Tag: education

What is College Really All About?

I’ve always found it amusing when someone makes the case that a college degree is not needed for material and career success and a professor responds that college is not about getting a better job or earning more money.  They are offended at such a base standard by which to judge the service they provide, and remind of the wonderful and fulfilling aspects of a liberal education.

The reason it’s amusing is because, whether profs like it or not, the myth that college guarantees a better job is the thing paying the bills at just about every school.  It’s also the thing colleges explicitly, repeatedly market and sell customers.  The belief in the degree as a ticket to a better job is the number one driver of demand for college.  After that probably access to artificially cheap money and overall wealth increases which allow many kids to purchase college as a consumption good; a four year fun time courtesy of other people’s money.  A distant reason for a small number of people is the actual learning they can get from college.  It’s not that the learning isn’t valuable, it’s just that an intellectually curious person has so very many ways to dive in to philosophy or history that it’s a tough case to convince them the only way is to spend tens of thousands and four years.

A lot of people in higher education are so confused about the actual product they sell and so blinded by the trappings of the university that they assume it is a robust, competitive market.  Perhaps compared to government K-12 schools it’s a cornucopia of choice, but it hardly resembles a free market.  Not only is the demand artificially high due to taxpayer grants, subsidies, scholarships, and loans, but a great many careers legally mandate degrees before an individual can even enter.  Law, accounting, just about anything related to health, the growing range of bureaucratic government jobs, and more can get you fined or jailed if you dare practice without a degree.  Laws prohibit employers in other fields from using other measures of ability like IQ tests in hiring.  Add to this the pervasive belief that one simply cannot live a decent life without a degree – a belief more akin to religion than regulation for non-mandated fields – and you’ve got the current higher ed marketplace.

It’s competitive in a sense.  Imagine if every city had a handful of DMV offices, and the offices had budgets partly determined by how many customers came to their particular office to get a license.  This would incentivize marketing and enhancements to the experience as competition between offices emerged.  You might have entertainment while waiting in line, or nicer lobbies to sit in, or food and drink (the price of which would just get added on to your license fee, which could be deferred and paid out over 20 years with subsidies from taxpayers), etc.  Over time, the nicer buildings and other in-line offerings might distract from the actual reason customers were there in the first place.  They had to get the legally mandated license to drive.  Or, to make a closer comparison, maybe only half the people in line legally needed a license, and the other half could drive legally without one but their parents and friends would be ashamed of them and constantly tell them that they’d be better drivers if they got one.

To understand anything about higher education today we have to understand what the actual product is in this distorted, unfree market.  Aside from those purchasing college as a consumption good and some small number purchasing college purely for the learning or “human capital” enhancements, the customer is buying the credential because it is legally or socially mandated.  Object all you want, but it’s not hard to prove.  Colleges themselves sell the degree-as-job-catcher angle harder than any other, and that’s the number one reason given by students for attending.  Besides, even the consumption good and human capital aspects of the product could be easily had for free if you just moved to a college town and took classes without registering.  The reason people don’t is because of the belief – sometimes true due to legal strictures – that they can’t make a decent living without a degree.

The discussion about problems in higher ed is not a discussion about learning or ideas or a liberal education.  It’s phony to respond to a criticism of college with a defense of philosophy.  It’s missing the point to respond to critiques of college with defenses of classroom style learning or other educational methods.  To do so implies that learning valuable ideas is only possible through the arbitrary four year debt-fueled system.  That is an intellectual arrogance of the highest order and a conflation of education and school that is dangerous for the former.

Good ideas are too important to be anchored to the current university system and its jobs focused mythos.  Good careers need a lot more than a prefabricated four-year bureaucratically managed prep process.  Separate the classroom from the credential and both will improve.

Credentials are Killing the Classroom

(A slightly tighter, probably better version of this was published for the Freeman.)

I’ve been to a lot of educational seminars put on by organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education and the Institute for Humane Studies, among others.  One thing these events have in common is incredibly high quality participants and deep discussions late into the night.  They tend to be multi-day intellectual feasts that leave you as tired as invigorated, and always challenged in the best of ways.

Nearly every time you hear one or more participants say something like, “This is what I wish college was like!”  The attendees are blown away by the caliber of the content, the professors willingness to engage amicably even in free time, and the intelligence and interest level of the other participants.  Faculty and students alike talk about how these seminars are far better than typical college classes.  This is no accident.

The obvious explanation most people give for this quality differential is self-selection.  Those who choose to give up a week of their summer to discuss ideas – both faculty and students – are high caliber and highly engaged.  This is true so far as it goes, but if we stop there we miss something even more fundamental and profound.  After all, college has self-selection too.  Shouldn’t it be full of professors and students who are earnest truth and knowledge seekers of the finest quality?  Yet college is nothing close to this, but for extremely rare exceptions in one or two classes.  Why does the self-selection only produce quality learning in these seminars?  The reason is right in front of us.

It’s because college offers an official credential and educational experiences outside of college do not.

That’s it.  Everything else is minor compared to this causal factor.  It’s easy to see when you look.  Imagine one of these summer seminars if they offered an official, government-approved piece of paper at the end that most HR departments used as a baseline screen, without which you couldn’t get past the first wave of job applications?  A summer seminar selling a magical ticket to a job that mom, dad, and society would feel proud of would be overwhelmed with attendees.  And most of them wouldn’t give a hoot about what they had to do to get the paper at the end.  Demand for faculty would spike, and most of them would do whatever it took to get the paycheck and quickly retreat to quiet corridors where they could be with their books and the few colleagues that actually care.  It would become, in a word, college.

The evidence is everywhere that the credential is killing the classroom.  I’ve guest taught entry level college classes before.  It’s pretty painful.  Most of the students are half asleep, grumpy, forlorn, texting, and generally inattentive.  I like to joke that if aliens from another planet came down and observed a typical class at a typical university and were asked what they witnessed, they would scan the cinder block and fluorescent room, ponder the pained look on student faces, and conclude it was a penal colony.  Imagine their surprise when told these people are not only here of their own free will, but paying tens of thousands for the suffering!

Not every classroom is that painful, but it’s the rule not the exception.  If you need further proof consider the fact that when class is cancelled everyone is happy, student and professor alike.  What other good can you think of where you pay in advance and are excited when it’s not delivered?  That’s because, much to the confusion of most faculty, the good being sold is not their lectures or the knowledge therein.  None of the students are buying that.  Sure, it’s nice if they get a little enjoyment and knowledge out of the deal, but that’s not why they’re there.  After all, if that’s what they wanted they could simply sit in on classes at will without registering or paying.

They are there for the credential because the credential is a signal to the working world that they are at least slightly better on average than those without it.  That’s it.  In some fields the credential is legally required, and in many others alternative ways to measure competence are illegal, so the signal of a degree retains artificially enhanced value.  Even so, that value is fading.

Large institutions form because transaction costs are high with tons of individuals exchanging goods, services, and information separately.  This is why family name mattered so much in times past.  Economist Ronald Coase famously explained the existence of firms using this basic logic.  It works for universities too.  When it’s hard to prove your worth alone, you get a trusted institution to vouch for you.  It’s s shortcut that reduces risk on the part of those who want to hire you.  But each passing year the value of this institutional reputation-backer declines compared to the available alternatives.  Technology has dramatically reduced information costs so it is now easier than ever to be your own resume.  You can vouch for yourself and create results easily seen by others that can speak for you.  It’s Yelp reviews instead of a few food critics determining whose steak is good.  You can build a better signal than what college is selling.

So long as legal and cultural (we might almost say religious) norms continue to see the degree as the primary signal of value in the marketplace the classroom will continue to decline in quality.  When the majority of students are purchasing one good (the credential) but are made to endure another (the classroom) they will continue to see it as a cost more than a benefit, and behave accordingly, sliding through with minimal pain and suffering.

On the flip side the classroom isn’t doing the credential any favors either.  Even though many still lack the imagination to see the alternatives right in front of them, most employers now admit that a degree signals very little these days.  Everyone has one.  Though there are still sometimes significant qualitative differences, most universities sell as many as they possibly can.  Cases of professors passing bad students and universities passing bad professors are well known, and the clout of the institutions is waning.  Even those who still require a degree ask for much more on top of it, because sitting through a bunch of classes you didn’t care about and doing the minimum amount of passionless hoop-jumping doesn’t convey much about your energy, eagerness, and ability to create value in a dynamic market.

A number of my professor friends sometimes chastise me for what they think are unfair criticisms of college.  Yet what I’m suggesting, that the credential be separated from the classroom, reflects my respect for great professors and the value of their style of education.  It is precisely because classroom learning at its best, like I’ve experienced so many times in those seminars, is so powerful and valuable that I wish to see it no longer destroyed and diminished by artificial attachment to a supposed magic job paper.  The subsidies, loans, restrictions, requirements, licensure laws, as well as the parental and societal worship of college as the great economic security blanket have filled the classroom with so much clutter it’s a rarity for quality interaction to occur.

The exciting thing is that a cleavage between the credential and the classroom is happening right in front of us.  It’s not MOOC’s that will fundamentally change college in countries like the US where access to information is already rich.  That’s just a new delivery system for a current good, and one that most American’s aren’t buying anyway.  The real shift is occurring as fewer and fewer employers look to the degree as the dominant signal, and as more and more young people build their own.

When the dust settles I’d love to see every great teacher and researcher doing their thing with eager audiences who are actually there to purchase that unique product, rather than suffer through it on their way to getting something else they really want.  The host of mediocre faculty will lose, but the good ones will win big, both in economic opportunity and quality of the craft.  So will the young customers who wish to learn from them.

Why Innovation Beats Politics in Reforming Higher Education

(The following article is adapted from a speech given on July 31 at the Pope Center’s Friedman Legacy Day event in Pinehurst, North Carolina.)

There is a powerful lesson in the emergence of companies like Uber for those who wish to reform higher education. All the focus tends to be on political and policy debates, but meanwhile innovators are busy working around the status quo without waiting for permission or consensus. 

Government granted monopolies are inefficient and unfair. The cartel structure of the taxi industry is a clear instance of the economic losses, higher prices, and lower quality that results. Policy wonks and would-be political reformers have been writing papers about this for decades.

All the arguments and efforts of reformers largely fell on deaf ears.

Then Uber came along. A startup completely outside of the political system and not interested in winning economic arguments or policy battles simply put a better experience into the hands of consumers. No academic or bureaucrat had to be convinced, and no politician had to fight union interests to pass a bill.

The status quo never saw it coming, and by the time they caught on, it was too late. Uber is here to stay.

This is a powerful case contrasting two approaches to changing backward institutions. Cab customers don’t care about economic arguments or cartel regulations. They just want to get from point A to point B. They may complain about the experience, but dissatisfaction won’t be enough to warrant hours spent educating, lobbying, or protesting.

The status quo persists because the regulatory regime concentrates the benefits on a few special interests while the costs are spread over millions of individuals with busy lives.

Uber, by providing an alternative experience directly to the consumers, made them the beneficiaries of a better system. Alternative experiences are a powerful force for change, even more feared by the status quo than critical ideas and theories. That’s why the Soviet Union banned not just free-market textbooks, but blue jeans, jazz, and Marlboro. When citizens experience the alternative, suddenly they are dissatisfied with the stagnant options on the table.

So what does innovation look like in higher education? How can alternative experiences be created to force academia to get in shape and better serve customers?

To answer this we need to first establish what the actual good being sold is. Taxis and Uber sell the same basic service, transportation from A to B. What are people buying from college?

Contrary to what many people—including professors—assume, students aren’t buying knowledge or skill. They’re not buying a network or even a social experience for the most part either.

To prove this you can simply ask why anyone would pay tuition. You can move to a college town, go to parties, hang around the campus bookstore and student union, and even sit in on classes and do assignments for free without enrolling.

The reason students don’t do this is because none of those experiences are the product they are purchasing. In fact, class is often seen as an additional cost that they must endure to get the product, which is why they are excited when it’s cancelled.

The product being bought is the credential. The credential drives the entire industry and is what causes millions to go deep into debt for an experience they often don’t love and admit doesn’t make them any more valuable in terms of tangible skills.

College credentials are valuable due to their signalling value. Your degree sends a signal to the world that you are, ostensibly, better than a similar person without the credential. This signal has some meaning; making it through college means you’re probably better than someone who lacked the intelligence or drive to do so–but it’s a shockingly low bar.

The proliferation of degreed people and the decline in ability among incoming freshman has turned college into little more than what high school once was.

I remember sitting in a classroom and having an epiphany as I overheard the hungover conversation of some classmates. Those people, I realized, were going to walk out of the university with the same credential as me. So all I was really buying was a piece of paper that said I’m no worse than that guy with his half-sober head on the desk.

Employers readily admit that degrees tell them little these days. Everyone seems to have one but few have relevant skills and experiences. Many, especially small businesses and startups, don’t even use it as a baseline anymore. Even those that still do require something more on top of it to signal who is really high quality.

Getting back to our Uber example, until the alternative was created and made accessible to consumers, no one was dissatisfied enough to demand taxi reform. Students today are in a similar place. A growing number are dissatisfied with the product.

The problem is that most students don’t become dissatisfied until they’re already in college and realize it’s not all that valuable. Or worse, they only realize that after they’ve graduated with a load of debt but little knowledge, skill, or ability to create value.

Most college students still believe that the credential it gives them is the one and only way to get from point A to point B. They thoughtlessly apply like New Yorkers used to hail cabs.  That’s where competition comes in. Today, it’s possible for young people to build their own signal that is more valuable than a degree.

No longer do you have to rely solely on an institution to vouch for you and open doors. You can let your product, your reputation, your individual ability and brand speak for themselves.

Consider the popular story of the woman who couldn’t get through the application process for the fast-growing tech startup AirBnB. She had a great degree, but so did all the other applicants. So she built a better signal. She researched the industry and built a basic website describing her take and how she’d add value to the company.

It turned into an internet sensation—infinitely more valuable than a generic resume listing a degree like everyone else.

LinkedIn pages, GitHub profiles for coders, personal websites, and modern communication tools make it easier than ever for young people to create value, build a network, and make it easily accessible and verifiable to the world. No longer are they confined to purchasing prefabricated credentials from large institutions.

Competition in higher education means competing ways to signal value to the world. The alternatives are limited only by imagination.

The force of government loans, grants, subsidies, and laws that artificially enhance the value of degrees, along with the force of the public religion that the college degree is the only way to a respectable, successful life, have made it hard for most to see the opportunity to create alternatives. Yet they are emerging.

Sometimes they emerge with great fanfare, like tech investor Peter Thiel’s fellowship program that pays kids under 20 $100,000 to dropout and start a company. Sometimes with less notice, like the many coding schools, online courses, and combination work/education/professional development programs.

As this proliferation of alternatives continues, it spells nothing but good for young people, employers, the economy, and yes even for some professors and universities. Really good schools that offer a truly valuable experience will thrive while colleges that function mostly as credential mills lose market share.

What’s left when the credential ceases to be the magic ticket is anyone’s guess, but we do know only those providing real value to the educational consumer will survive. That’s a good thing.

How Change Happens – Higher Ed. Edition

The current higher education model is flawed.  If we’re serious about changing it, first we need to get serious about understanding how social change happens.  Intentions and action are not enough to bring about desired ends.  We need an understanding of the causal relationships involved in order to effectively bring about change.

The great truth that flies in the face of civics textbooks and popular myth is that politics is not the source of social change.  It’s more like the last in a line of indicators of cultural shifts that have already occurred.  Politicians and the policies they create only change after the new approach is sufficiently beneficial to the right interests, and sufficiently tolerable to the public at large to help, or at least not harm, political careers.  Of course some politicians guess wrong and suffer accordingly, but by and large the political marketplace tends toward preservation of the status quo until a new direction is imperative for survival.

An entire, and entirely fascinating, branch of political economy called Public Choice Theory examines the incentives at work in the political marketplace in depth, and I highly encourage anyone attracted to political action to gain a working knowledge of this field.  It reveals, in short, that incentives baked into the democratic system create and perpetuate policies that are bad for the public at large, and good for particular concentrated interests.  What Public Choice has a difficult time accounting for is the role of changing beliefs.  There are countless policies that, based purely on the incentives of various interests, ought to be in place but are not, or vice versa.  Some things are simply out of bounds, no matter how much a particular group might benefit and be willing to lobby, because the general public finds them unacceptable.

Contrary to the seemingly ironclad rule of interest driven politics, public beliefs can and do change, and dramatically sometimes, putting parameters around the area within which political actors can ply their trade.  Slavery is a striking example.  At one point, it would’ve been hard to get elected, at least in some areas, if you publicly supported abolition.  Not too many decades later, it’s unthinkable to get elected anywhere if you’ve ever even joked about supporting slavery.  There is certainly a complex relationship between changing economic incentives and public beliefs, but it is undeniable that the about-face on the ethics of slavery was more than a mere shift in power among competing interests.  What most of the public found tolerable they now find reprehensible.

Our institutions are formed by incentives, and incentives are constrained by beliefs.  That makes the beliefs of the public the ultimate key to change.  Smaller changes might occur within the window of things already publicly acceptable, but major change requires a shift in that window.  How to change those beliefs?  There are two primary drivers, both of which feed each other; ideas and experiences.

Ideas are the raw data that form beliefs.  If you accept the idea that minimum wage laws make lower skilled individuals less employable, and you accept the idea that a society with fewer unemployed persons is desirable, then you will have the belief that minimum wage laws are bad.  If, on the other hand, you’ve never really thought about the economics behind minimum wage at all, but your low skilled neighbor lost his job when minimum wage increased, that experience might also cause you to believe minimum wage laws are bad.

I spent a good part of my life focusing entirely on disseminating ideas as a way of changing belief.  It was fulfilling and, I think, valuable work.  But it wasn’t until relatively recently that I began to understand the immense value of experience as a vital second prong when it comes to changing beliefs and the world.

Consider the difficulty of convincing your mother that the New York City taxi cartel is inefficient or immoral.  It requires a great deal of economic theory or philosophizing about rights and coercion.  Your mom might have other things she enjoys more than reading books on these subjects.  Even if you convince her, her newfound belief will probably barely register among things she cares about.  Sure, taxis aren’t the greatest.  So what?  She’s never had that bad an experience.  Even if a policy change to end the cartel were possible, your mom mighn’t pay any attention, or she may be concerned about what the new world without cartels would look like in practice.

Now consider recommending your mom use Uber on her next trip in to Manhattan.  She uses it, likes it, and becomes a regular customer.  She may be completely ignorant of the current cab cartel and the problems with it, but she’s now a believer in an alternative system.  If Uber comes under attack from vested interests, she’ll defend it.  If the chance to end the cartel comes up, she won’t fear because she already knows what the world looks like without it.  She can’t easily be convinced out of her experience.

It is for this reason that dictatorial countries not only ban literature that propagates new ideas, but also goods and services that compete with government monopolies and let people experience something better.  The Soviet Union feared blue jeans, jazz, and Marlboro cigarettes as much as free market textbooks.

If we want to break out of the educational rut it requires new ideas and new experiences.  We mustn’t only talk about new approaches, we must build alternatives.  The best part is, you don’t have to wait on anyone.  You can take your own path right now, and by so doing not only improve your life, but serve as an example to others of what’s possible outside the status quo.  Educational entrepreneurs, not just intellectuals, will change the hidebound approach to education.  It’s already happening.

While policymakers, pundits, professors, and provosts squabble about the future of higher education and jockey to secure their position, entrepreneurs are busy creating and delivering alternatives across the globe.  The educational consumer is enjoying new experiences and getting new ideas about education in the process.  The old guard can argue any which way they like, but at the end of the day they’ll have to prove more valuable to the learner than the myriad new options.  All the protections and advantages in the world can’t stop competition now.  Technology has helped break it wide open.

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Excerpted from The Future of School.

Your Student Debt is Unfair

You hear a lot of complaints about student debt, and how maddening it is to be $40,000 in the hole at age 23 and still not have a job that requires a degree.  The case for the unfairness of student loan debt is that these kids didn’t know better.  It’s kind of a pathetic excuse, but it’s often true.

12 years in an education system where you are constantly pummeled with the promises of higher education and the perils of any deviation will make you overvalue a degree.  You’ll never be warned about the cost, or how debt can limit your options.  You’ll only be told about the magic $1 million in lifetime earnings that is supposed to find you as soon as you find your major and graduate.  It’s a system. Obey it, and the statistics will magically bring you what they bring the average of the past aggregate, as long as your behavior correlates with theirs.

Starry eyed teens get grants, aid, scholarships, loans, and complete a bunch of paperwork with their parents to just get in to the best possible college they can based on rankings they’ve never really studied.  They get endless praise upon graduation and more upon heading off to college.  Finally, they’ve made it!  The rest of life will simply unfold successfully as if on autopilot.  What’s the worst that could happen now?  You’re getting a degree, so you’re set!  You’re on the right side of the data!

Young people get good enough grades, do some extracurriculars, and get the degree.  Once more they are celebrated.  Then, for perhaps the first time in 20 years, they leave the confines of a controlled environment shielded from the world of value creation and exchange.  No one is overly impressed with their ability to fit into the system.  People want to know what they bring to the table.  Can they crunch meaningful numbers without being assigned?  Can they sell?  Can they code?  Can they digest the complexities of markets and customers and make judgments on the fly about how to preempt problems?  Not really.  Those things take experience and context wholly lacking in most educational institutions.

So they struggle.  They don’t like what they do, or they can’t find work much better than what they could have gotten right out of high school.  It’s OK though, they have time to learn from the real world right?  Except they’ve got college debt to pay in addition to living expenses.  That awesome company they were going to volunteer for in order to gain skills?  Not so easy with the need to earn enough to make loan payments.

Grads are in a bind and they feel kind of ripped off.  They feel betrayed.  They feel lied to.  Where is that high school guidance counselor who pushed them to college?  Will she pay the bills?  Where are the parents who were so proud?  Will they want their kid to move back home?  It can be pretty rough.

So yes, it’s unfair.  But the worst possible way to respond and improve things is to say it’s unfair over and over.  Say it once, get it our of your system, move on.  The fairness doesn’t matter.  Sometimes you’ll act on bad information.  Sometimes you’ll have regrets.  Sometimes other people’s plans for you aren’t best and you’ll suffer for following them.  So what?  Talking about how sad or unfair it is does nothing for you but reduce the chances that you’ll actually make things better.

Yeah, you were led to believe this degree would pay for itself immediately and without difficulty.  Yeah, because you were handicapped by the system you were incapable of realizing for yourself what the decision to go into debt might mean and how it could play out.  That’s the past.  What will you do today?

The good news is, it’s not that big of a deal unless you let it be.  Laugh at it, roll up your sleeves, and reboot your expectations about the world while building every day.  Devise a payoff plan and a life improvement plan.  Lots of people have done it, so can you.  The past is past, you are where you are, and no amount of bitterness, protest, or hoping for some political savior to bail you out will do you good.  In fact, it might destroy you.

Oh, and if you have kids of your own someday, let them experience enough of the world outside the walls of schools so that they know better than to blindly follow the advice of authorities seeking to do them good.

Build a Better Signal

Why pay a university to do something you can do better yourself?

From Medium.

A college degree is a signal.

It’s a signal to the world of your value in the market. It conveys information about your ability, skill, and intelligence. There is a lot of noise in the world of work, and it’s hard to figure out who’s worth working with. A degree cuts through some of that noise and puts you in a smaller pool of competitors.

The thing is, this signal is not that valuable. It’s also very expensive.

Not long ago a degree may have been the best signal most people could get. There weren’t many ways to demonstrate your value to the market, so a degree was one of the better bets. Things have changed dramatically. Technology has opened up the world. The tools available to you now have lowered search and information costs, and you can create signals of your own that are far more powerful than a degree.

What’s Better?

A person with a strong GitHub profile has a signal that beats a degree. If you’ve launched a startup, even if it lasted only six months and ultimately failed, you’ve done something that sends a more powerful signal than a degree. If you’ve raised money, sold products, done freelance work, produced videos, run social media campaigns, mastered SEO or AdWords, built a website, designed logos, started a nonprofit, been published in a handful of outlets with good content, had valuable work experience, or even just have an amazing online presence via a personal website and/or excellent LinkedIn and social media profiles, you have a signal more valuable than most degrees.

If you are not very talented or ambitious and you are unable to do anything like the above, a degree might be the best signal you’re capable of getting. When you realize that all the other students half asleep around you in class will walk away with the same signal, it becomes clear that it doesn’t carry that much weight. It says, “I’m no worse than everyone else with a BA.” If getting a BA is a really hard task for you and building something better is overwhelming, the signaling power of a degree might be worth it. But if you are able and willing to do more — if you are above average and can excel in most environments, than you have in your power right now the ability to build a better signal than a degree.

You have at your fingertips tools that young work-seekers and employers a few decades ago didn’t. Never has it been easier and cheaper to start a business, offer freelance services, learn to code, show off your writing or artistic skills, and build a portfolio of value created.

Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them

Consider the woman who created this website in an effort to get hired at AirBnB. Her resume listing her academic accomplishments and other common signals was lost in the noise. So she built a better signal.

AirBnB website beats a resume

The website is far more valuable than any degree or honor roll listing. AirBnB took notice, and I can guarantee that website alone has created more job offers and interest than she can handle. In fact, so entrenched is the degree-as-signal mindset that this woman’s effort went viral immediately. The competition among degree holders is fierce, while the competition among those who build a better signal is almost nonexistent.

There is nothing in her story that required a degree. If you want to work for a cool company, you can do something like this yourself right now regardless of educational status. Why settle for a dated, baseline signal that says you’re no worse than every other degree holder?

What Happens to College?

Here’s the interesting thing: The more young people begin to build better signals, the better college will become.

Fewer people will go because most students attend to purchase the signal and that only. But those who stay will be there for the best reasons. They’ll be there because they love the college experience, the lectures, the professors, and the rest of the bundle.

Losing all those customers who are just suffering through the courses to get the signal will hurt the bottom line of most universities. Some might go under entirely. But for those who care deeply about higher education in its best form, this will be a welcome change. Schools will get sharper and better as they face competition. Instead of contenting themselves with delivering mediocre product because they have consumers who feel captive to the need to get that degree, colleges will begin to become more accountable to the customers there to gain knowledge.

Professors — good ones at least — will love this change. Students in their classes will be the ones who actually want to be there for the value of the classroom experience itself. Severing the credential from the classroom will enhance the quality of both.

How Do I Do It?

Most young people don’t know how to take advantage of this new world where they can craft their own signal. They’ve spent years in a conveyor belt education system that has instilled in them a rule-following, paper accolade chasing mentality. They see degrees and grades as safe, as fallbacks that will magically keep them afloat in hard times. They overestimate the signaling power of paper and underestimate their ability to create product. Product beats paper in the world of signals.

Entrepreneurship is becoming more than just an activity that a tiny number of company founders engage in. We once shifted from farming to factories, then from factories to offices. Today a shift from corporate offices to remote workers, freelancers, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs is happening fast. Those who learn to think entrepreneurially, whether or not they ever launch their own company, and see themselves as their own firm, regardless of where their paycheck comes from, will build the future.

It’s hard to internalize and act on the opportunity in this new world. That’s one of the main reasons behind Praxis, the entrepreneur education company I launched. We want to help you build a signal that is more valuable than a degree. We want to help you do it in one quarter the time and for zero cost. We want you to have fun and become excellent in the process. We want to help you use the tools available and create your own future.

That’s why we place participants with growing companies to get work experience. That’s why we help them create personal development projects, tangible skills training, portfolio projects, and personal websites.

Praxis is just one way to help young people take advantage of the opportunity to build a better signal. The options are limited only by your imagination. Find one that works for you.

Carpe Diem

The future is bright. You have in your hands the power to create your own brand, to broadcast it to the world, to demonstrate your ability to create value. You can built a better signal than the generic one in the hands of tens of millions of other young people.

What will it be?

Episode 22: Blake Boles on Unschool Adventures and Self-Directed Learning

Blake Boles is an author, entrepreneur, and self-directed learning advocate.  He’s written several books on education beyond school and runs a program to help unschoolers to travel the world.  He joins me to discuss his own education and career journey and what he’s learned along the way.

Find him online here.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

When Ideas Aren’t Enough, Start a Company

From Medium.

For me it was education. I had ideas. That wasn’t enough.

I worked in and around higher education for the better part of a decade and it confirmed and strengthened the belief I developed during my own college experience: the whole system is a wasteful mess.

Hardly anyone involved enjoys it. Students and professors complain about each other. Both are happy when class is cancelled. Employers don’t think grads know what they need to know, grads don’t feel ready to embark on careers, and everyone is spending everyone else’s money with unknown results and little accountability.

“I see opportunity”

I openly talked about the problems of credential inflation, student frustration, artificially stimulated supply via tax dollars in myriad forms, artificially stimulated demand via licensure requirements and restrictions on employers using other means to test competence. I wrote and discussed the dangers of the cultural narrative that guilts, shames, and scares everyone into buying a multi-thousand dollar product that they don’t much enjoy and don’t know what to do with.

I saw the emergence of MOOC’s and the decline of informational gatekeepers. I heard business owners say they don’t care about degrees anymore. I imagined far more efficient, customer-centric, accountable, exciting, and effective ways of providing education, experience, confidence, skills, and a network to young people. In short, I had ideas.

The problem with ideas is that they’re almost costless. I could broadcast my ideas and others could broadcast theirs, and ideas people can lock in an endless tussle over whose are better. Who cares? Nobody wins when it’s all talk. It hit me one exciting, frightening day. If I’m really correct about the problems with higher ed, and if my ideal alternative is as valuable as I think it is, I need to put my money where my mind is. I need to build it. So I did.

Make it real

I created a company that puts smart, hard-working young people in great businesses while they are engaging in a rigorous educational experience complete with tech skills, professional development basics, liberal arts, coaching, and self-guided projects that demonstrate tangible value.

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.

Suddenly, I went from the guy with opinions and ideas about education, entrepreneurship, and career to the guy who’s going to succeed or fail based on those ideas. I learned that the only thing critics love more than ideas to disagree with are physical manifestations of those ideas. But once I launched Praxis, everything became clearer. I was playing a new game. I was no longer worried about the critics, I was interested in my customers.

Have something to lose

This change in focus is the healthiest thing in the world. Economist Nassim Taleb talks about the concept of “skin in the game”, and every entrepreneur knows exactly what he means. Nothing sharpens your focus and clarifies your thought like having something on the line besides just the pride of being right. Nothing helps you gain valuable information from those who disagree like the need to succeed in the development and deployment of an idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an ideas person. Philosophizing is my favorite pastime. But the best philosophers are those who don’t limit themselves to thought experiments, but also put their ideas through field experiments. It’s not enough to have ideas that seem superior in mental models. The real impact comes from the thinkers who take the next step and incorporate their vision.

Entrepreneurship is philosophy in action.

Use the value-creation test

A good exercise is to attempt to turn every idea into a business model. Think people eat too many carbs and they’d be happier and healthier on your preferred diet? If you’re right, that’s value sitting on the table. Can you create that value for others and measure it in revenue? Think people watch too much TV? What need are they trying to meet and what other services might meet it better? Can you build it? Can you sell it?

I am not claiming that speculation without action is worthless. All action starts in the imagination. I am saying that every idea can be sharpened by forcing yourself to put it into some kind of model that creates value. Not every idea is monetizable, and that’s OK. But neither is monetization some kind of lower life form or dirty word. It’s nothing more than a representation of the value your idea creates for people. The practice of putting theories into business models will reveal weaknesses in the idea, or demonstrate that it’s so good you can’t wait to act on it.

Don’t get stuck talking

There are limitless entrepreneurial opportunities, and today it’s easier and cheaper than ever to turn an idea into a business. But there is also infinite information and no shortage of platforms with which to discuss ideas. This presents a challenge to big thinkers and entices many of us to stay forever in the world of speculation, avoiding implementation.

If you want to change the world and your own life, you can’t stop at ideas. The transformation of those ideas into something that receives feedback from the market is the hardest, yet most worthwhile journey I can think of. Embrace it.

Age and Your Option Set

I meet a lot of young people who have the skills, interest, maturity, and resources to do right now the very thing they want to be doing in five years.  Almost none of them realize it, or feel free to do it now.  They feel as though they need permission, or need to be in the “normal” age bracket for it to be in their set of options.

I know some coders who have the skill and interest to work for a software startup.  They don’t enjoy school.  They don’t feel it’s making them a better coder.  They have a job offer right now to go work someplace they love.  They even say that the job offer is exactly the kind they want to get in four years when they finish school, and voice disappointment that it came their way too early.  How could it be too early?  The company wants you and you want them, right now, today!

The conveyor belt mindset is so strong in most of us that we are incapable of seeing options in front of us if they aren’t part of the set of options that is supposed to be in front of a 16, 18, or 24 year old.  At 18 your options are among different colleges, internships, summer jobs, or gap year programs.  That’s the norm, and that norm blinds people to the massively larger set of options they actually have.  This blinding is so strong that even when offered something that they hope will be available four years hence, they are unable to see it as a serious, viable option, and they say no to go suffer through something less interesting for four years and untold thousands.

This isn’t just about college.  Our tendency to stick with the age-defined conveyor belt option set society expects is strong throughout life.  I’ve met women who desperately want to stop working and have and raise children, but they feel like they aren’t allowed to until they’ve put in a certain amount of time as a working woman, even though they could afford it today.  I’ve met people who want to play gigs at bars with a band, but they feel that’s the kind of thing an accountant can only do when he retires.

Don’t be blinded by social averages and expectations.  If you want to learn code today, who cares that you’re only 10 and supposed to be doing other things.  If you want to switch careers, who cares that you’re 60 and it’s supposed to be too late for that.  If you have a job offer today that matches what you hope to get after graduation, who cares that you’re only 18.

The conveyor belt sucks.  Get off.  Pave your own path.

My Education and Career Path

I was homeschooled, but in practice that meant playing Legos most of the time.  My mom felt guilt over her failed attempts at creating a more structured learning environment and curriculum.  At the time I thought I was probably embarrassingly behind my peers in “normal school”, but I didn’t much care.  We (my siblings and I) always had lots of chores to do, and I had paid jobs from age ten or earlier (weekly then daily paper routes, golf course, grocery store, construction…).  I had no interest in any kind of intellectual life until I was about sixteen.  Up until then, it was sports, Legos, earning money, playing guitar, and whatever I had to do to get decent grades in my few homeschool classes or textbooks.

When I was 15, I attended a small private school for my sophomore year in high school.  I enjoyed the sports and made some friends, but after years of loose homeschooling, it felt stiflingly prefabricated.  I don’t think I took homework home with me the entire year, since so many classes required almost no attention, I’d do homework right there at my desk.  The whole thing seemed artificial, and I found it absurd that we all followed the same bells and schedule, like cattle corralled through the halls.  I was not too smart for school – plenty of kids there were smarter than me – but too impatient with the lack of individualization.  I was also irritated that it severely restricted the hours I could work.  I decided to quit.

I’ll never forget when I told the music teacher of my decision to leave and enroll full time in the local community college.  I considered him a friend and something of a mentor.  He helped awaken my musical interest and gave me opportunities to sing and play that I was not qualified for, something I’m still grateful for.  But he just didn’t get it.  I came in to class after running around outside in a rainstorm with a few other students and broke the news.  He stared, mouth agape with a bewildered, wounded look in his eyes and said, “College!?  Isaac, you’re not ready for college.  You’re still a kid who runs barefoot in the rain!”  Any doubts I had about my decision vanished then and there.  It was a well-meaning plea, but I took it as a challenge.  I felt he underestimated me, and that was a great motivator.

I spent the next two years taking a full load of classes, packed into two or three days a week, and working as many hours as I could the other two or three days.  I loved it.  I could choose the classes I wanted, make my own schedule, and interact with a variety of people much wider than in the private high school, and even more than at the university I later attended.  Most of the classes were ok, some bad, some good.  The best classes I ever had were business and marketing from a crazy, middle-aged, self-proclaimed capitalist fanboy who ran a successful business but taught for fun.  It was around this time that I awoke to the world of ideas.  It had nothing to do with any of my classes, but for some reason (probably a breakup with a girl) I started picking up books, something I had, with a few early exceptions, hated.

I found myself mesmerized by philosophy, theology, and eventually economics.  My job had me travelling across the state and installing phone and computer cables (pre WiFi), and taking on scary amounts of responsibility, mostly making things up as I went.  My education, which came almost entirely from books I read on my own and late-night conversations with friends at church, the used bookstore, and coffee shops (which were kind of a new thing in Kalamazoo, MI at the time) was moving at breakneck speed.  It was like my whole childhood I was just doing whatever I had to to get by educationally, but the dam broke in my mid-teens and I was in love with the life of the mind.  I also had something of an entrepreneurial spirit and helped start a nonprofit and did a lot of international missions work, which at the time I thought was the best way to make the world a better place.

After community college I continued the work/school split while attending the local, generic, massive state university where I majored in political science and philosophy.  I changed majors several times, but finally settled on subjects I most enjoyed and would let me finish as fast as possible.  I didn’t mind school, but hated the amount of money I had to pay, and just wanted to get the piece of paper that was supposed to be a ticket to a job.  Trying to save money, I went two whole semesters without purchasing a single textbook and still got good grades.  It seemed like a racket.

With the exception of one professor and one TA, none of my fellow students or faculty really aided my intellectual development in comparison to what I was pursuing on my own and with friends outside of school.  I used to walk around an old building downtown and imagine buying and turning it into a real college, where students only bought the items they wanted from the bundle, and where work and classroom were not in competition, but complementary.

Despite never having a single meeting with an advisor, somehow I graduated.  At least I assume I did, since they sent me a certificate in the mail.  I was 19 and I started a business with my brother.  It was something of a failure, with a few high points.  We folded it up after just nine months.  I spent the next five years as a very young and very poor married guy working in the state legislature, then at a think tank.

I loved ideas, and had come to believe the way to make the world a better place was through political and policy change.  But the more I studied and observed the machinations of the political world, the less faith I had in it as an avenue for change.  While at the think tank I took night classes and got a Masters in Economics.  It was a uniquely amazing program, as we used no textbooks but instead read all primary works beginning with Hesiod all the way through Marx and Mises and Friedman.  I drove across the state three hours each way, one night a week for a year and a half during the program.  By the time I was done, my belief in the inability of politics to improve the world had become firmer.  I had little interest in anything besides educating people about the perils of government intervention and the wonders of the market.

My wife and I took a chance on a great job offer running libertarian educational programs in Arlington, VA, a city we weren’t too fond of before we moved, and one that, after leaving I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  The job was amazing.  Over my four plus years there I ran fellowships, seminars, mentoring programs, and raised money.  I interacted with hundreds of bright students and dozens of successful entrepreneurs.  I began to observe troubling trends.  So many young people were stacking up degrees and educational accolades, yet wandering aimlessly, insecure and unsure about their career prospects.  They had degrees and debt, but couldn’t find a job.  Many of the smartest decided, since they didn’t know what else to do, to go to law school.  So many came out the other end with massive debt, no closer to finding a fulfilling career.  (If I had a nickel for every lawyer that told me they wished they hadn’t done law school…)

Meanwhile, in fundraising I met countless business owners who claimed they were always hiring, even in a supposedly down economy, but couldn’t find enough good talent.  Something was amiss.

My views on changing the world were shifting too.  Education as I thought of it – convincing people to change their worldview – seemed insufficient.  I began to observe areas where change happened, it seemed to have a great deal to do with entrepreneurial innovation.  You could spend your life trying to convince people the Post Office is inefficient or immoral, or you could invent FedEx or email.  I got the itch to disrupt the status quo as an entrepreneur.

A culmination of desires I had in college and opportunities, skills, connections, and worldviews I’d developed since came together.  Cliché as it sounds, I went for a walk on the beach and had an epiphany.  A single word, “Praxis”, popped into my head.  I could almost see it in bold letters floating on the horizon.  A relentless flood of ideas filled my mind, and I ran to my car and drove home as fast as I could to type it up.  I was going to create an alternative to the university system.  Better, faster, cheaper, and more individualized.  I wanted to create a new class of entrepreneurial young people.  I wanted to seize the best online educational material, organize it, add a powerful credentialing signal, and combine it with work experience at dynamic companies that couldn’t afford unproductive interns.  I was tired of seeing young people languish and drown in debt.  I was tired of seeing business owners struggle to find good workers.  I was tired of seeing so many entrepreneurial opportunities and so few people with the confidence to pursue them.

Thus Praxis was born.  It’s kind of the incorporated version of my philosophy on education.

While living through the various phases I was only sometimes conscious of these things, but in retrospect I can draw several lessons from my educational and career path:

  • Free time is more valuable than planned time.
  • Work is more valuable than school.
  • Responsibility and ownership at an early age are irreplaceable.
  • College is what you make it, but nearly everything good you get from it can be had better and cheaper elsewhere.
  • Your education belongs to you, and no institution can give it to you.
  • Discovering what you hate is more important than finding out what you love. As long as you’re not doing things you hate, you’re moving in roughly the right direction.
  • Seeing geography as a constraint is a major impediment to your educational and career progress.
  • Your personal philosophy and educational and career path should feed each other.
  • Wandering and experimenting are great, but not at any price. Meandering through an educational path you’ll be paying off for a decade or more is different than dabbling in a free class or internship that will only cost you a few months.
  • Don’t fear how you compare to your peers.
  • If the interest isn’t there, don’t put energy there. But when it is, go all the way.
  • You always get more out of things you choose over things you’re made to do. Find ways to have more of the former, and fewer of the latter.
  • Work ethic can overcome knowledge deficit, but not the other way around.
  • Mentors can be great, but they can also hold you back. Don’t take them too seriously.
  • If the process isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.
  • If the process isn’t hard, you’re doing it wrong.
  • You’ll be doing it wrong at least some of the time. That feedback helps you figure out how to do it right.
  • Push your imagination to see yourself as capable of great things. Continue to do this.

The few regrets I have for the path I took boil down to one: I wish I had more confidence, and earlier, about going my own way.

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Excerpted from The Future of School

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*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Gains From a Radically Different Daily Structure

The other day I was in line at a Chipotle in Chicago.  It was around noon on a weekday, so the line was almost out the door.  It took 30 minutes.  It dawned on me just how wasteful and unhappy the whole situation was.  Why should we all wait so long to get food when an hour or two later the cooks and servers would be waiting around with few customers?

The same is true for traffic during rush hour, parking on the weekends, and prices during vacation.  The absurdity of the suffering we all endure and the economic and psychic cost of all this waiting, planning, and crowding is hard to measure.  But it’s real.

It all stems from the same source: the regimentation of life.  Every kid goes to school at the exact same time every day, stays for the same number of hours, leaves at the same time, and has the same days off.  More variation exists in the working world, but not much.  The bulk of producers clock in at roughly the same time every morning, eat lunch in unison, and head home en mass.

The odd thing is none of this is necessary for a growing number, possibly even most of us.  How many jobs require someone to actually be physically present between the hours of 9 and 5?  Why the heck do kids need to sit in clumps of same aged children for identical hours to be forced to study the same things in the same way?  We can work from almost anywhere.  We can learn from almost anywhere.  Most of us have the tools, the freedom of movement, and the resources.  Why don’t we see a diversity of daily schedules?  Why don’t more people treat Tuesday as the weekend?  Why don’t more people do all their errands during the day and their work at night?  Why don’t more people abandon regular offices or classrooms altogether?

There are some benefits the the regimen, but not enough to justify the costs we endure.  These practices continue primarily because of a mindset.  We have status quo bias.  We feel guilt or confusion at the idea of not being present 9-5 at work or 8-3 at school.  It’s an obsession with externally defined roles and goals at the expense of outcomes and value created.  What do we want and need to learn or create or earn?  How and when can we best do it?  Those are the important questions and the answers, if we are honest, would vary widely and look little like the routines most of us subject ourselves to.

Imagine a world where kids freely explored, worked, played, and learned on their own terms and timelines.  Imagine a world where people of all ages worked when and how they worked best.  Imagine a week not punctuated by any regular rush hour or weekend or meal time.  Certainly patterns would emerge and some schedules would be more common than others, but absent our rigid adherence to an outdated schedule, supply and demand would be regulated by the money, time, and headache of peaks and troughs, and the market would smooth out and have smaller ups and downs.

The value of such a shift would be immense.  Think of how many hours people would not be sitting in traffic if few had to show up at the same time to the office or school in the morning.  Think about the hours and money that would not be spent during peak times for flights, hotels, parking lots, and Disney World tickets.  Think of the immense subjective value enhancement by not enduring the throngs.  Little if any of these major gains would show up in GDP measurements.  In fact, it may hurt GDP.  Less spending on the same goods.  Less need for parking structures, etc.

We are seeing a slow but steady move in this direction, which is part of the reason I’ve argued that GDP is a dated and increasingly useless measure of anything valuable.  Let’s speed up the process by asking “Why not?” instead of “Why?” about radical new structures that make us happier.  You let your kids unschool?  Why not.  You work remotely?  Why not.  You take the day off to go to the beach in the middle of the day?  Why not.

It might not be doable for you in any big ways, but I bet there are some stressful patterns in your life that are relics of a bygone era and can be shed with little difficulty.

How My Son Learned to Read When We Stopped Trying to Teach Him

We were homeschooling and our son was six years old.  He had a good vocabulary and comprehension of ideas beyond many kids his age.  We knew reading would open up the world to him, we knew he’d like it, and we knew he was very capable of doing it.  But he didn’t.

We tried flashcards.  We tried read-alongs.  We tried playing hardball and we tried being fun and exciting.  We tried restricting activities until he’d done his reading lessons, and we tried giving rewards.  All these efforts had two things in common: they didn’t help him read one bit and they made our relationship with him worse.  Being a parent and being a child cease to be fun when you’re at odds all the time.

So, at an age when we were starting to worry about his lagging behind, we simply stopped trying.  We quit the whole effort.  He was nearly seven when we gave it up in favor of more peace and harmony in the house.

Daily life was a little easier, yet we still had this nagging worry about him.  What will happen if he’s behind where he’s supposed to be for his age?  Still, everything about our efforts to make him read felt wrong, so we simply ignored the fears.

I was reading a lot of great books on how kids learn and I knew intellectually that kids need no instruction to learn to read.  They will learn when they find it valuable and if they are in an environment where it’s possible – one with books and other readers.  Still the head and the heart are very different things.  I knew kids were better at self-teaching than being taught, but I had to watch my own son, sharp as he was, remain completely outside the wonderful world of the written word.

Then it happened, just like so many of the books said it would.  You believe it in stories, but it’s still a surprise when it happens in real life.  One night I overheard my son reading aloud to himself in his bed.  And the first thing he read wasn’t Dick and Jane, but Calvin & Hobbes.  Not light fare for a brand new reader.

Let me back up a bit.  We would often read to him for a few minutes before bed, and lately he had been in love with some old Calvin & Hobbes comics I had from my adolescence.  We’d read him a few pages and say goodnight.  One night it was later than usual and he asked me if I’d read.  I was a bit grumpy and tired, and I said no, I was going to bed.  He protested a bit but could see I wasn’t up for it so he let it go, seeming defeated.  Ten minutes later I heard him reading.

He later told me that he wasn’t actually reading it that night, nor the first several nights after when he spoke the words (and often laughed) aloud.  He had heard us read it so many times he had the words memorized.  He was looking at the pictures and reciting the words like lines to a familiar song.  I didn’t know this until long after he could clearly read without first memorizing, but it really doesn’t matter.  In fact, it’s probably better that my wife and I assumed he was reading it when we first heard him, or we might have been tempted to intervene and try to cajole him into reading it without the cheat of memory and illustrations.  I know too well the kind of unhappy outcome that would have created.

For a year or more we fought with a kid who clearly had all the tools to read and we got nowhere.  He wasn’t faking his inability, he really couldn’t read.  Reading was always an activity that interrupted his day and was associated with expectant and often visibly (despite attempts to hide it) stressed parents.  It was a concept as useless as it was foreign.  But once he had a strong desire – to enjoy his favorite comic strip – and his inability to read was the barrier, he overcame it in no time and never even celebrated or announced it to us.  It was utilitarian, not some lofty thing to perform for a gold star or a pat on the back.  His ability and interest in reading, then writing and spelling, only intensified as he found it indispensable for playing games like Minecraft and Scribblenauts.

We’ve since made a full transition from the imposed curriculum of homeschooling to the kid-created structure of unschooling.  Looking back I’m a little ashamed of the silly way we approached things before, but at the time it was so hard to let go, with all that crippling fear.  There are so many “shoulds” pumped into parents brains from the moment they conceive.  There are percentiles and averages and tests and rankings galore.  But these are useful only to the statisticians and none of them have your child’s interest or happiness in mind.  Aggregates aren’t individuals.  Living your life, or attempting to shape your child’s life, to conform to the average of some population is not a recipe for success.  At best it will produce blandness.  At worst a broken spirit.

You can read any number of thinkers like John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, or Peter Gray on why our son’s experience is not exceptional, but normal.  You can look at studies that show kids who learn to read at age four and kids who learn at age nine have the same reading comprehension by age 11.  You can get story after story from places like the Sudbury Valley school about kids who taught themselves to read in a few short weeks once they got the interest, and even one girl who didn’t become interested until age 13 and then went on to win a literary prize.  But it’s all theory and myth until you experience it with your own child.

Read the books.  Look into the unschooling movement and literature.  But above all, take a step back from your own kids and realize that they are only young once and for such a short time.  Do you really want your memories with them to consist of fights and forced lessons?  Enjoy them.  Let them go their own way and navigate the world.  There are few things more exciting than when they come to you to ask for your help or insight because they really want it, or when they never do because they figure it out on their own and gain a confidence that cannot be won any other way.

The world we live in does not lack for natural incentives to learn to read.  The rewards are massive, as are the costs of illiteracy.  We don’t need to artificially incentivize reading the way a poor farmer might have a few hundred years ago.  When we do we do more harm than good, if not to our children’s ability to read then at least to our enjoyment of our time with them.  They figured out how to speak – the most difficult, nuanced, and complex skill a human can master – without any formal instruction.  They can learn to read too.

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Here are a few other examples of learning by doing from my own life:

Why LEGO is more valuable than algebra

Why Mario Maker is better than a marketing major

Time for Entrepreneurship to Replace Schooling

Software is eating the world.

Those words, popularized by the creator of the first web browser and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, describe the present and foretell the future. First it was industry and ever more advanced machines. Once machines became programmable, software became the most powerful force for progress.

This scares a lot of people. It shouldn’t. Shovels are an improvement over human hands for digging a ditch. Software is an improvement over human minds for solving equations and handling transactions. The future belongs to those who master the uniquely human, not those who fight with software and hardware over rote tasks.

What is the uniquely human?  Creativity. Machines can perform but humans are relentlessly creative. We adapt, mimic, adjust, experiment, fail, try again, and reshape our conceptions of the world without any external programmer making it happen. We are the most complex combo of hardware and software on the planet and we can program and reprogram ourselves.

Embracing the future without fear means becoming more human than ever before. It means leaving the grunt work to the tools we make. It means coordinating those tools like a conductor does a symphony. It means, in a word, entrepreneurship.

No longer relegated to those who start a business, entrepreneurship is becoming a necessary way of life. It’s an outlook. You must be the President and CEO of your own firm. You must be the creative force in your world and coordinate with the resources around you.

It’s easier than ever before. The tools are there. All that stops you is an outdated mindset. The key is to break free from old modes of thought and realize the beauty, power, and boundlessness of technology-plus-human enabled progress. What is software but the expression of human ideas in digital form?  If we open our minds and engage reality as possibility and play the fear dissipates.

The opening sentence could be restated: Imagination is eating the world. The problem is that few have learned to dream. Or it might be more accurate to say that the natural human propensity to dream has been suppressed. It’s time to unlock it. It’s time for an un-education.

The role of education in society

Prior to the mass schooling movement education was used broadly to describe the acquisition of knowledge and skill useful in achieving goals. Education is a highly cooperative endeavor and critical to the life of any community. We learn how to navigate the world from observing those around us, copying them, getting results and feedback, adjusting, and trying again. In isolation humans are mediocre learners at best. In a vibrant community humans can master almost anything if given the freedom to try.

Observe the first few years of life and it’s easy to see a natural thirst for learning and an entrepreneurial approach to self-education. Babies are wide eyed. They take in everything. Then they test. They try to crawl and talk and play. They repeat over and over. They adapt and try again. They watch those around them and model their successful actions. This process can be called education, but note that no one needs to deliberately plan or structure it. No external incentive or impetus is required for children to acquire the most fundamental and important skills. They want to and they won’t stop trying.

A vibrant community is rich with examples of what to do and what not to do across a variety of ages and levels of expertise. Learners are constantly bumping into new ideas and methods. Ideas are non-scarce goods that fly freely, articulated and unarticulated. Patterns and norms emerge not from the minds of elites but from constant trial and error and observation by each member of the community. What works for one is repeated by another. Paths are worn by walking.

This is not to say no deliberate or planned education takes place. When someone discovers something they love it’s natural to want to learn everything possible about it. Those with particular skill and knowledge and the ability to impart it specialize and exchange what they know for something they value. Teachers and institutions for learning play a role. In a vibrant community they are part of the same trial and error marketplace as everything else. That means no one is forced to engage in any particular form of education, and educators aren’t guaranteed pupils or funding for their efforts.

What is commonly considered education today is really just one very narrow delivery mechanism for learning. This mechanism, called school, has so dominated the education landscape that many have come to completely conflate the two terms. If we are to boldly seize the opportunities of the future, we’ve got to start by rethinking our forms of education. We need to allow for the cultivation of entrepreneurs, not the mechanization we ask of machines.

How school kills entrepreneurship

The dominance of school as education is dangerous. It’s not only that the method of conveying skills and ideas is itself ineffective and inflexible. It’s the effectiveness of school at generating a particular mindset that’s cause for greatest concern. I call it the conveyor belt mindset.

You are plopped onto a production line at whatever stage you’re supposed to be based on arbitrary things like your age, class, and gender. Then you let the belt do the work. By essentially doing nothing but what you’re told, you get handed certificates at each next stage. 18? Unless you did something truly outrageous, here’s your diploma. 22? Here’s your degree. Degree? Here’s your job.

Most people believe this and live it. It’s revealed in the kinds of questions we ask strangers. “What grade are you in?” “What’s your major?” “What kind of job do you have?” If your answer is not the appropriate one for your age and assumed station in life, people worry. “I dropped out of school to do X” is cause for concern to almost everybody, no matter what X is. “I’m a sophomore at university Y” is cause for comfort to almost everybody, no matter what you’re actually doing with your time at Y. So long as you’re at your station, no one much cares if you’re productive, happy, successful, fulfilled, or free.

Parents obsessively check their child against a list of averages on everything from height to reading ability and stress if junior is not “on track.” No one really ever asks who built the track, where it’s going, or whether junior has any interest in arriving there.

Schools are the factories within which the conveyor belt mindset operates. They are structured to breed conformity and obedience. Students don’t even have control over their own schedules or basic necessities like bathroom and meal times. Schools were intended to be and still operate as places that restrict rather than expand the quantity of education in the community. Too many diverse ideas are a threat to efficiency obsessed do-gooders and social planners. Schools produce a more uniform product that can be plugged in like a machine to any part of the stagnant world once imagined by its creators. The conveyor belt produces the very thing that humans can’t compete with machines and software on: rule-following. If your primary skill is repeating known processes and adhering to protocols, you’ll lose to technology every time. Why are we educating humans out of their greatest strength?

The conveyor belt saps creativity and freedom. It is anti-entrepreneurial in every way. It’s not taking you where you want to go. Aggregates are not individuals and your goals and abilities are not definable by summing the abilities and behaviors of everyone your age and dividing by the population size. It’s time to get off.

The way forward

How to create an entrepreneurial education?  It’s actually a lot easier than it may seem. Start by quitting. Opt out of the activities and mindsets that are killing you. Take yourself or your kids out of school and let them do and learn whatever they want to in a safe environment. You don’t need anyone’s permission.

Step up and out into the world in which you want to live. Work with interesting people, read interesting books, do interesting things. No need to pay for someone else’s stamp on someone else’s set of activities just because everyone else does. You don’t need a external validation to do what you want. You may choose to get degrees and certificates. You may decide it’s worth the trade-offs. You may enjoy it. Do it if you do, but don’t ever do it, “because you have to.” You don’t have to. Create a way to do what you want without it. It’s harder, but freedom is always harder than the comfort of captivity.

The reason many people fear opting out is because of that paradigm of linear, externally-defined progress. It’s the conveyor belt. It’s time to jump off.

Yes, you want an entire community of free-thinking unschooling entrepreneurs. But you don’t need to wait for society to get there. You can jump off the conveyor belt immediately and create a better way for yourself. Not only do you immediately gain more freedom, doing so is the most likely way for a broader social movement to follow.

It’s scary at first, because your mind is trained to think that progress is defined by moving on the conveyor belt in the only direction it goes. Maybe really special or hard working people go faster, like the people who run up an escalator instead of letting the machine do all the work, but everyone is channeled in the same narrow corral moving in the same direction. That’s not progress.

Progress is moving towards your own goals and desires and becoming more fulfilled as you grow and overcome challenges. There are as many directions as there are people. Once you jump off the conveyor belt, the hardest part is actually discovering what makes you come alive, then being honest and unashamed of what you discover. It’s worth it. You can never start too soon.

The thing is, the mold-breakers who jump the belt don’t struggle any more or less than those who stay on. They have a hard time too. But it’s a different kind of pain. It’s the pain of working to achieve a goal they’re passionate about that has huge rewards when won, not the pain of subjugation to a monotony that brings you nothing in return.

Once you’re off the conveyor belt and seeing a world of possibility you can begin to create the kind of education you want. Education, like entrepreneurship, is not a stage in life but a way of living. You’ve got to become a lifelong learner. Cultivate questions and curiosity. Get comfortable with failure and restarting. Think big thoughts but don’t relegate your creativity to the realm of ideas alone. Test them. Thought experiments are great, but the best philosophers engage in field experiments. Those are the entrepreneurs. The only thing keeping you from joining them is an outdated mindset someone sold you. It works to suffocate the entrepreneurial embers deep within your nature. Fan them back into flame. You’ll light your own way and maybe start a brush fire that spreads to your community and beyond.

If you do, we’ll soon be saying that entrepreneurship is eating the world.

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*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Maybe You Should Drop Out of College

Originally published here.

What is college for?

If it’s a four year social experience, it seems really overpriced.  If it’s to gain knowledge, why not learn from better teachers and do it free online, and at coffee shops with friends?  If it’s to prepare you for a successful career, it’s the most absurd format imaginable: You are supposed to learn how to be successful in the marketplace through a system mostly sheltered from the marketplace, from people who mostly hate the marketplace and have chosen a career that protects them from it.

If we taught bike riding like we prep for careers, you’d spend twenty years reading about bikes without riding, until you graduate, at which point you’d be dropped off in the middle of the highway and be told, “Good luck!”

So what is college for?  For some specialized careers, it’s illegal to work without a degree (medicine, law, etc.), but most people get degrees in generic fields like business, communications, marketing, or political science.  Most people go to college to feel normal, and to signal to the world that they are normal.

The education system rewards obedience.  It rewards compliance.  It rewards following the rules, no matter how arbitrary and valueless they may be.  No one ever changed the world by obeying.

Alternatives change the world.  Alternatives to the status quo institutions that constrain and oppress.  It takes entrepreneurs to create alternatives.  Yet entrepreneurship is the very quality the education system is designed to beat out of you.

You go to college to signal to the status quo that you are no threat.  You did what you were supposed to.

It’s said that a degree signals to employers and the world that you are above average.  You are smart.  You are hard working.  You are driven.  You are worth investing in, or taking a chance on.  That may have been true at one time.  But look around you and consider your classmates.  Are they any of these things?  Would you clamor to hire them if you ran a business?  Yet all of them will walk away with a degree.

A degree signals that you are now 22 years old.  Congratulations, you’ve floated downstream.  No one acts impressed that you graduated high school, because everyone does, by doing little more than existing for 18 years.  College has become a mere extension of high school.  For most, it takes more work and effort to not go than to go.

So what’s the alternative to college?

Drop out.  Don’t get a degree, get an education.  Do something different with your life.  You were born an entrepreneur; a creative problem solver who overcomes through trial and error.  That’s been smothered by years of schooling.  What would happen if you broke free?

That’s why I launched Praxis.  I want to awaken your inner entrepreneur.  I want you to get out of the classroom and into the world.  I want you to learn by doing.  I want you to change the world.

I was tired of complaining about college.  How can we bring the cost down?  How can we improve the quality of instruction?  These questions accept the existing paradigm and try to tweak it.  The real question is how can young people get from where they are to a career and life that they love in the best way possible?

Four years and $150,000 dollars is nothing to sneeze at – the time even more than the money.  Is that really the best way?

Why not work with creators and innovators and learn what it’s like by doing? Why not get the best, most essential ideas and theories, delivered without cinder blocks and fluorescent lights? Why not gauge your success on the value of your working knowledge, and on what you can create, not the facts you can memorize?

Why not break the mold?

It’s scary.  It’s hard.  It’s painful.  But so is the status quo.  The difference is, the pain you endure for breaking the mold and creating something is a pain with great reward.  Even if you fail, what you learn and who you become is of immeasurable value.  Even the pain has some sweetness.  Contrast that to the monotonous pain you experience by following the rules.  There’s no reward.  There’s no prize at the end.  There’s no, “Congratulations.  You followed the rules.  You endured depravations and frustrations and shut up when told to shut up.  Here’s your Good Serf Award.”

Break the rules.  Do what makes you come alive.  Make the world better and freer by first freeing yourself.

Why I Started Praxis

I didn’t start Praxis because I think college is bad, or because I want to convince people it is.  I didn’t start it to be hip and trendy and “disruptive”.  I didn’t start it because I want to point out problems with the world.  I started it because I want to create value for individuals.

There are a lot of young people hungry for valuable experiences and not finding them.  There are a lot of young people unhappy with the education, career, and life options they see before them, searching for something more.  Praxis exists for you.

Praxis is more than a program or a company to me.  It’s the embodiment of a mindset and a way of life.  It is a tangible way to help people live free, self-directed lives.  It’s a community and a set of resources and ideas and businesses and participants built around the understanding that no conveyor belt can lead you to the life you want, and no structure you don’t choose and create yourself will bring you fulfillment.

Praxis is a concrete opportunity, not a vague notion.  It offers an interesting, challenging, amazing job and an interesting, challenging, amazing self-guided educational experience, all with a relentless focus on deliverable results.  It’s a recognition that your life will be determined by the quality of your product more than the pedigree of your paper.  It’s a way to remove the fear and doubt and strictures of the linear ladder to imagined success.  It’s a way to reveal and fan into flame the deep human love of adventure, play, possibility, and experimentation.

I don’t believe doing things you don’t like and hoping it leads to unspecified things you do like is a recipe for success.  Praxis pushes you to define what you don’t like and what you do, to learn what you’re good at and what you’re not, to identify definite outcomes you wish to achieve and definite causality between those outcomes and your desired next step.  Praxis does not ask you to learn things or perform tasks in the hope that it will get you work experience, we give you that work experience from the start.  You cannot separate learning from doing.

Praxis is a recognition that, wherever you get your paycheck, you are your own firm.  The future does not belong to those who follow orders, but those who solve problems with creativity.  The future belongs to entrepreneurs, whether founders or builders within firms.  Entrepreneurial thinking and acting cannot be learned from study, but must be practiced.  Praxis exists to put those eager to learn it into environments right now – not tomorrow, not after more study and certification – where they can be around and become entrepreneurs.

Praxis exists to offer a valuable service to young people who are searching for a way to build their confidence, skills, experience, network, and knowledge.  Praxis is built upon questions like, “Why not now?”, and “Why not me?”

Praxis is about that powerful combination of big picture dreamers and blue-collar doers.  It’s all the imagination of Silicon Valley startups with all the work-ethic of Midwestern small businesses.  It’s grit plus grind plus greatness.  Praxis is the realization that the most radical thing you can do is often the most practical, and that the most practical thing you can do is sometimes be radical.

Praxis is an idea.  The idea is simple.  Find the best way to get from where you are to where you want to be.  If we can help you do that better and faster with a great job that comes with a great education and community, jump in.  If not, we’ll still be rooting for you every step of the way.

I didn’t start Praxis to make enemies or to make friends.  I started it to create value.  I started it because the idea was so powerful I had no choice but to bring it into the world.  I started it because theorizing about ways young people could build their lives wasn’t enough.  I started it because it’s fun, fulfilling, and harder than anything I’ve ever done.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Break the mold.