Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Larson

It reads like a politician trying on a private-equity blazer and discovering it fits a little too well. Larson’s language is pure earnings-call Esperanto: “capitalize on the marketing,” “grow the top-line,” “leverage what has worked.” The diction does a neat trick of making a human institution - students, education, obligation - sound like a portfolio company with churn metrics. That’s not an accident; it’s the point. If you talk about public services as “acquisitions,” you preempt the moral argument by shifting the frame to management competence.

The specific intent is to reassure: we have a playbook, we’ve run it before, and results will follow. In politics, that’s a powerful promise because it substitutes process for ideology. “Investment in marketing” signals growth without naming what’s being sold or what might be compromised to sell it. “Retention and student services” is the softer half of the pitch, a set of comforting nouns meant to launder the harder reality of revenue extraction. Retention becomes less about education and more about keeping customers from leaving.

The subtext is that persuasion (marketing) is treated as a primary lever of institutional success, not a supporting function. That hints at a context where reputation or enrollment is slipping, or where the product itself is hard to defend on its merits. The repeated “we” also matters: it casts the operation as a disciplined team, while quietly narrowing the definition of stakeholder to whoever benefits from “top-line” growth. In a political mouth, it’s managerial pragmatism with a faint, unsettling echo of commodification.