“Steve Jobs once said that, ‘I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year,'” Shawn Langlois writes for MarketWatch. “Now, some 20 years later, Apple can do something about it, according to Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University.”
“He detailed his idea for the company’s massive cash pile on the Marginal Revolution blog,” Langlois writes. “‘Apple has more than $205 billion in cash. What should they do with the money?’ he wrote. ‘Apple should buy a university and rebuild it from the ground up.'”
“Tabarrok’s concept involves a nonprofit entity striving to take a place among the world’s elite institutions,” Langlois writes. “He told MarketWatch in an interview that the current system is in need of an overhaul, and the next phase likely doesn’t include professors standing in front of students and conducting a “chalk and talk.” Much like Africa has leapfrogged landlines to cellphones, Tabarrok said, countries like China and India are ready to embrace the virtual future.”
“‘Universities have had a free ride for a long time, and it’s pretty clear that, in general, they’re not doing a great job,’ he said. ‘It’s a good time to rethink the current system,'” Langlois writes. “And who better to shake it up than Apple, which would also, of course, stand to benefit, business-wise, over the long term, even with nonprofit status.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tabarrok is a university professor, so naturally he’d like to spend Apple’s money on his line of work.
We’re content to let Apple spend its own cash however it sees fit, accountable to its shareholders as always.