Given the breadth of new data that is generated by the modern university, what does the future of higher education look like if it were to embrace big open data?  What could the transcript of the future look like, and how could admissions evaluation work?  There’s big data, then there’s the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an open data set of more than 3 million astronomical objects.  Tim McKay serves as the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics, Astronomy, Education at the University of Michigan and is a major proponent for making the Sloan data open to everyone, arguing that doing so has generated unprecedented growth in the world’s knowledge of the cosmos.  Could higher education similarly benefit from a national open data set?  Join Thom and Brad for a fascinating inter-disciplinary conversation about how the modern university lives in the information age. Beers: Thom: Margaritaville Brewing Company, Jacksonville, FL, www.landsharklager.com, Landshark Lager, https://untappd.com/b/margaritaville-brewing-company-landshark-lager/4721  Brad: New Belgium Brewing Company, Fort Collins, CO, http://www.newbelgium.com, Tartastic, https://untappd.com/search?q=tartastic References: Tim McKay: https://lsa.umich.edu/physics/people/faculty/tamckay.html  Blog: https://21stcenturyhighered.com/author/tamckay  Twitter: @TimMckayUM Sloan Digital Sky Survey: http://www.sdss.org  Academic Innovation Initiative: http://ai.umich.edu/introducing-academic-innovation  Turning Down Top Choices, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/23/study-shows-how-price-sensitive-students-are-selecting-colleges  Music: Artist: Ryan Little, http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ryan_Little  Track: Damage, http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ryan_Little/~/Damage_1727  Used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, No revisions made.