The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Rebranding the Democratic Party + The College Affordability Crisis

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Scott Galloway breaks down Democratic Party branding strategy, why university endowments are hoarding wealth instead of expanding access, and which college degrees are still worth it in the age of AI. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Plus, you can now call or text Scott a question at our new Office Hours hotline: ‪[phone]‬. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is a part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to Office Hours at ProfGMedia.com. Again, that's Office Hours at ProfGMedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question one.

Our first question comes from Reddit user Goosneck 07, who asks, Do you think the Democrats should co-op the America first or Americans first as their brand in 26 and 28? Clearly, the current iteration of conservatism in America has not been America first. So this is a messaging opportunity for Democrats? It could be an opportunity for higher wages, less foreign intervention, no corruption, no nepotism, and better outcomes such as housing and health care. Would love your thoughts. Thank you. Hmm.

So it's kind of cute. Americans first? America versus Americans first? I think that's, I like it because it's kind of a play on what they said. America first has sort of come across is a little bit, I think it's backfired, because America first has sort of meant, let's put ridiculous weird tariffs on our allies, Canada, where 70% of their exports are coming into the U.S. The way I describe how Canada feels about us is from the movie Animal House when they let, or the guy lets his fraternity brothers borrow his parents' car, and they bash it up, and they bring it home.

And I think it's Otter. He says, you fucked up, you trusted us. And I think that's how a lot of our allies feel, becoming so interdependent upon the U.S. So I think it's a good play on words, and it depositions them. Effectively, what this is, is in branding we call it laddering,

and that is you drop the attributes of your competitive, and then you draw a comparison. So if you ladder Democrats versus Republicans, you'd go, all right, one is big government, one is small government, one is pro-fam. One is like pro-choice, one is quote-unquote pro-life. And then you just go through each, and then you ask yourself,

which of these is truly differentiated? You know, are we really, is, are the Republicans really small government? No, they've been as big government about spending as a Democrat. So you probably wouldn't want to hang your hat on that. One's pro-war, one's anti-war. Well, actually, Democrats have engaged in a lot of military interventions or adventures as well.

You try and find something where you're truly different. And then is it sustainable? Does anybody care? Can you own it? Can you own that? If you're fortunate enough to find an attribute that is differentiated, also relevant, can you own it? I would probably advertise fiscal responsibility, which should bring down interest rates, should bring down costs.

That does not fit on a bumper sticker. I like the word renewal. What do I mean by that? That's the word I love. We need to renew our alliances between our incredible allies, specifically in Europe and Canada, and renewed trust around the world. We need to renew the bond and the cooperation between moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans. We need to figure out a way to work together. This legislative Congress or this Congress has been the most inactive legislative.

Nothing gets done. They all hate each other. We elect crazies from the left, crazies from the right, and then put them in a closet and say, here, have a knife fight. It's just not working. And also renew the relationship between men and women. I think that's the greatest alliance in history, and it needs to be renewed. We need to do away with identity politics and start developing a greater fidelity for the flag.

I think mandatory national service, such that young people could stop identifying as a special interest group or a party, but identify as Americans, again. So I like the word renewal. I think the, I think if you will, the Americans first is sort of a cute turn of phrase that sort of depositioned them. But personally, I don't like referencing the competition. I don't like just OS. One of the things I don't like about Democrats is we need to evolve from indignance to ideas. Hating Trump and not being Trump is not a winning political position. It needs to be more than that. And that is 90 percent. I mean, let me describe the Democratic platform right now. Jesus Christ, can you believe what he just did?

That's essentially the Democratic platform. That's not, you know, the people who are angry, you're already voting Democrat. We're going to have to paint a vision for why the people in the middle want to vote Democratic this time. Usually, that's about economics. Those are the swing voters. They care about who's going to be what they think going to put more money in their pockets. But they're willing to engage in a policy around responsible fiscal spending, et cetera. So I think it's more, I love the word renewal.

I think what you're suggesting is sort of an interesting talking point that we need, you know, Donald Trump promised to put America first, but he, but, you know, what we really need to talk about is putting Americans first. I like that, but I don't think it's the rallying call. I think, you know, unfortunately I have to be able to put this on a bumper sticker. And I think the term or something around the notion of renewal is a little bit more powerful, a little bit more powerful, a little bit. but more optimistic and doesn't reference the competition. Generally in brand strategy, if you think of yourself as the market leader, which both parties think of themselves as,

you never, or you try not to reference the competition too much. Anyways, I think it's a really interesting discussion. I'm fascinated by it about how our brand positioning needs to evolve, how it needs to be more pro-growth. I mean, another good word might be growth, and that is start focusing on how do we unleash the economy make it work for everybody by investing in the middle class, which is traditionally been the engine of growth, if you will. So there's a bunch of different ways you could go, but I think it's going to be

a fascinating conversation. So where do I end up? Americans first is a great talking point, but I don't think it's the rallying cry of the bumper sticker here. I appreciate the question. Question number two. Hello, Jeff here from the Pacific Northwest. I have a question regarding university endowments. I've heard you say a few times that universities within a downment over $1 billion should increase their freshman class sizes and offer non-traditional education or lose their non-profit status. I'd like to understand more about how this would work. As contacts, I volunteer on a board at the university I attended, every time I raise the idea of using endowment funds, I get a response that essentially says, legally we can't touch it,

our hands are tied. Is this accurate? it, I'd appreciate some help on how to engage on this topic with a more important perspective. By the way, I'm a big fan about your latest book for both my sons and other young men in my life. Thank you for that. I plug to your other listeners. It is graduation season, and notes on being a man is a great gift for the young men in your life. Thanks again. Well, thank you for the plug and thanks for the kind words.

So just some data, U.S. universities collectively hold nearly a trillion dollars in endowed assets. a total of $944 billion across 657 institutions. Harvard's $53 billion endowment works out to more than $7 million for undergraduate student, and has grown roughly $2 billion a year since 2018, while class sizes stayed flat and tuition kept rising. What you mentioned, donor restricted funds do exist. If a donor's gift stipulates their specific use, the university must honor it. For example, Harvard has a divinity professorship endowed in 1721 that still dictate,

how those funds are spent. But restricted doesn't describe the whole endowment. At Stanford, over three quarters is donor restricted, meaning 25% is not. In practice, university spent about 5% of endowment assets per year. The governing framework in most states is the UPMIFA, the University Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act. It encourages restraint spending,

but does not mandate a specific payout rate. The 5% figure is more of an informant. industry norm as opposed to a legal ceiling. By contrast, private foundations are legally required to distribute at least 5% annually. Universities face no equivalent federal four. On taxes, so in some, private foundations have to spend their money at some point, but not universities. On taxes, the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act imposed a 1.4% excise tax on net investment income from private colleges with endowments exceeding a half a million dollars per student, a modest nudge affecting about 56 schools. So they said, if you're going to hoard wealth, you're going to have to pay some

taxes on the gains. Now, again, that tax is nothing like the tax that corporations or citizens pay on profits. But anyways, the one big beautiful bill signed July 2025, raised that to 8% for institutions with endowments over $2 million per student, hitting Harvard, Yale, Prince, and Stanford, and MIT. Now, that doesn't really encourage spending, if you will. It, it, What it, I mean, this like so many other things is basically, Trump has decided that these universities are centers of progressive ideology, and he sees them as an enemy. So his policies are more or less meant to go after them

and move them away from this progressive positioning. It's not an attempt to broaden the number of freshman seats, if you will. So Harvard, Yale, Prince, and Stanford, and MIT were hit here. and they haven't responded with larger freshman classes or greater spending. Harvard's endowment generated $2.5 billion in investment income in fiscal year 2024. But 8% of that is not, I don't know, it's not going to alter behavior. Look, in some, it comes down to this. I think what's infected universities' endowments is infecting America more broadly,

and that is the wealthiest among us and the wealthiest institutions are engaging in hoarding. And that is, they're more focused on building a big endowment. than they are in expanding the freshman class size. This is a hoarding, and that is they should be spending this money. Can you dictate where they spend it? I like to think so. I like the idea that you have to expand your freshman class size faster than population growth or your subject.

You know, you're no longer a public servant. You're a hedge fund with classes, and so why shouldn't you pay the same tax as a hedge fund pays? So I do think we need incentive to broaden the freshman class size. What really fucked this up? the Business Week university rankings because one of the criteria is selectivity. And the higher you go on the rankings,

the more inbound applications you get, the more selective you can become, the ranking goes up and you start this upward death spiral. So the LVMHing of the university system encourages universities to sequester supply. Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment. They let in, I think, 1,100 students.

And it's in the middle of nowhere. They could let in 5,000 and they wouldn't have to sacrifice quality and they have the money to do it, but they're Dartmouth. They see themselves as a luxury brand, not as a public servant, which is their decision. But if they're going to make the decision to be a luxury brand and not a public servant, they should pay the same taxes that a private company pays, I believe. But also that it has gotten too expensive to engage in what is the primary upward lubricant of income mobility. And that is education. So the key is how do we encourage universities to expand their freshman class size? In my view, the kind of big, beautiful bill, or I didn't like the student debt relief plan that Biden put forward.

I know it's populist and it would be great just to wipe out people's debt, but all that does is increase education prices. What do I mean by that? If you relieve that debt and the consumer, the student, and their families stop shopping for the best deal because who knows, take out debt and someday it might be wiped away. I think it creates moral hazard where people don't think about the debt they're taking out. They don't shop around for the best tuition and prices keep going up. Also, I just think it sucks to be a grown-up. If you're one of the third of Americans that had an opportunity to go to college and you borrow money, I don't think the other two-thirds that weren't given the opportunity to go to college should bail you out. What should have been done, in my view,

with that $750 billion would be a grand bargain with the university system. Grow your freshman class percent a year, reduce tuition 2 percent a year, and will give you the top 750 universities, on average, a billion dollars to expand your freshman class size, invest in technology, invest in new types of certification. What does that do? It means in 10 years you've effectively on an inflation adjusted basis, cut tuition at half, and doubled the university population or the freshman class size. In some, we want to go back to the future to where to when I went to college and tuition was manageable and admissions was reasonable. So we need to stop hoarding these endowments, spending it on plan, property, and equipment

that expands freshman class size. In addition for that capital to do these things, I think other types of, say, 20% non-traditional certificates. So more vocational programming, different types of certification. I think there's a lot that could be done here in terms of tax policy that encourages them to spend some of that endowment. So this is something I think a lot about. I've given my quote philanthropic efforts are focused on two areas, teen suicide prevention, and by far, though, expanding freshman class size or opportunities for students at great public schools.

I think another message from Democrats needs to be, don't go after universities for, I don't know, because they're woke, go after them because they're not letting in enough people. There's still no, if we had a drug that reduced suicide rates by 60%, increased your likelihood of getting married by 80%, cut in half the likelihood you would kill yourself, massively increased the likelihood that you decided to run for public office, doubled your income. If we had that pill, would we hoard that pill? Would we let the cost of that drug quadruple? Well, we have that pill. It's called higher education.

And all this bullshit narrative you hear from people that people don't need college anymore because of AI. That means Susie just blew the ACT because college, in my view, has never been more important to figuring out the critical thinking skills to control and leverage AI. Anywho, in sum, we need to stop hoarding what is a life-changing drug called higher education and figure out tax policies that encourage them to lower their costs, encourage them to expand their freshman seats. And some, our strategies should be go back to the future here, where unremarkable kids with 3.1 GPAs in 1130 on the SAT can get into a great school and show up to UCLA freshman year with $60 to their name and figure out a way to work their way through college.

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N-A member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Please borrow responsibly. Welcome back. Question number three is from Arthur on Instagram. What do you see is the future of undergraduate degrees, what will be worth pursuing in a few years? Hmm, all right. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates, age 22 to 27, ended 2025 at 5.6%. Well above the 4.2% overall rate and the highest December level for recent grads since 2020. This is unusual. Typically, the unemployment rate is much greater for non-college grads. It's the first time it's flipped in a while. That's probably a good thing.

Among employed recent grads, 43% were working jobs that don't require a college degree. That's the greatest share since 2020. Since late 2022, early career workers aged 22 to 25, in the most AI-exposed occupations, including software development, customer service, and accounting, have seen a 13% relative decline in employment, while workers 30-plus in the same field saw employment grow 6 to 12%. According to a Gallup poll,

42% of bachelor-degree students have reconsidered their major because of AI. 16% of currently enrolled students have already changed their major because of AI's potential to impact. Men are more likely than women to have done so, 21% versus 12%. That's probably CS degrees that tend to attract more men are switching out of computer science, which they probably hated,

but thought they would get them a easy $100,000 job. In 2024, nearly 630,000 job postings required at least one AI skill, up from 0.5% of all postings in 2010 to 2% in 2024 and spreading beyond tech and engineering business and management roles. The average trade school program costs $5,000 to $20,000 in total compared to $30,000 in student loan debt for the average bachelor's degree borrower. And some of their, they're starting to be better values because the salaries are just as high.

And trade grads enter the workforce two to three years earlier. The welding industry alone needs get this, 320,000 new professionals by 2029, with 160,000 currently nearing retirement. takeaway computer science is in a weird middle position so valuable long term but oversupplied at the early level entry jobs right now or entry jobs right now and humanity's generalist degrees are under genuine structural pressure that predates AI because they're expensive to get and you know come out with an automatic signal around who's supposed to hire you so what do I think I think your job in your 20s and when you're in college is to find something you could be great at I think it's okay to be a classics major or, you know, English lit, as long as you're really good at it, because if you can

write well, I think you can get a good job. I think the fastest growing job in tech is comms. So I think trying to predict where the puck is headed is really difficult. If you have a predisposition towards STEM and science, I still think most business and almost everything, ultimately versus engineers to biology and chemistry, so I think those are pretty good degrees to have. The sciences, I think, are going to explode. So, for example, when I was at Haas, the two best, the two jobs everybody wanted was to be a brand manager, to go be a brand manager, or to go into real estate, because real estate had boomed up until that time. Typically, grads are rearview mirror oriented. Then that is, the fields they study for are about at

pete and are about to get disrupted. So it's not a good proxy what students are doing in terms of the future. What I would suggest is just try and find your talent and find stuff that is useful. I would say at a minimum, take some science courses, some STEM. I'm a big fan of learning how to write, and more than anything, learn how to communicate, become a great storyteller. I think that's really the only one enduring skill I would bet on always, is that your ability to craft a narrative arc and they compel people to action or to feel something is super important. And also, it sounds passe, but if you have the blessing to go to college, I think you want to leave not only with certification, but as many relationships as possible. And there as many skills, interactions with

people, and as many, start building an asset base. They call it networking. But while you have the opportunity to just make those types of contacts, you know, the person who advances the fastest is going to be the one who not only has skills and finds what they're good at, but has a network of people they can call not only for downside when they need a job, but upside when they're doing really well and want to do deals with other companies or have good ideas and involve partnerships. It's a long-winded way of saying, I don't know, but no one else does either, where the puck is headed. We do know that relationships and storytelling, and to a certain extent, a basis and underlying foundation of being able to, in my opinion, write well and understand some basics around the

sciences, the kind of the building blocks of life, if you will, I think are going to be enduring. I appreciate the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours of propertymedia.com. That's office hours of propertymedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Camry is our social producer, Brad Williams is our editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropgeyPod from Propvgy Media.