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Jay Hamilton knows his way around academia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Government as well as a doctorate in Economics, both from Harvard, and he’s spent much of his adult life teaching at prestigious institutions such as Stanford University, where he currently chairs the university’s journalism program.
Though he is also Stanford’s vice provost for Undergraduate Education and chair of the First-Year Requirements Governance Board, he has a question for incoming freshmen at The Farm and for that matter those headed to any institution of higher learning: You got in, now what?
That question serves as the title of the latest book by Hamilton, who has written extensively about the economics of the news business. Fortunately for incoming freshmen, he provides 100 answers of his own based on extensive research into people who have found success along their own journey through Stanford.
Recently, Hamilton sat down with Clay Lambert, peninsula editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation, to discuss the book and college life today. The following is a lightly edited transcription of that conversation.
Embarcadero: You’ve written a book for people — teenagers — who, famously, don’t read books. Explain that.
Hamilton: The book has many origins. One of them was thinking about that time before college, when you’ve gotten in and you’re starting to think about how you’re going to approach the next stage of your life. And I know that I’m competing with TikTok and YouTube in the construction of the book. So if you think about how the book is organized, it’s 100 one-sentence statements accompanied by a cartoon and supplemented by a 300-word essay. … I’m very much aware that we’re in an age of social media, and the idea is one sentence with a drawing and a very short essay. I think that it’s competitive in the market for attention.
Embarcadero: Also, even in 2025, students might expect some books in college.
Hamilton: But they do expect a digital copy. So, for instance, at the Admit Weekend, I spoke before about 1,000 parents and students, and President Jon Levin mentioned the book, and I immediately said, “This is not a product placement, because I didn’t want a conflict of interest.” I said, “If you send me an email, I’d be happy to send you a copy of the book.” I’ve had more than 85 emails. So I’ve sent out more than 85 books. … It was about 50-50 parents and students emailing me, but some of the folks expected a digital copy, so they were surprised when I said, “No, you need to tell me your mailing address so I can send you (a book).”
Embarcadero: It will be interesting to see what you hear back from any of those people, how they find it.
Hamilton: I’ve already heard from one person, the injunction, “What would you do if you could not fail?” has been transformative in how she’s thinking about her willingness to take risks and to start right now.
Embarcadero: Why did you write this book now? I mean, you’ve been in this field for a long time.
Hamilton: So, Stanford, a while ago, had what they called the Long Range Planning process where you could send in an idea. Close to 2,700 people sent in ideas about all aspects of Stanford. The suggestion I made was a book of essays by Stanford faculty that would be sent out to students before they arrived that talked about how professors viewed liberal arts education and how their own lives have been transformed by it. That idea was not adopted, but it got me appointed to a committee, which is what happens in academia. That committee eventually led to the formation of the COLLEGE Program at Stanford, the first-year program. But in the back of my mind, I thought, you know, I don’t have to try to ask people to write about how they view life and education. These are Stanford people. They’ve already done it. So I said, I’m going to read books by people from Stanford, by professors, alums, students. I started the project, and on Day 2 my credit card was canceled because I ordered over 200 books on the first day on Amazon from people who had gone to Stanford or were associated with it. Eventually, I read over 300 books. I read 40 years of commencement addresses. I went to the Stanford Daily and the senior reflections. And I have 500 pages of single-space notes from all of this. Out of that came the 100 lessons.
Embarcadero: I don’t know why that’s a much more rigorous process than I thought. So that explains, then, why it’s Stanford centric with quotes from people like alumni Sterling K. Brown and Issa Rae.
Hamilton: I wanted to write what I know. I thought it would be called “Cardinal Lessons” initially. But then I thought, you know, this is much broader (and works) even if you’ve never been to Stanford or never are going to come to Palo Alto. So I changed the title to, “You Got in, Now, What?” … There are over 140 people associated with the university one way or another in these stories.
Embarcadero: It may surprise some readers to know that even people who get admitted into Stanford feel like an imposter. Is that a universal thing?
Hamilton: Unless you’re a jerk, I think that the duck syndrome is real. That is the imposter syndrome at Stanford, the idea that you are in a beautiful environment and you’re placidly moving along, but underneath you are definitely paddling hard. I think that it’s something that drives people here. But one of the challenges of being an educator is we ask people to say who they are their senior year in high school, to give a vision of themselves. And then when they come here, if we’re doing our job, we’ll cause them to question that and reformulate it. And so one of the lessons from the book is don’t live another script. You know you’re going to be the author of your own life story. And your education really begins when you are open to changing your mind about what you want and where you want to go, and that goes against a lot of the pre-programming and parental pressure.
Embarcadero: You wrote that when you started school, you wanted to answer three questions: how you should live your life, what was the best form of government and is there a god. You were a more evolved 18-year-old than I was. Did you get your answers?
Hamilton: I’d still say that I’m a seeker or a searcher. In terms of the best form of government, I came away from “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville’s volume, believing that it revolves around self interest, well understood — that qualifier is (important). Tocqueville has this idea that you’re a farmer, there’s a road that’s going by your place that’s being built, you go out and you help build the road that’s going by your house. But that also then gives you an interest in the life of the community. So, reading “Democracy in America” was really impactful for me.
Embarcadero: One of the things that you say is that, though we are often told to follow our passions, it’s OK to not necessarily know what that passion is.
Hamilton: That could be a real straight jacket because if you look statistically most people don’t have a passion when they are in this age group. They have things that they might be interested in, but I think especially in your first and second years here, we are sampling. You should be taking things that you haven’t been exposed to before. When I came to college, I was pre-med, and then I had to take the social science requirement. I took an economics class, and just the clarity of thought, the framework, was transformative to me. And so I ended up being a different type of doctor. I got a PhD in economics. It is said that life is lived forward and understood backward. I think people, when they look back on their career, they might have said, you know, I found meaning in my life. Some people are very lucky. They find it directly in their work. Other people find it in their relationships with their family, the things that their work makes possible. And so, in the end, people report that it’s family, friendships, interactions with other humans that are extremely rewarding, even though, when you’re 18, you might be thinking I need to maximize my lifetime income.
Embarcadero: I would imagine that a fair percentage of students here are not following their passion. They feel a responsibility to maximize this opportunity.
Hamilton: Yeah, it’s the deferred life model, but sometimes it’s based on misinformation. Suppose you told me economic security is really important to you. It’s true that the median lifetime earnings of a computer science major are greater than the median lifetime earnings of a history major or philosophy major. But, if you look at the 95th percentile of departmental majors, history and philosophy majors out-earn CS majors, and there are a couple reasons. One is that CS skills can degrade over time. And the second is the critical thinking skills that you learn in those (liberal arts) disciplines set you up to go to law or business school or to be a manager and earn more down the road, if you take earnings as a measure of returns on a career. And so I think again, people have more freedom than they realize. Would you rather be compromising and pursue a career where you don’t excel, you’re sort of at the median, versus saying, I’m all in on this particular thing.
Embarcadero: You warn freshmen that they won’t always be happy. What do you think kids are coming to school expecting, and what do they actually get?
Hamilton: Sometimes they expect constant success, and that can make them risk-averse, unwilling to try a new topic, try a new class. One of the lessons in the book is to expect setbacks. I talked about somebody who got a D in genetics or a C in first-year writing or a C on their first writing essay. And that was U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. That was Atul Gawande, MacArthur Genius Award winner. And that’s Stewart Brand, National Book Award winner. Where you start isn’t where you’re going to end up. And so having what Carol Dweck famously calls the growth mindset, where you look at something not as a referendum on your intelligence, but as a chance to stretch and grow, (is important). This ability to stretch and challenge that’s hard in a world where, again, going back to this idea of the duck syndrome or effortless perfection, it seems from social media as if everybody else is having this tremendously happy and unanxious experience.
Embarcadero: You quote someone speaking of a U-shaped curve of happiness. Where you start and end high with a dip in the middle. Is that universal?
Hamilton: You come in freshman quarter and students realize that they should almost make becoming part of a community and making friends an additional class. So they’re willing to invest the time in making friends and then some of that newness wears off, and you’re getting challenged sometimes for the first time, and that can be hard. So that’s the bottom and then you get better. You get better at your classes. Classes also become smaller too. You’re … getting more confident. I will say, especially in maybe that winter of frosh year, students note they are feeling this discomfort. Is it me? Is it the college that I’m at, or is it college in general? Almost all the time, if you really talked to other people on campus you would see that they’re having similar struggles. And it’s usually not the college; it’s college in general that they’re adjusting to.
Embarcadero: As we speak, we’re outside of Green Library. You write about the importance and pleasure of reading books. How do you make that case to people today?
Hamilton: In our first year COLLEGE program, in the fall, there’s the class “Why College?” In the winter, it’s a class on citizenship, and in the spring it’s a class on global perspectives. Students have to take two out of three. What … I’ve found, first of all, if you ban electronics in (these) classes, you get more engagement. So no laptops. I’ve personally banned electronics since the year 2000 and I don’t use PowerPoint. I have a board and I have a marker and I have my voice. It’s not for everyone, for every discipline, but if you ban electronics, you’re no longer competing with YouTube. And then in terms of the reading, ex post, people will say, I didn’t think I was going to like this class on the nature of education or citizenship because it was required. But you know what, you get out of it, what you put into it, and having done the reading now that you put me in this class, I actually am very happy that I was here.
Embarcadero: No. 76 is “The Rules of the Road are Uneven,” meaning not the same for all of us, which feels both obvious and sort of like a political statement these days. Is that a dangerous thing to say today?
Hamilton: I think that’s a recognition of two things. One is college can be, depending on where you go, one of the most diverse places you’re ever going to see. There’s great social science research that shows that if you have 10 people around a table and they have to make a group decision, it’s going to be better if people came from different pathways, if they have different perspectives, because you’re all adding information. The examples from that rule show that people are treated differently systematically, still, by institutions in America based on their race, and that that’s an important thing to know. In our own journalism program, (Hearst Professional in Residence) Cheryl Phillips had a project called the Open Policing Project, where they looked at over 160 million police records from across the country, and they found this effect of who got pulled over by the police by race depending on time of day. They look at dusk. If you compare the hour before dusk with the hour after, people of color are much more likely to be pulled over before because you can see in the car, and it can activate all sorts of biases. I think that, yeah, it’s still important to say that we come through different roads.
Embarcadero: What is college going to look like 25 years from now? Is it going to be essentially the same with maybe some cosmetic changes, or will AI upend everything, or the economics of it all change?
Hamilton: I’d be extremely happy if I could answer that question for five years from now (because) the social compact with Washington is being renegotiated. The post-World War II support for research is being called into question fundamentally. At universities, where research is a central part of what people are doing, if the federal government backs away from that research, it’s going to have an effect on undergraduate education. There are going to be fewer graduate students, and there’s also going to be less opportunity for undergraduates to do research. So over the next five years, how that compact gets negotiated is going to be central. The second thing is how people incorporate AI into their learning lives. You can use it as a substitute or a complement. As a substitute you might generously call it cognitive offloading, asking AI to do your work for you. Summarize this book, give me 500 words that I can note in the seminar discussion. You can get the answer, but you miss the self-transformation. On the other hand, you have a set of people here as researchers, whose work is being multiplied by 10 because of AI. So the challenge for students and for teachers is, how do we teach you self-transformation? How do we teach critical thinking? And how do we teach you to use critical thinking and AI to multiply what you’re capable of? And right now, it’s a real experiment, because the class of 2029 that we’re going to welcome in September has had two years on generative AI, so they will have missed out — some of them — on this experience of staring at a piece of paper, looking at a puzzle, challenging themselves over what questions to ask. If I knew the answers to those questions, what’s the social compact going to be with government and how can we teach critical thinking in an era of AI, I’d be very happy over the five-year period.
Embarcadero: Is that something that people in your position think about a lot — the future? Or do you just get up and face this day?
Hamilton: I really do. I mean, parents are very helpful. I had a parent come up at Admit Weekend and say, “Do you think you’ll be irrelevant in two years?” That was the timeline they gave me. Especially as an economist, I think constantly about what our value add is. The opening chapter of the book talks about the seven goals for a liberal arts education. Your degree is a signal to your future productivity. That is definitely true, and there are other things that the market rewards, like your critical thinking skills or the network that you build, or the domain-specific knowledge that you get. But the reason we’re a nonprofit are those last three of the seven goals, moral self development, trying to figure out the nature of a good life, or citizenship, the fact that you’re all going to live in a community and face a choice about whether you want to contribute to public good, and then intrinsic level of learning, that basic research question. And so when I look at academia, we’ve had this really great run where we’ve been able to mix the market-driven incentives of critical thinking and signaling with the nature of your good life and how we can make folks better citizens and how we can give you that great freedom to just solve puzzles. What we’re seeing with the dissolution of the compact (with Washington) is challenging because the combination of teaching and research is what has made it such a Nirvana. Seeing the renegotiation, and seeing where we land, that does keep me up.
The Palo Alto Weekly will offer extensive coverage of local high school graduations, including photos from graduation ceremonies, interviews with graduates and lists of all graduates beginning June 6. Look for the Graduation button on the homepage to find all the coverage.
Editor’s note: This version corrects the spelling of Stanford President Jon Levin.
