Freakonomics Radio Releases Its 500th Episode With Series On Higher Education

 500 is a Harshad number, meaning that it is divisible by the sum of its digits. 500 is the most common number of laps in a NASCAR race. Monkey is slang for $500. 

500 is also the number of episodes released by Freakonomics Radio. That's an amazing accomplishment, considering that 25 percent of all podcasts only have released one episode. Freakonomics Radio has done it 500 times.

The big-round-number episode kicks off a new four-episode series on the state of higher education called “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.” The first episode is out now, with future episodes dropping weekly on Wednesday nights across all podcast platforms.

 

 “Over the years, we’ve done several episodes about higher education, and we find ourselves coming back to this fundamental conflict: college is incredibly valuable for individuals and society, but it’s still a somewhat rarefied activity, and even a shrinking one,” host Stephen Dubner says in the first episode. “So we wanted to go back to first principles, and ask a very basic question: What, exactly, is college for?”

To answer this question, Dubner speaks with university presidents, academics, and economists, exploring related questions like:

• Do people go to college to learn, or to get a degree?

• Why are more women going to college than men?

• If the demand is there, why don't elite colleges increase supply?

Entering its twelfth year as one of the most popular podcasts on the planet, Freakonomics Radio has hired Slate's former podcast chief Gabriel Roth as editorial director and celebrated being the subject of the first-ever digital podcast channel on SiriusXM.

The flagship Freakonomics Radio has been joined in the past few years by the podcasts No Stupid Questions, a show exploring the weird and wonderful ways in which humans behave, with hosts Dubner and research psychologist Angela Duckworth; People I (Mostly) Admire, a show where Dubner’s Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt interviews other unorthodox high achievers; and Freakonomics, M.D., a show exploring the intersection of economics and healthcare with Harvard physician and economist Dr. Bapu Jena.

And coming next month: Off Leash, Freakonomics Radio Network's first new show of 2022.

In total in 2021, podcasts from the Freakonomics Radio Network had over 160 million downloads. Freakonomics Radio Network will announce additional podcasts in 2022.