Wallowing in Education

I’ve been an enrolled student most of my life – K-12, 4 years at BYU, and 4.5 more at Georgia Tech. Over time, I’ve developed a belief that there are WAY too many students out there.

Lifelong learning is a beautiful and noble endeavor that should be extolled as a virtue. But the policy of extolling “college” as the path to prosperity to all of our K-12 youngsters is not the right approach. Formal schooling, where some sort of tuition is paid and a brick & mortar classroom exists, is over-promoted and under-criticized for what it actually produces.

With all this formal schooling, we’ve lost the art of apprenticeship and have ended up with a bunch of educations-to-nowhere. Here’s my hack at a formula to determine if an education is worth pursuing:

Is the cost of the education

+ the opportunity cost of not getting trained on-the-job

+ the opportunity cost of wages & experience lost

less than

the benefit of the education for future incremental wage?

Education is like buying a gym membership. You can spend a ton of money on it. But if you don’t do the tough stuff, you aren’t going to see any benefit. In a gym, you’ve gotta sweat and you’ve gotta quit eating crap. You can do that without a gym. In education, you’ve gotta read and write. You can do that without being enrolled.

In a recent lecture on entrepreneurship, college dropout Josh James, who recently sold his company Omniture to Adobe for $1.8B, explains how he learns. Hint: He reads! The whole lecture is awesome – I’ve watched it twice this week. The segment from 20:50 to 22:20 is the part about reading.

Josh James, December 8, 2009 from Rollins Center at BYU on Vimeo.

Some random additional thoughts:

1. In addition to books, high-quality resources are available online, such as MIT’s Open Courseware. Also, there are cool communities for learners, such as Atlanta’s OpenStudy.
2. Students, like government employees, are a necessary evil. They do not, of themselves, generate products or services in the economy. In many cases, both the student and the larger society would be better off if those years were spent in a more productive apprenticeship.
3. Students pay big bucks that have, over the years, generated a massive education machine. This machine is a self-interested, heavy promoter of the idea that everyone should go to college.
4. With our state and federal student programs, we continue to edge more and more towards socializing college education. For example, with guaranteed loans, students and lenders skip natural and needed cost/benefit analysis. Hrm, sounds a lot like sub-prime mortgages.
5. The need people feel for “college education” probably has more to due with failing K-12 schooling than it does with the virtues of a college education.
6. Enrollments are purposely kept low in some professional programs, such as medical and dental programs where the AMA and ADA have incentives to keep supply low.
7. Becoming a “student” is the de facto cover young people use to cover an absence a life plan. Too many 20-somethings wallow in “student-hood” and end up worse than if they had simply started working out of high school.
8. There are too many PhD students. A big chunk of them churn out stupid papers that either no one cares about or that flood the world with confusion… this is a topic for a future blog post I’ve already entitled, “Err on the side of bologna!“
9. It’s unfortunate that companies use a college education so heavily in filtering. It’s an artificial crutch used in lieu of skillful interviewing and in response to diminished ability to fire the losers.

Do you agree or disagree? What changes in our educational culture would lead to a better outcome?

Tagged as: education, grad school