Thoughts and prayers to the idiots at Burning Man. Welcome to Sunday Monday bites. We’re here coal mining all the market-shifting events, so you can ‘blue steel’ yourself to stardom.

Notes

Huge thank you to a couple of readers this week for cutting us deep in the early drafts of this email.

We’re thinking about back-to-school stuff and the future of streaming.

Let’s go.

WVU Spends its way into Oblivion

It's been a tumultuous year for higher ed, between public university systems hiring management consultants to streamline their curricula and an end to long standing affirmative action protections, and it's only going to get crazier from here.

Here's what we're reading & thinking about as summer draws to a close:

ChatGPT may prove to be a gamechanger in the college admissions essay game. Advocates say it'll democratize this aspect of the admissions process, effectively disrupting any advantage the moneyed elite may have previously had in the form of essay coaches, etc.

Detractors, and some university systems, think it'll be a serious problem and some of the latter have outright banned the use of generative AI tools on applications.

Here's our take:

We don't know.

-Management Consultants, slashing public university humanities departments.

WVU, a longtime bastion of intellectual freedom in the rural coal country wasteland that is West Virginia has hired some third-rate regional consulting firm called RPK (yuck) to evaluate solutions to a 45 million dollar budget shortfall.

Their answer to which, ChatGPT could have probably generated btw, is to slash 9% of its majors, including all foreign language departments, culminating in the proposed termination of 16% of its full-time faculty.

Paradoxically, the WVU's own financials show that their World Languages Department was profitable unlike their Schools of Social Work & their Physics/Astronomy Program which incurred operating losses.

What are we speculating?

• Could this misguided nonsense become a new blueprint for other mildly beleaguered university systems to follow?

• Is this just a long-range trend of STEM preference finally coming home to roost?

• Why are public land-grant university systems following a Wall Street suck-up playbook?

During the pandemic, data show, public university enrollment numbers were hit especially hard as more working or lower-middle class students opted to work through the economic disruption.

Private schools, during the same time period, actually saw a continuation of a slightly increasing trend of enrollment (on aggregate). However, in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency, public institutions appear to be taking back market share from privates.

Recent economic instability, paired with years of state-level budget cuts, resulted in an over $3 Billion decrease in public expenditure, between 2019 and 2020. This marks the first time ever in modern American history that this aggregate figure has dropped.

WVU may prove to be nothing more than a high profile patient zero in a trend of disruption of the US’s higher education ecosystem.

What’s the Streaming Service of the Future? Here are 5 points

1. We’ve been thinking about this quote a lot this week as we prepared to write this story. There’s 2 discarded pages of notes about Warner Brothers somewhere on this computer so we could make the point we're about to make now: Streamers like Max are going to be the future of how we consume content. 

2. Max, with its vague ass name, speaks volumes about the importance of distribution of content rather than the content offering itself. What WBD saw in HBO was not what we saw. It didn’t see highly curated, best-in-class content. It saw a selling point to draw in new subscribers and barrage them with a bunch of other Discovery+ content to grab our attention just a little bit more than the big guys.
   

3. We’re past curation. It’s about eyeballs. It’s about content hours to keep viewers’ attention. Evidence? Max is releasing a planned livestream of CNN flagship shows straight onto its platform.
   

4. We’re now shelling out just as much/maybe more to streaming companies as we did cable. So naturally, there has to be an inflection point in how we’re going to consume media.
   

5. Which is why you’re seeing so many moves happening in media right now. Whether it’s expanding content or getting into sports. Examples include:

   • Amazon airing NFL Games

   • Apple circling around ESPN

   • Netflix expanding its content through acquisitions

Jeez, just put it together for us:

What we’re seeing is the fight for the knife in the mud before eventual consolidation. It’s everyone with a tile on your TV saying ‘let’s make our libraries and services as big as possible, branding/curation be damned’. 

What that bundling is going to look like? Maybe it’s a company like Netflix releasing its own hardware, maybe getting into the literal production of televisions.

Or maybe it’s something like Apple TV. Apple’s interface is the only one that has the chops to integrate all this media seamlessly, and has a deep technical understanding of how to control the rails (App Store, iCloud). If you’re subscribed through different services, it’s incredibly easy to oscillate back and forth through libraries.

That could mean future licensing agreements with Apple and different content channels the same way cable companies have with channels like FX or MSNBC. That would fatten Apple’s wallet without the heavy lifting of ‘new hardware’ production.

But it won’t be a play for the masses. Apple is the ultimate self-expression of wealth and status when it comes to tech, and naturally prices towards the top 20% of this country.

So maybe Roku.

TL;DR

Just look at these two diagrams and you’ll get the gist.

What AI made this week

Have a great week!

Ahmed and Peter