Developing Self-Reliance (1951)
Cheesy but earnest film for youngsters (via AoM).
The four principles in the video:
- Assume Responsibility
- Be Informed
- Know Where You’re Going
- Make Your Own Decisions
Solid advice for all ages.
(Source: youtube.com)
The last sentence is important. You don’t have to make super-easy courses to get people passed. Give them enough time and feedback and they will learn your material over time.
How does the future market of higher education looks like? Andrew Rosen, the CEO of Kaplan, presents his ideas and takes a look in the past of higher education in the USA. At the beginning there were colleges, like the Harvard College. Interestingly, there isn’t much known about John Harvard. The most important thing was that he donated his library and half of his money after his dead to the nearby college.
At this time, Harvard was a college where young men could learn about science and the arts. Most, didn’t graduate. It was rather so that they stayed two years there and learned about different subjects. Other universities like Brown or Princeton had a similar history. They play be the same rules. Tons of money, highly prestigious, strong in research. Rosen says they use the Ivy-League Playbook.
The next higher education institutions came later when people found out that American agriculture is much less efficient that European because the lack of knowledge. This lead to land-grant colleges which provided knowledge for farmers. The older colleges were strictly against this type of colleges because it would undermine the spirit of higher education. Today, some of those land-grant colleges evolved into Cornell University or the MIT.
A more modern form of these land-grant colleges are community colleges. The offer education for everybody, for people who aren’t “college material”, who want to improve their skills or who want to learn something new. These colleges play be the All-Access Playbook.
If we move a bit in time a new form of higher education institutes evolves. Like the Kaplan University or the University of Phoenix. These institutions focus on learning and a lead like a company. Basicially they are like All-Access institutions but a bit more advanced. This is the For-Profit Playbook.
Before we go future playbook, I will show why Rosen made this distinction. Lots of decent institutions try to play the Ivy-League Playbook which is called Harvard-envy. Instead of spending money on the education of their students, they spend their money on new buildings or try to buy famous professors. They try to build up their prestige.
A nice example is the High Point University that spend tons of money in building a prestige luxury resort for students. That’s nice, sure but you can’t argue that these investments are necessary for better learning.
The future playbook is the Learning Playbook. Rosen shows what could be and encourages institutions to try to become a learning institution instead of accumulating more prestige. The Learning Playbook focuses totally on student’s learning. It will use modern technology, use new scientific findings to improve the learning. Learning will become more individualist, more mobile and more global.
Andrew Rosen did a great job in presenting the history of higher-education in the US and differentiating it. I don’t know if the Learning Playbook will be so institutionalized because we saw more and more small players and micro education platforms like skillshare.com. But of course, it’s uncertain but it would be nice if he included that. Great book!
Every time I talk to an engineer or a pre-med or something, they have the nerve to ask me, “So what are you going to do with that major?” Even English majors, who I thought would be sympathetic, have a wide variety of (mostly evil, corporate) career paths available to them. They, too, express contemptuous curiosity in regards to my Program II Global Marginalized Cultural Art Studies degree. But then I guess they wouldn’t understand, because putting English above all other languages is so ethnocentric of them. How can they still teach “English” when they got rid of the Wolof department? It’s racist. […]
Extremely funny, worth a read!
Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.
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In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
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Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus.
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College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.
Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, and one of the first mega-billionaires in the US. Elementary school dropout.
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Charles Culpeper, owner and CEO of Coca Cola. Dropped out of high school.
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David Karp, founder of Tumblr. Dropped out of school at 15, then homeschooled. Did not attend college.
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Jake Nickell, co-founder and CEO of Threadless.com. Did not graduate from college.
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Michael Dell, billionaire founder of Dell Computers, which started out of his college dorm room. Dropped out of college.
Back in October, I was baffled to see Jacob Weisberg at Slate lose his cool over an effort by Internet entrepreneur — and libertarian — Peter Thiel to make kids consider not going to (or at least not finishing) college.
Weisberg’s description of the program: “The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school.”
Sounds promising to me, but Weisberg flipped out, calling it an “appalling plan to pay students to quit college” and a “nasty idea” without ever quite telling us why. It’s not as if Thiel was paying kids to become prostitutes or divorce their parents, or something most of the culture would believe was self-evidently bad. Weisberg, however, treats dropping out of college as being on that level of so-bad-I-don’t-need-to-explain-why-it’s-bad.
