There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that’s just not true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism.
i don’t always agree with Peter but he’s spot on about education
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine (via pegobry)
(via fred-wilson)
Source: the-american-interest.com
I want to learn something. That’s the real pleasure, when you understand an idea or you answer a question. When I was a little boy I used to think you could get all the answers to all the questions. I thought that you could learn who God is and will he answer why he made me. You think you are going to get those answers but you don’t. (Laughs)
(via curiositycounts)
Source: the-talks.com
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Subtly awful:
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Why We’re Building Polymath, a New Platform for Learning
“Your brain is a terrible thing to waste” - Christopher Wallace
One of the things I’m learning as a first-time entrepreneur is how it’s way too easy to put your head down and get caught up in execution mode, doggedly pursuing a grand vision that lives in your head that other people in your life are only vaguely aware of. In an effort to combat that, I wanted to put my thoughts down and share what I’ve been working on with my co-founder Dan over the past couple months.
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Let’s start with a little story.
I graduated from Penn with a degree in Systems Engineering (and a cool $100K in student loan debt) a couple of years ago. I think my college experience was pretty typical in that most of what I learned that still sticks with me, I learned outside of the classroom. Instead of joining most of my classmates on the path to Wall Street doing consulting and banking, I decided to work full-time at a startup called Venmo, where I’d been working on marketing and customer development as I finished up school. My first day of work was a surprise — despite never really coding much before, I was told that I’d be building our new iPhone app. Gulp. I bought a couple books and got to work, in what was a tough and lonely process learning an entirely new skillset.
Fast-forward a few months. I decided that coding full-time wasn’t ideal for me — I wanted to be involved in all parts of the product development process, and I left to find a product manager role. Despite having some product background, I didn’t have great technical knowledge of design fundamentals, and needed to learn a lot more about marketing and messaging. I did what anyone would do and asked the smartest people I knew to help me out — recommend great resources for me to learn from, answer questions I had, and keep me motivated by keeping tabs on my progress. With their help, I learned a lot and, armed with my new knowledge, finding a cool position was not a problem. Awesome!
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The point of that story wasn’t to ramble about my life. It’s to highlight a process that happens so often to people in this new generation of work (Fast Company does a good job talking about this climate in a couple of pieces— Generation Flux and The Four-Year Career). You leave college with only some tangible work skills (and maybe some debt) and a bunch of on-the-job training to be done. You switch jobs or careers a few times in your quest to find something that you’re good at and is fulfilling to you. Along the way, you constantly reposition yourself by learning new skills that will better prepare you for the work you want to do and keep you up-to-date with the latest technology.
I think more people are realizing that rather than being the exception, this is the new normal. Writer Ben Casnocha does a great job here talking about how the career “escalator” of old that we expected has now disappeared:
For the last sixty or so years, the job market for educated workers worked like an escalator. After graduating from college, you landed an entry-level job at the bottom of the escalator at an IBM or a GE or a Goldman Sachs. There you were groomed and mentored, receiving training and professional development from your employer. As you gained experience, you were whisked up the organizational hierarchy, clearing room for the ambitious young graduates who followed to fill the same entry-level positions. So long as you played nice, you moved steadily up the escalator, and each step brought with it more power, income, and job security. Eventually, around age sixty-five, you stepped off the escalator, allowing those middle-ranked employees to fill the same senior positions you just vacated. You, meanwhile, coasted into a comfortable retirement financed by a company pension and government-funded Social Security.People didn’t assume all of this necessarily happened automatically. But there was a sense that if you were basically competent, put forth a good effort, and weren’t unlucky, the strong winds at your back would eventually shoot you to the top. For the most part this was a justified expectation.
No, says Ben— now, “Entrepreneurial career strategy involves learning while going, executing while planning, finishing while starting, aiming while firing.”
We live in a time when we’re told to follow our passions. Do things we love. The world is our oyster. And for the most part, that’s abundantly true — the most fulfilled people I know are the ones pursuing their dreams, the ones who figure out what they really want and reinvent themselves along the way to their goals. The Columbia econ graduate figuring out the music business and launching her singing career. The Penn Bioengineering masters opening a tea house. The former risk consultant learning UX design and photography and starting a new career.
That’s all great, right? But the problem with this is something I’ve faced firsthand — there is incredible inertia in finding and learning these new skills and getting started, enough so that there are tons of people doing things they don’t love or that are otherwise suboptimal (lower pay than what they could be earning with an updated skillset, for example). Despite there being ample (free!) resources online about anything we could possibly want to learn about, it’s incredibly hard to filter it all and find the most relevant information and content. It’s hard to know what you need to know. It’s hard to learn something new on your own without getting peer help. It’s hard to prove what you know once you’ve learned it! And so this combination of issues often keeps people from even getting started on their path to new knowledge and more rewarding work. These are the problems we’re setting out to solve with Polymath.
We all know the flaws of traditional higher education institutions— extremely high cost, overly rigid structures, laughably outdated course content that struggles to keep up with industry changes… the list goes on. But the model obviously works in a number of ways— you get unparalleled access to a community of like-minded learners, high-quality content, and expert-led instruction. We’re trying to combine the benefits of traditional schooling with the unique power and reach of the web to enable and empower the next generation of people to learn & do what they love, and we couldn’t be more excited about what we’re working on. Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, get involved by signing up for the Polymath beta.
