Tripping up the Hedonic Treadmill
The other day, I noted how student debt can limit your options if you want to go work at a startup. When you take out student loans to get a degree, you open up some doors that are closed without the degree but close doors that would require you to work on a small salary for […]
If You Want to Work On a Startup, Avoid College Loans
Joining a startup team is an amazing, wild, incredibly worthwhile experience. You get to work on a growing project, see real, tangible products of your work on an innovative, risk-taking team, and you are forced to grow your skills daily in order to succeed. It’s an experience I would encourage almost any young person to […]
The Ayn Rand Characters You Meet In College
Critics malign Ayn Rand’s characters as two-dimensional and unrealistic, and they can appear to be at times. “Few people can really be this obsequious, transparently selfless, and constantly looking for the approval of others!” you may think. Until you go to college. You finally see that there really are Ellsworth M. Tooheys, Peter Keatings, and Catherine […]
Do People Really Go to College for an Education?
Almost any discussion on the decreasing value of going to college will find one onlooker asking, “sure, but what about going to college to learn and to get an education?” The implied claim is obvious, “Even if going to college isn’t worth it if you are going to get a job, lots of students actually go to […]
You Graduated! Now Deschool Yourself
Congratulations, Class of 2015! You’ve completed your higher education journey and graduated from college! Sure, you may be the most indebted in history (until 2016, that is), and there’s a good chance you’ll be employed in a position that doesn’t actually require a degree, but you went for the gold that was expected of you for success […]
Peter Thiel: College Beats Our Dreams Out of Us
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege […]
Do Less in the Pursuit of More in Education
By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s prepared – for nothing in particular. — Peter Thiel & Blake Masters, Zero to One The highly competitive nature of college admissions creates a race to the […]
Bryan Caplan on School and Networking
Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University renowned for his work on public choice theory, the economics of parenthood, and the signaling theory of education, has compiled some basic data from his readers at EconLog about their networking experiences in school. Turns out, the networking effect may be negligible.
What Skills Should You Learn?
Any discussion about college and the failure of young people to enter the workforce upon graduation with in-demand skill sets will give time and space to ambiguous “real skills,” but few actually go into what skills are exactly in demand.
My Podcast with Isaac Morehouse on Education, Aviation, and Innovation
I joined Isaac Morehouse for a discussion on education, aviation, and innovation in the podcast below. We discussed some topics like college, schooling, deschooling, unschooling, and some thoughts on aviation and barriers to major innovation in that sector. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/197801049″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
How College Betrays Our Best Students
This post originally appeared at the Praxis blog. Applying to college is one of the most stressful times of life for elite students. “This is what the last 18 years have come down to,” they think, and are told by peers, counselors, and parents alike. Getting into a top-choice school, usually Stanford, MIT, or an […]
Mike Rowe on Elitism in Employment and Opportunity
I had the pleasure of watching, via Livestream, “The Diploma Dilemma: Exploring the Costs and Value of College Education” hosted at the Newseum in DC the other night. The guests included the former president of American University, an executive from US News and World Reports, Ohio University’s Richard Vedder, and Discovery Channel’s Mike Rowe. The […]