I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
—MARK TWAIN
In the last section, we explored what would happen if credible credentials could be earned outside of a college. I’d like to turn now to a vision of how college education might change to better suit our needs. The starting point for this discussion is a very basic disconnect between most students’ expectations for college—a means to employment first and a good intellectual experience second—and what universities believe their value is—an intellectual and social experience first, with only secondary consideration to employment.
And it is unfair to expect traditional universities to cater to the whims of the economy or job market. They are designed to be places insulated from the “real world” so that intellectual truth and pure research can be pursued with as few practical constraints as possible. This is what allows them to be truly fertile soil for breakthrough ideas and fundamental discoveries. Even more, some professors—especially those at large research universities—don’t view teaching as the best use of their time, and were not selected to be professors based on teaching ability. They were hired to do research and sometimes view teaching as a necessary evil. I have professor friends who feel lucky when they don’t have to teach a course at all.
So let us face this as an open-ended design problem—is it possible to craft a university experience that bridges the gap between students’ expectations and professors’ inclinations? One that provides the rich social and intellectual atmosphere of a good existing college, while at the same time exposing students to those intellectual but also practical fields that will make them valuable to the world? Where the faculty is invested in the future of their students and not just their own ability to publish research papers? And now let’s be ambitious: Might there be a sustainable way to make this experience free, or even pay the students to participate?
Computer science is a good place to start. I know the field reasonably well and I also have a sense for the job market—which is tight and growing tighter every day. It is a field where degrees can be valuable, but the ability to design and execute on open-ended, complex projects is paramount; seventeen-year-olds with unusual creativity and intellect have been known to get six-figure salaries. Because of the demand for talent and the recognition that college degrees and high GPAs are not the best predictor of creativity, intellect, or passion, top employers have begun to treat summer internships as something of a farm league. They observe students actually working and make offers to those who perform the best. Employers know that working with a student is an infinitely better assessment than any degree or transcript.
Students have also begun to recognize something very counterintuitive: that they are more likely to get an intellectual grasp of computer science—which is really the logical and algorithmic side of mathematics—by working at companies like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook than by reading textbooks or sitting in lecture halls. They see the projects that these companies give their interns as being more intellectually challenging and open-ended than the somewhat artificial projects given in classrooms. Even more, they know that the product of their efforts will touch millions of people instead of just being graded by a teaching assistant and thrown away.
So, to be clear, in software engineering, the internship has become far more valuable to the students as an intellectual learning experience than any university class. And it has become more valuable to the employer as a signal of student ability than any formal credential, class taken, or grade point average.
I want to emphasize that these internships are very different from the ones that many people remember having even twenty years ago. There is no getting coffee for the boss, sorting papers, or doing other types of busywork. The projects aren’t just cute things to work on that have no impact on real people. In fact, the best way to differentiate between forward-looking, twenty-first-century industries and old-school, backward-looking ones is to see what interns are doing. At top Internet companies, interns might be creating patentable artificial intelligence algorithms or even creating new lines of business. By contrast, at a law firm, government office, or publishing house, they will be doing paperwork, scheduling meetings, and proofreading text. This menial work will be paid accordingly, if at all, whereas pay scales at the new-style internships reflect the seriousness of the work involved; college interns in Silicon Valley can earn over $20,000 for the summer.
Given the increasing importance of internships in terms of both intellectual enrichment and enhancement of job prospects, why do traditional colleges limit them only to summers, pushing them aside to cater to the calendar needs of lectures and homework? The answer is simple inertia—this is how it has always been done, so people haven’t really questioned it.
Actually, some universities have. Despite being founded not even sixty years ago, the University of Waterloo is generally considered to be Canada’s top engineering school. Walk down a hallway at Microsoft or Google and you will find as many Waterloo grads as those from MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley—despite the fact that, because of work visa issues, it is a significant hassle for American employers to hire Canadian nationals. And this isn’t some attempt to get low-cost labor from across the border—Waterloo graduates are commanding salaries as high as the very best American grads. What is Waterloo doing right?
For one thing, Waterloo recognized the value of internships long ago (they call them co-ops) and has made them an integral part of its students’ experience. By graduation, a typical Waterloo grad will have spent six internships lasting a combined twenty-four months at major companies—often American. The typical American grad will have spent about thirty-six months in lecture halls and a mere three to six months in internships.
This past winter—not summer—all of the interns at the Khan Academy, and probably most of the interns in Silicon Valley, were from Waterloo because that is the only school that views internships as an integral part of students’ development outside of the summer. While the students at most colleges are taking notes in lecture halls and cramming for winter exams, the Waterloo students are pushing themselves intellectually by working on real projects. They are also getting valuable time with employers and pretty much guaranteeing several job offers once they graduate. On top of that, some are earning enough money during their multiple high-paying internships to pay for their tuition (which is about one-sixth to one-third the cost of a comparable American school) and then some. So Waterloo students graduate with valuable skills, broad intellectual development, high-paying jobs, and potential savings after four or five years.
Compare this to the typical American college grad with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, no guarantee of an intellectually challenging job, and not much actual experience with which to get a job.
Waterloo has already proven that the division between the intellectual and the useful is artificial; I challenge anyone to argue that Waterloo co-op students are in any way less intellectual or broad-thinking than the political science or history majors from other elite universities. If anything, based on my experience with Waterloo students, they tend to have a more expansive worldview and are more mature than typical new college graduates—arguably due to their broad and deep experience base.
So let us imagine optimizing the model that Waterloo has already begun. Imagine a new university in Silicon Valley—it doesn’t have to be here but it will help to make things concrete. I am a big believer that inspiring physical spaces and rich community really do elevate and develop one’s thinking. So we’ll put in dormitories, nicely manicured outdoor spaces, and as many areas that facilitate interaction and collaboration as possible. Students would be encouraged to start clubs and organize intellectual events. So far, this is not so different from your typical residential college.
What is completely different is where and how the students spend their days. Rather than taking notes in lecture halls, these students will be actively learning through real-world intellectual projects. A student could spend five months at Google optimizing a search algorithm. She might spend another six months at Microsoft working on human speech recognition. The next four months could be spent apprenticing under a designer at Apple, followed by a year of building her own mobile applications. Six months could be spent doing biomedical research at a start-up or even at another university like Stanford. Another four months could be spent prototyping and patenting an invention. Students could also apprentice with venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs, eventually leading to attempts to start their own businesses. One of the primary roles of the college itself would be to make sure that the internships are challenging and intellectual; that they truly do support a student’s development.
All of this will be tied together with a self-paced academic scaffold through something like the Khan Academy. Students will also still be expected to have a broad background in the arts and deep proficiency in the sciences; it will just be done in a more natural way. They will be motivated to formally learn about linear algebra when working on a computer graphics apprenticeship at Pixar or Electronic Arts. They will want to learn accounting when working under the CFO of a publicly traded company. Ungraded seminars will be held regularly during nights and weekends when students can enjoy and discuss great works of literature and art. If the students decide that they want to prove their academic ability within a domain—like algorithms or French history—they can sign up for the rigorous assessments we discussed in the last chapter.
Let me stress the notion of ungraded seminars in the arts, because I think it would lead to more appreciation of the humanities than what goes on in traditional colleges. Take a look at literature. In most colleges and high schools, students are forced to read great works—or at least those deemed great by their professors. They do this within a deadline-based setting where they have to read two hundred pages by Friday. And this is while they have a lot of other work to do from their other classes. At the end of the reading, they must participate in a discussion or take an exam or write a paper—which is graded. Given all of this artificial structure and assessment around a work of literature, do we really think the student has time to appreciate and enjoy it? Is the point here really to see who can read two hundred pages by Friday and impress a professor on an essay to get an A? Look at the graduates who used their straight A’s in comparative literature, history, or political science to get a competitive position in investment banking, law, medicine, or consulting. How much do they remember, much less read and appreciate, the classics now? Many of the ones I know haven’t read a major work of literature since college.
I feel strongly about this because when I was in school I was not a fan of the forced reading for a paper and/or exam around an artificial timeline. It made me, and my peers, treat amazing works of art as busywork that was standing between us and our grades/diplomas/jobs. We’ve already talked about how forcing math down students’ throats according to an artificially imposed one-pace-fits-all curriculum causes them to dislike it. It is even worse in the humanities. One can appreciate and internalize neither logarithms nor Thoreau if they are force-fed at an artificial pace. This is why so many students—often boys—have something approaching post-traumatic stress disorder when someone brings up Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick. When Newton or Gauss explored mathematics that unlocked mysteries of their universe, their intent was to empower—and maybe inspire—humanity. The goals of Twain, Dickens, or Austen were similar: to deeply entertain while opening our eyes and minds. Neither the great mathematicians’ nor the great writers’ goal was to create tools of torture for high school or college students—but that is how many students have grown to view their work.
One of my all-time favorite books is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—I know, a bit girly, but great is great. I hated the book when I was forced to read it and write a book report at fourteen. I only realized that I loved it—and a lot of literature—when I reread it for fun on a whim when I was twenty-three. The same is true for Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and Brave New World. Not only was I more mature and had more perspective on life, but I had the time and motivation to appreciate it. I believe that motivation, the culture of a community, and outlets for exploration drive the appreciation of the arts, not grades and credit-unit requirements.
Returning to our hypothetical apprenticeship-based college in Silicon Valley: Who will be the faculty? Why not the executives, scientists, artists, designers and engineers that the students will work with? Some of the most effective professors I have had in my education were not professional researchers; they were retired or practicing scientists, engineering, investors, or executives, all of whom wanted to teach and mentor.
Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students). Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors. This could be supplemented with dedicated faculty with more specialized backgrounds in fields like history or law or literature or mathematics.
What about grades and a transcript? How will employers and graduate schools know which students are strong and which are weak? As already touched on, many of the employers will have had direct interaction with these students through their apprenticeships, giving them a much deeper view into a student’s abilities, work ethic, and personality. Even employers—or graduate schools—who have not had direct interaction with the student can see the student’s portfolio of work, and also, if the student allows, can have access to letters of assessment and recommendation from people the student has worked with. This is essentially how any job applicant is treated five years after graduation today—grades and majors take a backseat to what the individual has actually done in the real world. Additionally, students will be free to take the aforementioned rigorous assessments to show that they can go deep in certain academic areas.
Will the traditional GPA be missed as a measure of ability? I don’t think so. Consider that the average graduating GPA at many elite universities is around a 3.5.3 Couple that with the fact that 95 to 97 percent of students graduate and you may conclude that the most difficult part of getting a degree with a decent GPA from some universities is getting through their hyperintense admissions process when you are seventeen. The rest gets pretty fuzzy.
I am by no means the first person to rethink what college could be. PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel has been a vocal critic of what he calls a “college bubble” and has funded the Thiel Fellowship program to pop it. Thiel Fellows, as they are called, are twenty high-caliber students who are each given $100,000 to drop out of college and work on an ambitious idea or project. According to the program’s website, the fellows will be “mentored by our network of visionary thinkers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, who provide guidance and business connections that can’t be replicated in any classroom.” What I love about this is that it is mixing things up and making people realize that the traditional way isn’t necessarily the best way for everyone.
The difference between the Thiel Fellowship and what I am advocating is that I do not want to throw out the idea of college entirely. I think the shared experience of being on a campus and exploring alongside other motivated and inquisitive individuals is a powerful one. It is also clear that for most students a college degree is a form of risk mitigation, something that’s there to fall back on. Many of the Thiel Fellows may not succeed on their first big venture. The prestige of having been a Thiel Fellow may open future doors, but this cannot be guaranteed. Still, allowing for some differences, the Thiel program and my own vision are aligned in spirit. Grow Thiel’s fellowship to several hundred students a year; allow them to be mentored in various settings, not just one where they are starting a venture; house the students in an inspiring residential campus; and give them a scaffold of academics, and we are talking about almost the same thing.
We started this thought experiment by envisioning a school focused on engineering, design, and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. We placed it there so that it could take advantage of the local ecosystem. Why not a school of finance or journalism located in New York or London, or a school focused on energy in Houston? Even better, why can’t they all be affiliated so that a student can experience multiple cities and industries, all while having a residential and intellectual support network?
Will this be for everyone? Absolutely not. But majoring in literature or accounting at a traditional university isn’t for everyone either. There should be more options, and this could be one of them—an option that introduces diversity of thought and practice into a higher education world that has not changed dramatically in hundreds of years.
It also should be noted that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a new university. Existing campuses could move in this direction by deemphasizing or eliminating lecture-based courses, having their students more engaged in research and co-ops in the broader world, and having more faculty with broad backgrounds who show a deep desire to mentor students.