Saturday, October 31, 2015

What should Apple do with its more than $205 billion in cash?

"...Apple should buy a university and rebuild it from the ground up.

Apple is a for-profit corporation not a charity but there are plenty of ways to make money from a non-profit university. Aside from the tax breaks and other deductions, Apple University would be a proving ground for educational technologies that would be sold to every other university in the world. New textbooks built for the iPad and its successors would greatly increase the demand for iPads. Apple-designed courses built using online technologies, a.i. tutors, and virtual reality experimental worlds could become the leading form of education worldwide. Big data analytics from Apple University textbooks and courses would lead to new and better ways of teaching. As a new university, Apple could experiment with new ways of organizing degrees and departments and certifying knowledge. Campuses in Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sao Paulo could provide opportunities for studying abroad. Apple’s reputation would attract top students, especially, for example, if it started with a design and business school. Top students would lead Apple University to be highly ranked. The more prestigious Apple University became the greater would be the demand for Apple University educational products.

...More than a century ago Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller used their industrial-age fortunes to build some of our best universities. Isn’t it time for another great university built for the information age?"

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/10/apple-should-buy-a-university.html

8 comments:

rhhardin said...

If they don't know what to do with it, don't do anything with it. It's not in cash but securities of some kind, which means it's already being used in its most productive use.

Maybe just Treasuries, but with all the regulation that might be the most productive use.

bagoh20 said...

Experimentation would be fine if it was sensible, but experimentation is exactly what has destroyed American education. Experimentation will not produce improvement unless there is respect for established knowledge, and principles like free speech, rule of law, individual rights, and truth. We definitely need change, and the campus model is due for updating, but the thing most needed is a return to the sensible values the West once championed. Without that we get what we have now: educated idiots, who know lots about an alternative reality that serves nobody and destroys our most precious discoveries hard earned over millenia.

bagoh20 said...

like spelling.

bagoh20 said...

Of course Hardin is right - the money isn't stuffed in a giant apple-shaped mattress. It is working at other companies where it is invested and producing monetary returns for Apple.

I do think an investment in a new kind of university is needed. Give some to Khan Academy.

deborah said...

From a link in the linked article:

"Apple has more than $205bn of cash in the bank, the company revealed on Tuesday as its chief executive Tim Cook said the firm had made more than $234bn in 2015, making it its “most successful year ever”."

The comments at the linked article are interesting, but I'm not up on Economics. They talked a lot about how Apple wants to/could bring the money back from abroad. (I only read the first several ones.)

bagoh20 said...

"Apple wants to/could bring the money back from abroad...""

Then vote for Trump. He's promising to make that feasible for companies like Apple who know the U.S. tax code is the enemy of us all.

Methadras said...

As an original stock holder myself, I've advocated for Apple to get rid of that cash immediately in the form of building their own technical centers and funding them for decades to come. Parents would kill each other to get their children into them and they would become the preeminent learning centers on earth. Free of any government intervention, they would have accreditation, and hopefully be free of unionization.

deborah said...

"preeminent learning centers on earth"

For some reason Starfleet Academy flashes in my head.