Marc Andreessen: Foreign Enrollment At Top Universities Has Grown From 3% To A Majority Over the Past 50 Years | Video | RealClearPolitics
MARC ANDREESSEN, ENTREPRENEUR: Nobody wants to talk about, but I’ve started to talk about, the intersection of DEI and immigration that has really, I think, warped, I think, our perceptions on high-skilled immigration over the last 50 years. You look at, like, the foreign enrollment rates of the top universities, which went from, you know, like, two or three or four percent 50 years ago to whatever, 27 or 30 or 50.
JOE LONSDALE, HOST: Columbia’s over half, right?
ANDREESSEN: 70% or whatever it is. And so there’s been this massive transformation in who gets educated, and then there’s been this massive transformation of who gets admitted through DEI, through affirmative action, and then, you know, as we now know at DEI. And again, this goes straight to the political divide in the country, which is, if your parents have a kid where I grew up, and you’ve got a smart kid, and you think you’re gonna get them into, you know, a top university in this country, like, you are fooling yourself…
There is this really fundamental question, which is, like, what level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have basically cut out of the loop for the last 50 years, and how long can we have this, you know, story to everybody in the Midwest and the South that says, you know, sorry, you’re, you know, because of historical oppression, your kids are SOL.
This has been getting true for a while. My kids who had perfect grades and very high SAT scores, had no chance of getting into an Ivy, as I lack the connections and they lack the genetics. There was no separate box for “Atlantic Islander.” They ended up at Cal where they got a “good education.” Cal for example has the number 2 ranked Classics department compared to Harvard’s number 1. One son majored in classics and graduated summa. But there are of course no jobs you would want in Classics, so he did another computer related degree after he graduated.
When applying to colleges out of high school, Harvard and others still asked them to apply — “please send us the application fee and we’ll send you an awesome rejection letter.” But eff Harvard. I’m not doing that.
The entire system is screwed up. I don’t know if it can be fixed. I hope so.