Peter Thiel’s remarks about a supposed higher education bubble, along with his 20 Under 20 initiative, have sparked a great deal of discussion these past several days. Unfortunately, the quality of that discussion has been disappointingly predictable, centered around status quo-defending critics and bubble-defending champions, with a few people falling somewhere in the middle.
Largely missing from this discussion, however, is the question of whether it even makes sense to discuss education in America in terms of bubbles. It doesn’t. Because the biggest problem with higher education is institutional, not economic:
Our higher education system largely fails to educate. This is far worse than a bubble. It’s nothing less than a deep institutional, cultural, societal and indeed humanitarian crisis.
The very real problems that Thiel identifies aren’t symptoms of a bubble but of an institutional crisis of education; they only look like a bubble because we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good.
You don’t have to be an economist to see the rapid commoditization of higher education over the last two decades (probably longer) and its corresponding failure to actually educate. Students pay top dollar, not for quality, but for a name brand education. For-profit universities treat students as cash cows, making unrealistic promises and even outright lies to increase enrollment. Classes, even at elite universities, can top 500 students and are disproportionately taught by poorly paid adjuncts and graduate students, not professors. Cheating and grade inflation are rampant and quietly tolerated. All of this points to a spectacular betrayal of the educational principles that these institutions are supposed to uphold – namely, to educate. Meanwhile, rising tuition and student debt are justified on the increasingly faith-based grounds that it all will pay off in the long run.
By commoditizing higher education, we have not only given it away to the highest bidder, or borrower, as the case may be; we have impoverished the notion of becoming educated itself, at great social and economic harm.
The perceived value of education has little to do with one’s ability to think critically, write well or solve complex problems, and everything to do with whether you have a piece of paper (and the debt that comes with it) that purportedly enables you to earn more money.
Perhaps this has always been the case, but the dumbing down of American college students, combined with the treatment of education as a mere tool to increase earning power, is very, very real, and it’s very, very bad for society. Case in point: the ever-practical business major accounts for 20 percent of all undergrad majors, but as a group, they learn less and spend far less time studying than their non-business major peers. Business programs are also, not surprisingly, highly lucrative for universities, leading to an institutional focus on quantity of students over quality of education.
I’m not disagreeing with the problems in higher education that Thiel has pointed out. But to treat all of this as a bubble, on par with housing or high technology, is to not only misunderstand the problem but also to contribute to an impoverished, commoditized view of education that values a monetary return-on-investment over intellectual cultivation, that treats education as a resource, not unlike wood or oil, to be exploited and profited from, rather than a vital ingredient of a healthy society.
And so we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be educated? If education means churning out obedient, unthinking, indebted consumers, then we’ve done very well. But if it means anything – anything at all – more than that, we have failed massively.
So you tell me. What does it mean to be educated? The stakes are high, higher even than most of us realize. Our answer to this question holds the very roots of our salvation… and our demise.
{ 67 comments… read them below or add one }
This is so brilliant that I don’t even know where to begin. Thank you, Robin.
Thank you, Terry! Glad you enjoyed it.
As someone who taught college for many years, hires college graduates and has put two of my children through college, this post hits EXACTLY what I have been seeing. Most schools do not offer anything like the education I received 30 years ago. There are still some hold outs, primarily non-profit, elite schools , but even some of those are heading down the not-so-primrose path you laid out. In selecting the institution for my youngest, I’m going to be very selective about the type of EDUCATION (not credential) she gets.
Thanks for stopping by, AnnMaria! I can’t speak to what education was like 30 years ago, but I remember how the view of education as a commodity gained steam even from the time between my college freshman and senior years (it was already bad when I started). Good for you, recognizing the difference between education and credentials. It’s a distinction that very few people make in our society.
I’d like to start with saying that I enjoyed this blog post. It points out a very real problem with the American Education institution as a whole.
But with pointing out this problem, I would like to know – what possible solutions do we have??
Currently, more and more job opportunities require Masters or Doctoral degrees. Should (and will) these institutions lower their education requirements if the system is revamped? What if they will not?
Further, if the system is not revamped, and more job opportunities continue to require Graduate degrees in some form – then what can we expect to happen to the hundreds of thousands of college graduates that can’t afford to repay their loans??
Hi Keith, thanks for the thoughtful comment! I don’t pretend to have all the answers (that’s why I asked all of you for your thoughts on what education means!), but I think a good start to improving our education system would be a more Socratic approach – drawing ideas and wisdom out through dialogue and engagement, as opposed to spoon-feeding students facts and not requiring them to think.
As far as the larger problem of student loans and the job market, there are no easy answers. I’m definitely in favor of a more European model of higher education, where students don’t have to go deep into debt for a college degree. Regarding the problem with jobs, well, that’s its own can of worms, isn’t it? We definitely need some radically disruptive thinking there, starting with rethinking the notion that college (and increasingly, graduate school) is the right fit for everyone. Our higher education is currently one-size-fits-all, but people, of course, are anything but! These are just some initial thoughts. I’d love to hear your ideas, too!
It’s a tough cycle to break but one that must be done if we want to keep the dark ages at bay. I think it ought to start with those hiring to pick the best possible person for the job at hand without automatically excluding good candidates because the wrapping isn’t Tiffany! The value system must really be revamped and those in charge of hiring must recognize and value the diamond in the rough inside the box and bypass the wrapping . They should also offer apprenticeships where a person entering the workforce is taught by the master himself, which is how most expert become so. One can only learn, excel and exceed under the direct tutelage and guidance of a master. We need to go back to a hand on approach… education has become to disconnected.
I think the key here is that there is no one answer. That’s the basic problem with education – it forces so many into mediocrity by giving them a standard ‘education’. That’s what my new project (SelfMadeU.com) is all about. Any driven kid can get a world class line through Open MIT/Yale/Harvard etc. The ability to stay dynamic, solve interesting problems, and creating value is what is needed now.
It’s worth talking about the higher education system but I think what is more important is to discuss what individuals should do now. If the system is broken then it’s probably not ideal to jump in if there is a better path
A thoughtful response and article, thank you. Perhaps it’s fair to say we have a credentials-bubble then? And on top of that, it works in a vicious spiral: the less people can think for themselves, the more they rely on someone else’s sign of approval, like a prestigious degree.
Soon enough, a BA will be meaningless. For when even liberal arts students can’t articulate why liberal arts matter, we’re so far down the road of a commercial society that idiocracy is the most-likely near-term outcome.
Thanks for the comment, K! I definitely agree that credentials are over-valued. I’m still holding out hope that we won’t become an idiocracy… if only because of the many thoughtful responses I receive on blog posts like this one!
Education. Knowledge. The ability to think critically. To achieve a level within a discipline. To know something about the nature of knowledge itself. To learn to solve various classes of problems. To be equipped to solve problems not yet defined. To integrate disparate pieces of knowledge from disparate sources. To understand how to work with — and evaluate — primary, secondary, tertiary and further removed sources.
Sorry, but the idea of a Bachelor or Arts in Sports Marketing, for example, just doesn’t make it for me. It’s totally valid to learn to do something specific like that — but it’s a different activity. Learning a trade is virtuous, but it’s not an academic thing.
In many ways, what we really need to do is to raise the respect level of going to a school to learn a trade, but not by conflating it with academic subjects.
But that’s just me.
Hey Artie, your idea of a good education sounds a lot like a philosophy major! I’m biased, of course, because I was a philosophy major…
But thanks for sharing your insights!
Thank you for posting your thoughts. To answer your question of what might a solution look like, I have a few thoughts, albeit radical and thoughts which I’m certain will be dismissed out of hand. But, I’ve had these thoughts for years and I can’t seem to shake them.
First – drop all sports except for intramural programs and take away the money incentive and the money drain from future citizens. The highlight of a family’s life should not be a drunken tail-gate Sunday at some subsidized sport stadium and activity that more and more is “learned” at institutions of higher education.
Next – start teaching the idea of “citizenship” in pre-school and continue for as long as a student continues their education. Teach co-operation among students and grade them socially rather than academically. Reward students for mentoring the students in the grade just below their own attained grade.
Separate boys and girls a year before they hit puberty (an average age of course) and keep them segregated until college.
Pay teachers more than administrators or politicos who are in an educational type public office. Offer bonuses to teachers who actually master and teach creative/critical thinking.
Reduce the emphasis on testing.
Require all students, starting in their first year of school, to take a second language as part of their daily curriculum from one of the three major languages the world is consolidating toward, i.e., Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic.
Lastly, allow students who work abroad in impoverished countries for four years after graduation to have their education loans shown as paid in full. This will be an incentive for students to be ambassadors of good will, and will also create a more empathetic citizenry, something that is sorely missing at the moment.
These ideas are not mine and they are not new. But that does not mean they are not sound ideas that can be refined through experiment and debate. Something has to be done, or soon the word citizen will be replace with worker/slave.
Bryon, that your (excellent) ideas are considered radical in our culture is a travesty! I’d love to see an America that took them seriously – I think we’d have a much more meaningful, compassionate, humane society than the one we have now. Thanks for commenting!
Byron: Really like and support all of the points you’ve raised here: Could not have better expressed these ideas myself if I had tried. I also agree with Robin’s response to your ideas.
i more or less agree with your ideias but separating boys and girls is, well, stupid. no good comes out of it. for obvious reasons. i’ve seen this happen in my country and it lead to a bunch of problems. i’m glad it was abolished.
I like some of these ideas more than others. I’d like to add that as a high school student, college has always seemed more of an institution of career hunting rather than a place to learn. I’d wager the main problem with higher ed. is it’s politicized. All the reasons to go to college have been distorted by government subsidies and other “incentives.” I don’t think segregating children by gender is a very good idea, but that’s my opinion. One possible solution could be , say, a college version of Khan Academy. This would definitely keep costs down and provide quality information. Just my two cents.
Robin,
I actually am a business school graduate, but I was fortunate to go to a small liberal arts college that was not too expensive at the time. I learned a lot there due to excellent professors and small classes (largest was Acct 101 with 22 students). But on the flip side, I work as a software consultant and never wrote a single line of programming code in college. I learned on the job and to toot my own horn, I’m pretty good.
I think for a further expansion on your ideas you should read what Josh Kaufman of personalmba.com has to say. He did a great post on Ramit Sethi’s financial blog. http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/college-debt-josh-kaufman-personal-mba/
I think Josh hit many things on the head and has beating this drum for a while. Hopefully more people will listen and do what’s best for them.
Cheers!
-Erick
Hey Erick, I had a similar experience to yours – went to a small, liberal arts college and learned a ton because I had access to actual professors. And at the risk of being presumptuous, I’ll bet that, although you never learned any programming in college, the skills you gained there continue to help you in less tangible ways.
I’m familiar with Josh Kaufman, and I definitely appreciate his refreshing point of view, especially his emphasis on the difference between education and credentials!
I’m getting my MBA right now – which I regret – and whole heartedly agree with this article. Tis all.
Assuming a broken college system, then one must ask, “what is the alternative?” You will have those continuing buying into the college system lie*, and those who segment forming a DIY approach (I believe mostly fueled by economics, despite institutional factors being the greater problem).
Unfortunately, many still buy into the notion of paying a great deal of money to get a quality education as if there are gatekeepers withholding the “good stuff.” In a world with TED talks, YouTube Tutorials, Khan Academy, etc., the “good stuff” is now publicly available for free from the brightest minds out there. Of course DIY education poses a whole other set of issues (social, forming a curriculum, etc.), which is another discussion.
Education is something you take, not something that is given. Those who succeed in the future will increasingly be determined how far their educational curiosity takes them, not what institution they went to and how much they paid for a piece of paper.
*Disclaimer: I believe college works mainly for those who know *specifically* what to focus on, not generalized business majors.
“Education is something you take, not something that is given.”
Word.
I hold a BFA in Acting. I work in marketing. I make a good living and have the time I need to make myself happy. While I was in college my acting classmates would ask me why I was reading books about business and finance. You have to take control of your destiny.
Well said, guys! I’d like to add that a good teacher makes a huge difference, too. Self-education and internal curiosity is wonderful and absolutely crucial, but many students need help learning how to learn. That’s where an in-person education will be more valuable than all the TED talks in the world.
You’re not refuting Thiel, you’re arguing from a different point of view. Education has aspects which are liable to be treated through the lense of economics, and aspects which aren’t. Thiel wasn’t discussing the meaning of education, he was discussing its measurable value. Hence the bubble terminology, which is quite apt.
Whether we like it or not, college today _is_ the measure of ability in many ways. Whether it has to be so is a question that’s been raised before Thiel, and will be raised again. Consider, e.g., Charles Murray’s arguments here: http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college. Highly controversial in their own right, perhaps more so than Thiel’s.
Your argument could perhaps be better framed as “if we start viewing education as Thiel seems to suggest, what’s going to become of the idea of liberal education?” Indeed?
Thanks for the contrarian view, Alex.
My intent wasn’t to refute Thiel line by line, but rather to show that his very valid criticisms of higher education don’t go far enough (bubble vs. institutional crisis). I think it could potentially make sense to talk about a student loan bubble, or a for-profit university bubble, but to say broadly that there’s a higher education bubble doesn’t go far enough, in my view.
An extremely well-written response to the “Bubble” article. I wholeheartedly agree with your points.
@Byron Hathaway makes an excellent case as well.
I received my BA from a Big Ten school almost twenty years ago. I enjoyed my time there, yet (with a few exceptions) I never really felt as though I was “learning” anything. Perhaps it was the size of the institution and my own lack of motivation. While I was there, however, I did start my own company. Upon graduation, I took a pay cut to work for Corporate America. I did that for awhile, quite successfully, then left to pursue another entrepreneurial venture, which did very well, until I got bored with it. I sold it last summer.
I write this as a means by which to (quickly) illustrate where I’m coming from in proposing that we, as a society, need to consider these issues at any even higher level. I think we need to do some real soul-searching and redefine our notion of “success” in this country.
Why does “success” have to mean making as much money as quickly as you can? Why do we take out huge loans to go to over-priced colleges so we can get a degree so we can take out more loans to get another degree so we can get a “good” job that will pay enough to qualify us to take out more loans to buy an expensive car and a house that we can then borrow against so we can take fancy vacations and renovate our house and install fancy appliances and all the latest “must-have” electronic gizmos? I’m not throwing stones here. With the exception of the graduate degree, I pretty much followed this path. Up until about two years ago, by all modern definitions of the word, I was “successful”.
But it didn’t feel that way.
Until we as a society are able to collectively redefine what it means to be “successful,” until we can stop chasing the “must-haves” and paying hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars for tickets to sporting events… Until we decide it is more important to use scarce funds to thoroughly investigate the collapse of the mortgage industry than it is to use them investigating whether Barry Bonds injected steroids… Until we decide it is more important for young people to figure out what they are truly passionate about (see Ken Robinson’s “The Element”) than it is to enroll them in constant athletic training for the whole of their childhood in the hope that they get an athletic scholarship… Until we do all this and more, we will continue, unabated, in our quest for an externally defined, unfulfilling “success.”
And the over-priced, under-delivering Higher Education system will continue charging more and more money for the right to pass through their “hallowed” halls and “earn” an increasingly meaningless degree.
Thanks for such an insightful comment, Matt. I think you pretty much said it all!
One big problem: professors don’t have a lot of incentives to educate. They have incentives to publish, which helps explain grade inflation. The current higher education system hasn’t really designed around the needs of undergraduates, which a lot of people don’t understand.
This is part of the reason I wrote How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated, which I give to my freshmen every semester.
Really well covered Robin: I like and agree with what you have posited here. I think that “Our higher education system largely fails to educate. This is far worse than a bubble. It’s nothing less than a deep institutional, cultural, societal and indeed humanitarian crisis.” states the situation very clearly. Amongst possible solutions, I clearly like Byron’s ideas though obviously there is a much deeper issue than can be solved simply by just adopting such changes alone without tackling the “vested interests” issues that have been keeping the system shackled to profit generation at the expense of delivering real, lifetime value to both students and our society at large.
Before finding your blog on this topic, I previously made observations in another blog http://seekingalpha.com/a/5n4f relative to my own and my families experiences resulting from having come to the US from the UK with young children who are now fully grown adults having “enjoyed” the benefits of having a pre-HS education per the British system and from HS onwards immersed in the US system. Fortunately, everyone came through with flying colours and no educational debt-burden since my young children aced the American system, had no desire to go to any Ivy League US university and, none the less, landed in very rewarding careers.
Start by killing all the lawyers. Grade quality, cheating, and instructional quality have all been degraded by litigious students and parents. Caught cheating? Bad grade? Don’t like the faculty? Can’t collaborate with your project group? Universities are under constant assault by undisciplined, immature, lazy students who attack the University system in order to obtain a degree. In the end, the colleges find it easier to pass the cost of failures onto society than fight. I can’t say I blame them.
Education is not something that is given to you inside of 4 walls by a professor over the course of 4 years. It’s a lifelong process that’s self-directed, and now that we have the internet with unthinkable amounts of information at our fingertips, the idea that education is something given to you by someone in a building (in exchange for money) is not only false, it’s it’s anachronistic.
There’s nothing you can learn in a college that you can’t learn yourself. However, credentials are something you can’t give yourself.
If you want to see the decoupling of education and credentialing, then you have to start by acknowledging that educational institutions don’t have a monopoly on knowledge and learning. And if you want people to stop looking at education like a commodity, you should stop treating it as if it’s something that educational institutions are not manufacturing properly, because that, indeed, is a commodity.
You lay blame at the feet of “commoditization”, but I think that misses the mark. Commodities are undifferentiated. Fungible. One bushel of wheat or pound of gold is as good as any other. You know what you’re getting if you buy some, but you have no idea where it came from. With college degrees you don’t really know what you’re going to get, whether you’re on the prospective student end or the potential employer end. One college grad is certainly *not* the same as any other. Not even within the same department.
Thiel’s comparison to bubbles is apt in the sense that we’re over investing (in both time and money) in something that has little chance of paying off. His comparison fails because there’s no chance that the education “bubble” is going to pop like the housing bubble or tech stock bubbles did. The higher education establishment is *very* deeply entrenched in our society. Its institutions have distorted people’s incentives to the point that the incentives of schools and professors align very poorly with those of students.
Thinking in terms of misaligned incentives leads to the conclusion that we need more market competition in many areas of higher education, not less. The textbook market gouges students because the people choosing the books (professors) aren’t the people paying for them (students). We should re-align those incentives. The market for professors disfavors students because it rewards things that increase a department’s prestige (lots of citations in lots of publications) rather than things that students care about (quality instruction at a reasonable price). We should re-align those incentives too.
One last heretical thought: What if, at the upper end at least, society needs a way to sort people by talent more than it needs to actually teach them things? That would explain why the hardest thing about going to Harvard is getting in, and why prestigious schools can get away with having TAs teach most of the classes. It also reinforces Thiel’s point that trying to take the experience of an elite university and replicate it for every student in America is a fool’s errand; the point of the top schools is not education, it’s sorting. On the other hand, all Thiel has done with 20 Under 20 is provide another means of sorting and signaling for a very small group of students. That won’t scale, and it’s not revolutionary.
I think American universities might do a better job of educating young men and women than equivalent systems around the world. However, there are serious issues regarding costs, especially for out of state students and you are absolutely right about textbooks and incentives for professors.
I think higher ed in American universities needs to expand, but not just in terms of enrollments, but also in terms of subjects and majors offered. There is no reason why universities that teach mechanical engineering and business management (both professional degrees) cannot have culinary programs as well. I feel there is room to accommodate even more diversity in American campuses.
I think this issue started a few years before now. As an undergrad 30 years ago, we were already seeing the start of assembly-line education at the large state school I went to. Upon graduation I felt the most relevant thing I had learned was how to navigate a large bureaucracy. But I remember the first two years having definite courses that were mainly part of a “weeding” process. If you weren’t capable of some kind of serious, sustained effort, you didn’t make it.
Part of education is not only being lead into new ways of thinking that you wouldn’t have come across on your own, but being pushed in new directions to see what your abilities are.
“What does it mean to be educated?”
I have my doubts that there’s ever going to be any kind of consensus answer to this question (which makes it a perfect blogging topic
, but I think if you’re looking for answers that complement the rhetorical narrative in this piece, you couldn’t do much better than the commencement addresses given by David Foster Wallace and Bill Watterson at Kenyon college:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
I see a strong common theme in both: education is learning to use your mind as a tool, not just as a tool to be hired out or lent to a task, but as (a) your own seat and re-mediator of experience, and (b) a way of shaping a life in accordance with well-considered personal values.
As you’ve noted, though, the labor market often seems largely indifferent to this. They want training. The obvious and immediate incentives are lined up that way.
Personally, I think if there’s going to be a society-wide answer, it’s going to have to start with a cultural shift that includes two changes for the business world: (a) a partial rejection of credentialism and correspondingly rote “best practices” in hiring and (b) an acceptance of the responsibility to educate on the job and grow talent from within.
However: I’m not sure I think it’s all so bad as this on and individual level. It’s been a while since I passed through the University system myself, but my observation is that it’s still quite possible to get the kind of valuable education that both Wallace and Watterson are talking about… for those who know it’s there and care to pursue it because they’re given a vision of what it means. Because, as the proverb goes, education is less about filling a bucket, more about lighting a fire.
A really stimulating conversation here! Since we had a son a couple of years ago I’ve thought about this some. I think that the only place you can get a good education is from your family now – i know i’ve hardly seen it properly done anywhere I’ve been. I hope he’ll have a college education before he gets to college – nobody’s that interested in bringing you through to it there. One Ivy president said in candor that they ‘do so well because the undergraduates bring so much and take so little’. I sadly agree.
“we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good”….no actually, it’s the other way around. We treat education as a social good rather than a market driven commodity. We see education as a right and entitlement, rather than something earned and sought after. The longer we continue to reward mediocrity, the more mediocre we’ll get.The feds think that everyone should have an education, therefore they throw money and test standards at the problem, as they always do, expecting better results. What they get is higher costs, less discipline, manipulated test scores, corruption and…yep, a commodity rather than a demand driven education.
Private schools for higher education are a joke because they don’t really have any competition, as their public school counterparts are just as bad or worse. Let the competitive market work. The problem with education is that is not driven by what is produced, it’s driven by how much is produced. The more students you churn out, and the better the “test scores”, the more money that pours in. What a system.
This is a direct result of federal money, federal corruption and the federal mandate that all should get a higher education. This is the very same problem that all public schools face. They either accept public funding and “churn out students”, or they stay private and receive income only if they provide a service that is valued more highly than its cost by their customers. Milton Friedman (someone I admire greatly) wrote a lot on this topic as it relates to early education, but I think his ideas are applicable here. http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/Milton-Friedman-on-Vouchers.aspx If we’re going to continue to federally fund higher education, why not a better voucher system for higher education, rather than the political mess that is higher education funding? Let the students decide.
Is there a reason that you prefer the European approach? Why is it better? The bottom line is the bar needs to be set higher, achievement needs to be earned, and failure needs to be a reality for those not willing to step up.
Why do you think it’s better to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good? I’d love to hear you expand on that more.
I only mentioned the European approach in reference to costs – students in most of Europe don’t have to take on crushing debt to finance a college degree because tuition is low or free. I should have clarified. In my experience (and I’ve studied at university in both Europe and the US), I actually find the American system to be a lot better at encouraging free thought.
Thanks Robin for such a thoughtful piece of writing.
Yes indeed Education has been sold as a costly commodity for past few decades.
I am from India and I also had the urge to complete my higher education from any “Well branded” university of USA or Europe. I am sure many of the students who belong to the middle class family have the same dream. But the fact of money forced me to come back and think it again.
The universities have opened a market where they are buying a constant flow of money for them every year, in the name of student. Education is no longer the luxury of the intellectuals or those who need it, but it is for those who can afford it or rather you can say for those who can but it.
I think it is the high time to think and revise the whole education system across the world.
the real problem is that the college grad income and employment stats are bogus.
Its great to hear you speaking up about this. My own education has been wrought with disaster and delight, and i think this is a good place to share why I think our educational system has failed.
Bureaucracy killed the cat. it confused it to death with endless forms to sign and elevator music. Here, I’m not talking about the government alone, but the corporate form which seems to function as a community of partners trading necessities. The drive to profit off the scarcity of these necessities has driven demand, mechanization, and a culture of profiteering which trickles through the masses: promoted by media; enhanced by academia. And herein is the formula which has diluted the value of our educational structure.
I for one am trying to build a new future. Something that doesn’t destroy the precious resource that is creativity. Our school systems fail across the board… yes, there are schools which have great resources and churn out super smart kids, but education should be a resource, not based on a time schedule. Why shouldn’t schools be community resource centers where kids work with adults to make projects and learn new things? Oh wait, …bureaucracy. Apparently, adults cant have any interaction with children unless they’ve been thoroughly vetted by a crack squad of background specialists.
The key to our salvation is community. I was proud to hear that when the unemployment level in Detroit skyrocketed to the stars, the number of community gardens exploded. Not because they particularly knew anything about gardening, but because they needed something essential to their survival. It’s devastating that it should come to these circumstances to bring a community in touch, but the rest of us should learn by example, and take back our lives… with food! There’s no reason that people need to be separated by imaginary lines… or, um, yeah, three, two, one… bureaucracy. Ugh, it’s sad there are so many meaningless little divisions across our beautiful planet…
And back here in the real world, while I type this super rambling synopsis of something that’s been stirring inside of me for years, I’m haunted by the fact that I’ve done this instead of finishing a ‘group speech outline’ for the state-mandated (freshman?) class that I’m in here in the fourth year of my degree. Now, ill go to sleep, only to wake up, type some words, then commute 15 miles to say it, only to forget it again by two o’ clock. The beautiful thing is my gardening class is at two, and a whole community of friends (and knowledge!) has sprouted from it.
Thanks for your insight!! Its always wonderful to be asked what an education should be.
” Why shouldn’t schools be community resource centers where kids work with adults to make projects and learn new things?”
I’m thrilled at this line – I’ve been saying this for years – if we took the resources invested in the gov’t school system and created community resource centers staffed with mentors and volunteers where people of any age can go and contribute and learn, now that is a way to support people in educating their selves all life-long. The understanding of ‘how people learn’ is faulty in the philosophy that undergirds the current system, imo&e.
And I am glad to see several people in these comments make the point that you can’t ‘give’ an education to anyone. The individual has to engage and create their own set of knowledge, and that is an ongoing process from (probably before) birth til we turn our toes up.
With computers and internet access, the conventional teacher/student school setup is anachronistic and redundant, teaching to the past rather than leaping into the future. The learner is in charge of hir own learning, and that fact is not respected or even recognized, generally. The free flow of information and learner control of time and activity and access to the whole wide world (not being cooped up in schools for the majority of early life) opens whole new vistas in thinking about ‘what is education?’.
That’s the view from this homeschooling/unschooling mom and occasional community college teacher (which really challenges me to not betray my values, with that bureaucracy)
Here’s my perspective, as one of the 20 under 20 Thiel Finalists and a recent dropout from Harvard. It’s not quite right to pin all the blame on the institutions. Much of the burden of responsibility for nurturing true education lies on the shoulders of the students themselves, and this is something I noticed time and again at Harvard. Those who wanted to learn, and were truly immersed by their education, thrived and grew splendidly. Those who were motivated by more “pragmatic” concerns, such as a lucrative future career, derived comparatively little from the experience. Arguably, yes – this might demonstrate an institutional problem with society itself, and the growing pressure we seem to be feeling for securing a good, financially stable future for ourselves and auxiliary concerns, but in any light, many universities don’t deserve the heat they’re currently getting.
I can only speak for Harvard, so speaking for Harvard, I can identify with your criticisms of being taught by graduate students and being in enormous classes. I’ve experienced three of the largest classes on campus – Life Sci, Justice, and CS 50 – each numbering several hundred students during lectures. Despite that fact, all three classes were brilliantly taught, and were fantastic experiences – in fact, far more so than my smaller classes. The professors are clearly engaged in their fields and absolutely love teaching and interacting with students, and students have more than ample opportunities to visit the professors during office hours. Our sections were indeed led by graduate students – but the graduate students were similarly brilliant and quite devoted to their teaching.
In actuality, the problem isn’t so much a dearth of intellectually stimulating opportunity provided by the universities and their faculty, but rather a dearth of desire on the part of the students to capitalize on that opportunity. Almost invariably, it wasn’t the student who couldn’t find a professor to talk – it was the professor who was sitting by himself during office hours because no student bothered or cared enough to come by.
So from my vantage point at the least, the problem lies with the modern student body. For whatever reason (and there are several that I can think of), we are no longer (if we ever were) driven by the desire to learn, but rather the desire to *succeed*. And success for most of us, it seems, comes in a lucrative career path down the road. And to get on that path, the overwhelming prevailing notion is that one requires a college degree. And so we obediently trod through college towards the path to success promised to us on the horizon, pragmatically navigating our university days in such a way as to maximize our chances of landing the financially stable job of our dreams. And in consequence, we lose sight of what an education really is.
I will agree that people need to make the effort to learn themselves, but your logic is flawed at the underlying cause. You blame the students for not making the effort, but, in reality, the majority of students who are there aren’t all that interested in what they’re learning; it’s not what they’re passionate about. Those students never found out what they were talented in, or what they were passionate about; they were never given the opportunity. Our entire educational system is set up to simply advance the student to the next level — not to help them discover what it is they’re good at and what they’re passionate about. And, yes, I do believe it is the responsibility of the education system to help the student discover this.
I do agree that universities are getting more heat they than deserve, but only because the fundamental flaw is with the education system as a whole, not just higher education. Universities can only shape the students they’re given, and the students they’re given are disinterested and apathetic, most frightened and lost about what they’ll be doing in the future, forced to make a decision about what kind of career they’ll have before they’ve even discovered anything they care about.
Russell, you just hit the nail on the head. I completely agree that our problems with education run far deeper than just higher education. For the sake of clarity and succinctness, I kept the focus on higher education for this post, but you’re absolutely right.
@Russell – Exactly. I left out a following paragraph when I was writing my initial response, which went something along the lines of saying – “The most striking and compelling indication that there is something terribly, terribly wrong here is the fact that virtually no one on campus has any clue what they want to do or what path they want to follow. Hence, they stumble through college wildly fluctuating between conflicting desires before ultimately settling on an option (in the case of Harvard, i-banking and consulting) that doesn’t quite make them happy, but doesn’t make them so unhappy as to fervently revolt and change their course – in my opinion, the worst place one could possibly be. Not quite dissatisfied enough to change, but never truly content.”
And I think that’s the true problem with our society at large (and education as a subset of that society). @Robin – It has very little to do with higher education. Like Russell notes, it begins far earlier than that, and not only in the educational system – the fault and burden of blame lies with our very approach to society itself. Obviously, I’m not fully supportive of the educational system as it is, seeing as how I’ve noted my being a dropout and one of the Thiel Finalists. But the reason college isn’t right for me, and isn’t right for so many others who are lost in its wings, is because college *should not be* the only path towards success and a well-fulfilled life. As our current society holds it – there’s only one respectable path to take, and that’s the one through college. Bullshit. Just like Web 2.0, we need Education 2.0. It’s a user-centric approach we need and that’s not what we’re getting.
For me, I dropped out because I, like many of my other peers, had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Why? Because it’s idiotic, the way the educational system scaffolds us further and further into one specialization. People aren’t just scientists, or journalists, or artists or programmers or engineers or lawyers or doctors or CEOs. People are everything. And that’s why we can never decide exactly what we want to do – because there’s far too much to do, far too much we want to do. The prospect of doing only one of those things, for the rest of your life, is too stifling. We have devastatingly narrow blinders drilled into our minds from the very beginning of our lives, and these are the fault of everything around us, all the notions and abstractions that we are inundated with in everyday life, that are incorporated into our very being. “What are you?” “I’m a biochemist.” “What do you do for a *living*?” “I write, I blog.” It’s abominable. There’s more to us. There are, admittedly, a very select few of us who are only inclined to pursue just one thing, and they do that quite contentedly. The rest of us, however, struggle stifled through our lives melded unwillingly by our education system, as fabricated by prevailing societal convention to its specifications.
And that’s the heart of the Thiel Fellowship – at least for me. I was immensely troubled in school because there was so much I wanted to do – and unfortunately, our ever-increasingly complex society forces us to choose one specialization for the duration of our pitifully short lives. So the only path out of this I could imagine was to pursue biological science – as a logical first step, the notion is to live longer. If we could prolong our lives, the educational system falls apart. We can relax, take our time to explore our options, make mistakes, find our passions, and pursue them all. This might seem as an absurd and irrelevant aside, but I’d argue it’s precisely the heart of all our problems – our very short lifespans. With an in-depth education in just *one* field promising to last into nearly our 30s, it’s impossible that we’ll be able to ever be fully content with the breadth of the content with which we’ve filled our lives..unless we’re mindnumbingly brainwashed into being utterly uninterested into the vast majority of what comprises the wonders of this world.
And so, my goal was to achieve a sort of biological immortality, and at the same time, I realized higher education wasn’t quite suited to that pursuit. Life, as it stands presently, remains desperately transient, and to spend the best, most productive, and most energetic, passionate, and acute years of my life boxed up in school learning, before being thrust out into the broken world of research, where I’d spend half my time struggling to piece together measly grants to fuel my pitiful modicum of narrow research and the other half despairingly scrambling to crinkle together publications to keep afloat…didn’t quite make any sense. So the Fellowship allows me to take a much more beautiful path, one that weaves through entrepreneurship into funding the research that so urgently cries to be done. Because guess what? I’m as passionate about entrepreneurship as I am science, and in science, as passionate about physics and chemistry as I am biology, and beyond those fenced fields as much a fan of literature as I am of anything else in this world. I’m fascinated by what lays in the deep depths of our precious watery reservoirs of life, as much as I am by what lies beyond our world, in the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies presently beyond our reach. What possibilities stretch before us as illuminated by artificial intelligence…by the presently unfathomable nature of quantum mechanics. I can’t wait to spend years of my life running cross-country, rowing across oceans, thru-hiking our last preserves of wilderness, climbing our highest peaks, ballooning around the world and diving from cliffs and our own vehicles of flight. If I could, I’d spend a lifetime with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, in the jungles of Congo, of Borneo. I’d learn the languages and cultures of every nation, I’d make friends with a million people.
And so this is what our current education system denies us, though clearly, as I see it, through no full fault of its own. There’s a very real biological inhibition that our world and our current notion of life and its aspects has wrapped around, and it’s time we realized that we can break free of that inhibition. So in short, through all the rambling, I’ll note a book written by my first interviewer for the Thiel Fellowship, aptly titled “Ending Aging” – http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066 .
Yes, there is a problem with education, but far more concerningly, there’s a massive problem with society itself.
Imagine if you had not had to waste the first two decades of your life being ordered around doing things that you were not passionate about. Imagine if you had been not allowed but helped to pursue your passions from day one. You’d learn the reading writing ‘rithmetic along the way- don’t have to spend years cooped up going over the same territory year after year while adding new bits after boring review. You just gained two decades to your woefullly-inadequate-to-doing-it-all lifespan. That is one step towards changing the world: support children in their learning from the beginning. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com explores the philosophy of non-coercive learning and the parent-child relationship which is the most important relationship in our lives.
Yes. Fantastic. I encountered the same set of variously motivated students at Northwestern, from which I graduated a few years ago. The students that wanted a top-notch education (I was in Biomedical Engineering, these were serious students) worked extremely hard, sought out the professors, and went on to advanced positions in research laboratories, professional schools, or industry careers. On the other hand, the students that “obediently trod through college towards the path to success promised to us on the horizon” still fared decently, finding jobs post-graduation through professional networks and the value of the educational brand.
I think it’s interesting to look at the components and metrics – two orthogonal dimensions – of the value of an education at a (top) school:
Components:
1) The education itself.
While it certainly is possible to slide by and obtain only a mediocre education, it is also possible to dedicate time and energy and grow one’s mind with a set of mentors and peers to such a degree that is near impossible anywhere else.
2) The brand.
Certain institutions have gained and maintained a reputation of producing excellent students. The mark of one of these institutions (at least in certain categories) serves as a certificate of quality.
3) The professional network.
Humans have a natural inclination to help those that they perceive to be in the same group as themselves. Many schools, especially the most prominent, have extensive professional networks embedded at high positions in a variety of industries and academic pursuits. Being a member of such a group provides access that is much more difficult to achieve from outside the group, whether by nepotistic selection or sheer proximity.
4) The social network.
The selection process for admission to a university, while often seeking diversity of view points, tends to lead to a community of students and faculty that share many attributes. Among those are commonly intelligence, curiosity about the world, passion, and enthusiasm. Such a community of similarly-aligned people can produce friendships, collaborations, and marriages that would be significantly less likely in the world at large.
Metrics:
1) Financial success.
Material wealth gained over a lifetime.
2) Educational achievement.
Amount of knowledge gained.
3) Practical skills.
Whether specific (e.g. computer programming) or general (e.g. logic, critical thinking)
4) Happiness
Intangible, difficult to measure, self-reported.
Students choose to attend colleges for a variety of reasons, optimizing one or more of the aforementioned metrics. It is presumptuous to assume that students _should_ optimize any given metric; ultimately, the decision is that of the students. Now, if we believe that students are being promised a certain value that they are unable to reap, then we have a true “problem” that can be addressed. Otherwise, we have an attempt to dictate what others need.
you have talked about American education i don’t know it’s true are not but in India it’s true.Now a days higher education become business for example we have so many engineering colleges which does not have good infrastructure like labs,faculty,play grounds and library but still they exist.Once if you graduate from these colleges you don’t know what to do and which field you want start your carrier like suppose if you have a degree of Electrical Engg you want to go for Electrical field or open source like CSE and IT
Hey Robin!
Thanks for writing this blog post. I feel like that’s what I realized about school a long time ago. I pretty much quit school at about 6th grade and have been self educated since. I’ve done a lot like direct a film with a professional cast and crew of over 20 people at no cost to me for hiring them. Started and closed a video production company and learned a lot all before 17. Just thought I’d share my experience.
Again thanks for the post. I’m retweeting it!
Brent’s comment nails this discussion, especially the definition of commodity: “Commodities are undifferentiated. Fungible.” Each one is as good as the next.
Obviously, many don’t feel that way as is seen by the efforts made to get into the schools that are perceived to offer the best educations – or the best career prospects following graduation. There is a definite perception of success that students and parents feel based on the schools that a high school student is accepted to. Again, this is not a commodity, because if it were, nobody would care where they were accepted.
The bubble analysis misses the mark too. Bubbles are economic phenomenon characterized by speculative investments where large numbers of buyers compete to buy assets that will appreciate to unusually high price levels. College students do not bid against each other for the right to attend the college of their choice. There are many who would probably be very happy to compete based on their ability to pay, but they can’t. This doesn’t mean students do not over-borrow in order to attend a prestigious school, but they are not competiting for admission by outbidding each other.
While it costs a great deal to attend Harvard, Stanford and the like, the endowments these schools have do not require students to compete financially. If you can get in based on test scores, grades recommendations and other elements, the financial burden can be significantly reduced. While most colleges don’t have the huge endowments of the top private schools, most of them do have ways to provide get economic relief to promising students and those that need financial assistance. Some of that assistance may come from loans, but there is also a significant amount of scholarships and grants given. Again, if the schools are helping to level the playing field this way, it is certainly not an economic bubble.
There is a lot of interest in making education better than it is but it doesn’t help to apply terms and analysis incorrectly.
I’m not arguing that education is, in strict economic terms, an actual commodity (like oil or wheat). I’m arguing that we treat it like one – something to be bought and sold at the market, with little value beyond that which can be articulated in monetary terms.
If employers (and HR managers) looked to hire ‘people’ rather than ‘CVs’ and qualifications, it would go a long way to solving the perception problem that the piece of paper is more important that your knowledge, experience and unique skills.
Education as a social good, that’s the point. Really nice post.
I would like to mention the issue that is taboo. Not everyone should go to college. The concept that anyone can learn higher knowledge is a root cause for the degredation of the institutional principals within the higher education system. This may not be the fault of the higher educatrion system but more likely the fault of the high school system not being able to quantify thinkers from test takers with the current system.
Before we simply compare higher education as it was 20 years ago to today’s, i think we need to look at the expectations out of college graduates in both cases. 20 years, graduates from highly distinguished schools were suppose to ‘change’ or ‘revolutionize’ the economy. Today, graduates are simply expected to contribute to the economy and steer it forward. As the economy grows, we need more contributers than drivers and colleges are doing exactly that. As the expectations out of a college student changed, so did their attitude towards college. And that is where the story ends. Blaming education system for the loans and hardships that graduates face is not correct. I think the problem rises from the fact that every high school graduating out of California wants to go to UCLA but complains that it’s too expensive. If all you want is education, as in studies, UCLA might not be for you today. I don’t agree with Thiel either. His article was deeply rooted in his intent to support his ’20 under 20′ scheme. Calling higher education a bubble is like calling country club membership a bubble because they are very few elite ones and more and more people want to get in on them. Higher education is an absolute necessary for most students, and it is not going to change. And entrepreneurship is a self discovery- like enlightenment, nothing to do with college.
Do we really need more contributors than drivers? Imagine a future in which more people had both the agency and the ability to think beyond “steering the economy forward”. We’re facing a lot of problems in the 21st century. We need more people coming up with revolutionary ideas, not fewer.
This isn’t just a problem with higher education, but even basic education, and it started at the very beginning of what we consider the modern education system to be. The school systems, as they exist now, exist in response to the demand created by the industrial revolution to have workers educated and skilled just enough to not cut off their own arms in manufacturing line. From these beginnings, not much has changed — instead the goal has just shifted to fill up the countless cubicle farms in modern corporations.
And, as you stated, this is a fundamental flaw because the entire system is built to staff and service the private sector; their obligation is not to the students themselves but to the corporations who need them as bodies in cubicles.
Unfortunately, there are not any true alternatives. We need alternatives that seek to improve the individual — help them find what their talents are, what they’re passionate about and then give them the skills to succeed in doing what they enjoy doing.
A better question is “Why are American kids so freaking lazy?”
American universities are clearly taking advantage of students’ desire to take the shortest possible path to high salaries. It is students’ who are choosing to load themselves with debt and short themselves on knowledge.
Ah, but these students are part of a culture that teaches them to do exactly that! That’s why I’m arguing for broad, institutional change. If we lay all the blame on the shoulders of individuals, we fail to address the systemic roots of the problem.
Your last two small paragraphs are very profound, intense, and important. Thank you for thinking…and sharing.
You’re article is spot on and explores an angle that is is most appropriate to education, but especially to Higher Education because people are paying top dollar. I believe education comes from ones yearning to learn and obtain knowledge and less from the confines of these institutions that enforce too many rules, inhibit creativity, and thinking. I myself attended University, but are totally anti these institutions. I celebrate Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 and Higher Education Bubble opinion along with Robin’s assessment. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” Higher Education has failed in fostering imagination.
Well said, Ron. Thanks for the comment!
Spot on! It is not right that we spend so much, argue even more and waste an unimagineable amount, yet children can leave school without the ability to read, write and be numerate to the same standard as those that can afford the education. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair and if fixed could be the seed solution to so many society issues.
excellent post!!!! thanks from argentina
Did I miss something. Ok I think I either miss the original talk but I couldn’t really identify what you meant by being educated or how would education should be according to your criticism. I agree that the system is broken, I also recognize that those are evidence of how broken it is. However, the part of simply not even trying to educate, and trying to define what it is to be educated, left me a bit ‘in the air’.
Education AFAIK is the acquisition of skills? Or is it the skill of researching about what you will need to continue your training — in the future.
In other words, should education needs to be with a real teacher, otherwise you are not being educated?
Is the goal the mere recollection of sparse data into students brains and just simply listen to lectures and expect a test about the lectures are the end of the course, so we can do it all over again?
I am not a teacher, I live in the real world. Where people need to learn to keep their jobs. And we don’t have time for teachers, books, and football teams. You learn by loosing jobs, getting new ones, and being pushed into new skillsets you need to “express cook” to be able perform, no test required.
I think Thiel is right to say that education is a bubble. It has become an institution of theory and not practice. I think the problem with education is that the vast majority of universities have no consideration of costs because there is no incentive to care about costs. The reason being is because the federal government heavily subsidizes higher education through loan guarantees like Sallie Mae or Stafford Loans. Since the universities know that they will always get money, then they have no incentive to minimize costs. In any business, to create wealth is to minimize costs. If they are guaranteed funding from the government, whereas any other organization is dependent on individual preferences (meaning they can just stop voluntarily support it), then there is no cost minimization. In Thiel’s line of work, he has to cost minimize, which results in price dropping because if he does not, someone else will find a cheaper and better way of doing it. Higher education does not have that incentive.
I think Thiel is looking at it from an entrepreneurial perspective; by amassing incredible debt, it limits options for the individual. My gut feeling is that higher education will come crashing down because people will just fair it out; the price will be too high. Then schools will dramatically cut costs and consolidate to make it cheaper. Barring a government intervention (hopefully will not happen) higher education will be rethought in a dramatically different way where it is based on practice and more specialized.
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