How Stanford Took on the Giants of Economics

I like Stanford, but as I read this article I couldn&#x27;t shake the feeling that all of these gigantic academic dinosaurs are headed for extinction and simply don&#x27;t realize it yet.<p>The very force that has fueled Stanford&#x27;s prestige — the dynamism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — may ultimately strike the fatal blow against the existing university system. Anyone who bothers to look can recognize the gross waste and inefficiency in the existing arrangement that the federal government subsidizes through student loans: Education is more expensive than ever, and there are cheaper and cheaper alternative sources of information.<p>We have already reached the point at which you can educate yourself outside of the legacy institutions. In the future, someone smart will devise a better way to demonstrate the existence of the relevant skills to employers. The residual prestige of schools like Stanford or Harvard may seem durable, but it could evaporate overnight if suddenly all of the smartest kids in the country realized that ____ education startup was providing them a better opportunity for future advancement.<p>I predict that once this cultural phase shift occurs, the field of economics will also begin to decline, because so much mainstream economics research offers zero actionable insight for private actors. The parts that thrive will presumably be those with practical applications, like finance.

It&#x27;s not like Stanford had a sub-100 program and then started recruiting the best faculty. Some might even argue that Chicago (including its business school) has been just as influential as either Harvard or MIT. The top programs are Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. Penn, Berkeley, Yale and a few others are also in the conversation. Good for Stanford that they made a couple of senior hires, as they&#x27;ve strengthened one of their fields, but this isn&#x27;t big news. Stanford has never been an underdog.

Newspapers only know how to tell a few different narratives, so they feel the need to hammer everything into one of them.<p>In this case it&#x27;s &quot;plucky underdog takes on established titans&quot;, which you have trouble hammering into the narrative when your &quot;plucky underdog&quot; is Stanford.