Michael HornCo-founder and Chairman, Christensen Institute

Why Computers Went Universal—but College Didn’t

14 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:23

In this segment of the video, Michael Horn and a co‑speaker discuss how higher education mirrors the healthcare industry's approach to affordability. Citing Clay Christensen, they argue that both sectors focus on subsidizing expensive services rather than fundamentally redesigning them to be affordable. Horn critiques the current higher‑education policy of subsidizing costly college degrees and calls for a radical redesign of degree structures to make them more accessible and affordable. The conversation also notes a recent shift: many former advocates of a "college‑for‑all" model are now questioning its value, highlighting the irony of pushing universal college access without addressing underlying systemic costs.

The computer definitely is. And that's an interesting contrast to examine.
Yeah. And I guess the point, right, Clay used to always say this, and he was— Clay Christensen would talk about healthcare and he'd say, what we've been trying to do is allow people to afford what is an expensive healthcare, as opposed to ask the question, how do we make healthcare itself fundamentally affordable?
And
we've done the same thing in higher ed. We've asked, how can subsidy and so forth allow people to access what is fundamentally in most places still an expensive college degree, as opposed to how do we radically remake that degree and make it more affordable and accessible?
And this is what's so ironic because in the last couple of years, there's been a whole lot of dialogue around the idea that college for all is not actually such a good idea. The same folks who were proponents of college for all 10 years ago, 15 years ago, are now Proverbially off the bandwagon. Yeah.
I mean, look at my co-host at Class Disrupted, Diane Tavner, like famously 100% of their students at Summit go into college and she's sort of like, I think we had the wrong goal. Like we need to be looking at economic mobility and things of that nature, much wider prism of pathways.