gotten in regard to canceling student loan debt. And he's like, look, I mean, just putting a band aid on this problem, not really going to make people happy. What if I make college free now? [00:06:14] The way he wants to do it seems like there's a lot of magical thinking involved, but I kind of like where he's going with it. The instinct is good. Yeah, of course it's obvious that we should be investing in our people this way, investing in their education, investing in, you know, the latest cutting [00:06:31] edge of technologies of of all sorts. And by tech, I don't mean the latest Instagram AI app. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about life affirming, life changing technologies. Of course we should be investing in those people. But, you know, I suspect that the ruling class doesn't really want [00:06:50] a highly educated population because they'd be a lot more hip to the the awful, awful, awful management of our society by said ruling class. You know, I, I do think there's a little bit of truth to that. [00:07:06] I. But a lot of these companies are having a hard time finding workers. You know, that's fair. And when I say workers, I mean skilled workers. And look, the other thing I'll say is, I do think that there's been too much focus [00:07:22] on four year degrees and graduate school, like the traditional college model. And people have moved away from learning a trade, which for some people that's the way to go, right? Go to carpentry school. Go to a school that teaches you how to do plumbing or Hvac type stuff. [00:07:41] You can open your own private business where you do that work. I actually have a lot of admiration for people who know a trade and work in a trade. They work with their hands. They actually fix things. Electricians, you know, those types of jobs are super important. [00:07:56] And I think that there needs to be a little more attention paid to that area of education as well. And clearly he's thinking about that as he talks about this academy featuring programs for trades and also traditional bachelor's degrees, if that's [00:08:13] what these students want to pursue. And so who would be in charge of this? Trump campaign officials said they have yet to decide who would run American Academy, but said they would look to include private sector resources. [00:08:28] And they pointed to several potential models, including oversight by an existing government agency, a presidentially appointed board or commission, or a publicly funded private entity. A Trump Trump campaign official said. [00:08:44] It's a contrast with Joe Biden's plan for free college, which is to essentially wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt. This is a different way we need to have affordable options for college without spending trillions and trillions of dollars. [00:09:00] So look, I'm going to admit it sounds appealing, but I do think there's a lot of magical thinking involved here. And so I have to be real with you all on that. But I do wonder if we lived in the kind of society that had the type of government where you have good faith actors on both sides of the political aisle [00:09:18] looking at something like this and thinking to themselves, okay, what can we do to fine tune it? So it actually does work? Wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't it be great if we tried different models of higher education? Like, I get it, it's Donald Trump and I get the urge, the knee jerk urge to just [00:09:36] immediately brush him off as a lunatic. But if he proposes this and he says that his heart is in the right place. You could work with him to actually make this feasible. I don't know, maybe I'm being naive. What do you think was. [00:09:53] Trump has had decent ideas in the past, right? First of which being, yeah, we're not going to cut Medicare. We should probably be trying to expand that thing. Same with Social Security. So it's not like he hasn't had instincts for good ideas in the past. [00:10:10] It's just there's just no evidence that he would ever see something like this through. Even his pet project, The Wall. Once he got elected, he didn't even care about it. And not to say that that was a good idea, it's like a lot of his and the wall was something he said in every single speech, every single campaign stop, [00:10:28] every single time he was on TV. Like we all knew about the wall. We all knew Mexico was going to pay for it. Right. And then he got elected and it just, you know, it just fell by the wayside. So there's no evidence that Donald Trump is the kind of guy that would see something this massive through. [00:10:44] Thanks for watching the video, guys. 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