Andrew Yang on Education Democratic Presidential Challenger & Tech CEO

Extend Universal Pre-K to three-year-olds

New York has some of the greatest teachers in the world. We should be using the remote learning tools now in greater use to give them a platform to enrich students around the city and the country. We should take video and curricula from teachers who are particularly strong at creating remote lessons and make them available to students across the City. This can potentially be a revenue driver for our city too, if expanded to the state/country.

Giving families money will improve educational outcomes

Forgive "significant portion" of student loan debt

Andrew believes community college should be funded at a level that allows it to be free or nearly free. For other higher education, Andrew believes we, as a country, over-prescribe college and should be focused on providing alternative pathways for students, such as apprenticeship and vocational programs.

Would allow compensation for collegiate athletes

I am pro-good-school; pay teachers more; use tests less

YANG: Let me be clear, I am pro-good school. I've got a kid, one of my little boys just started public school last week. So, we need to pay teachers more, because the data clearly shows that a good teacher is worth his or her weight in gold. We need to lighten up the emphasis on standardized tests, which do not measure anything fundamental about our character or human worth. But here's the big one: The data clearly shows that 65% to 70% of our students outcomes are determined outside of the school. The answer is to put money directly into the families and neighborhoods to give our kids a chance to learn and our teachers a chance to teach.

College shouldn't be free

While candidates agree something needs to be done to address the rising cost of college, not all are ready to sign onto tuition-free or debt-free college proposals. Yang has called for a number of other steps, including mandating how much colleges that receive public funding are allowed to raise tuition each year and threatening the tax-exempt status of schools that aren't doing enough to keep costs down.

Offered high pay for teachers in earlier business

Pay teachers enough to attract and retain the best

Reimagine college in the age of automation

In 2011, everyone began talking about massive open online courses (MOOCs), and many believed they were going to revolutionize education. Instead these MOOCs kind of flopped. Only about 4 percent of students completed the average course. In one case, an online math course was found to be less effective than a remedial college class in person and scaled back. People (still) learn from other people.

Improving teacher salaries improves student success

Problems to be solved:
• Teacher salaries in this country are too low to incentivize potential teachers with great skill but other options
• Teachers don't have a strong monetary incentive to continually improve their craft

As President, I will...
• Work with states to fund their educational systems to improve teacher salaries and reduce layers of administration, leading to better educational outcomes

Require colleges to cut administrative costs

As President, I will...
• Explore a gradual phase-in of a desired ratio of administrators to students of 1 to 30 as a condition of public funding as opposed to the current 1 to 21. The ratio was 1 to 50 in the 1970s --if we can get back to that level then college will be much cheaper.
• Stipulate that any university that receives public funding cannot increase its costs by more than the rate of annual median wage growth.
• Modify the U.S. News and World Report rankings and eliminate the ability of any university to compensate administrators with incentives tied to their rankings.

Later graduation makes more entrepreneurs

This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, "When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative."

In this United States, many college seniors have been students continuously for seventeen years, with their professional experience limited to a summer internship or two.

College career services should identify growing "new firms"

You improve what you measure. Ideally, national universities would pool resources to invest in an agency that would act as a clearinghouse and ensure that a level playing field exists between firms large and small. Our national universities are publicly funded and supported; at a minimum their tax-exempt status saves them hundreds of millions of dollars per year. What their graduates do should be regarded as an official goal and a public policy concern.

Universities and MBA programs ought to fund postgraduate scholarships for and forgive the loans of any honors graduate who starts or joins a qualifying early-stage business upon graduation.