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COLLEGE 101 is supposed to make the case for a liberal arts education for Stanford freshmen. In my experience, it has made a much stronger case for why students are frustrated with one.
The intention is noble: encourage students to take their education seriously, think beyond their careers, and consider what they owe society. At a time when dropping out is a popular option, that is an argument worth making.
But COLLEGE 101 undermines its own argument by treating the technology industry with such dismissiveness that it feels incompatible with the intellectual openness it claims to teach.
Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Palantir are name-dropped and criticized daily. Interpretations of Silicon Valley converge on “tech bros” and “AI slop.” There is a consensus that education, particularly the liberal arts, should include both exploration and self-reflection. Is the technology industry not a place where one can do both?
What’s concerning is the impression that pursuing a career in technology is something a liberal education should teach you to outgrow. Many students come to Stanford hoping to think more seriously about what they can contribute to the world. Why make them feel that the work they’ve already done belongs on the wrong side of that conversation?
Ironically, the first time I read COLLEGE 101’s first assignment, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was not at Stanford, but at Palantir Technologies as a part of their Meritocracy Fellowship.
When the allegory was introduced to us at Palantir, college education was analogous to the shadows on the wall, while gaining experience in the real world was akin to the light of the outside world.
For most of us, this was something we could see firsthand, as we were transitioning from memorizing formulas and textbooks for dozens of AP classes to building workflows for America’s largest hospitals.
In COLLEGE 101, however, students are taught that a liberal arts education is the only light outside. While the liberal arts generally broaden students’ perspectives, a curriculum that doesn’t consider technological progress does not. Too few are willing to see that COLLEGE might actually be the cave. Instead, they see AI and technological advancement as one.
During class, we were asked to think about AI in the context of Plato’s cave and place it as either the shadows, the prisoners, the objects, or the light. During a vote, the vast majority of students said that AI represented the shadows in the cave. I was overwhelmingly convinced it was the light.
AI is a forcing function for learning and pursuing projects that contribute to society. It matters now more than ever that students learn economically productive skills given the increasingly steep opportunity cost of forgoing them. As a school, we should be encouraging AI in classes like COLLEGE 101 instead of disparaging it.
When you have a class that overemphasizes the dangers of technology, you stifle the innovation that comes out of Stanford. You end up with hundreds of students walking out on graduation speakers like Sundar Pichai instead of aspiring to someday become him.
Rather than a Luddite course with an anti-tech agenda, we should factor AI into the conversation and think deeply about what pursuits enabled by AI might contribute to the future. Oftentimes, that impact is made in the tech industry, though professors don’t like to admit it.
Companies like Etched are pushing the Pareto curve to bring AI inference to millions of consumers. Solcoa Industries is chemically manufacturing metal from scratch to save the U.S. industrial base. But in COLLEGE 101, you might hear these companies are evil because they were funded by Peter Thiel.
Instead of weaponizing a class against AI and removing the technology from the classroom, we should be learning how to use it for good.
