Is College Obsolete?

Many people say that our education system is broken. It's not. Our system of education is obsolete. What may have made sense one hundred years ago no longer makes sense today.

One hundred years ago college didn't matter. Maybe for bragging rights, but not for getting a job. People lived in the same town their entire lives. Everyone knew everyone else and anyone could vouch for you. It was a network; the most advanced form of social organization.

With the advent of modern transportation, people were no longer fixed. After the first world war, people could live anywhere they wanted, and increasingly they did. No one knew anyone and so no one could vouch for you. Transportation and surpassed our social support systems. Colleges saw this and stepped up to plate as the trusted middleman, and so we regressed from networks to hierarchies.

This wasn't necessarily bad in and of itself. Hierarchies can be efficient too. Corporations are usually hierarchies, and they are one of our most adaptive social systems.

Things got bad when credentialism surpassed education as the primary function of college. If you want evidence of this, consider the criteria for the US News & World Report college rankings: Peer assessment, student selectivity, faculty resources, graduation and retention rate, financial resources, alumni giving, and graduation rate performance. Notice anything missing?

Are colleges not ranked in order of how much students learn because that would be impossible to measure? Or is it because no one cares?

As the old saying goes, "What gets measured gets done." According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 71% of college graduates are unable to read proficiently. What exactly is getting done?

Colleges have failed. Credentialism has failed. Hierarchies have failed.

And they haven't just failed abstractly or in general. They've failed me personally.

The good news is that, thanks to the Internet, degrees may be on their way out. The Internet, as the name suggests, is a global network. Everyone is connected to everyone else. I'm connected to every fortune 500 CEO within one degree. So are you. Sounds a lot like pre-WWI society doesn't it?

Recruiters rely on degrees because they are the easiest way to grok what someone is all about. The problem is that relying on credentialism is an act of faith, comparable to closed source eVoting without a paper trail. And we all know what that got us. The Internet is changing this. Every year our lives become more transparent as our words and actions become increasingly digitized and searchable. What credentialism was to the twentieth century, Google will be to the 21st.

In the 20th century your references were something you put on your resume. In the 21st century your references ARE your resume.

Thanks to the Internet I am connected with almost every CEO within two degrees. It's as if we all live in a small village again, where everyone knows everyone and anyone can vouch for you. Hierarchies are no longer necessary, because hyperlinks have subverted them.

As technology multiplies, new social systems and metaphors will emerge as others obsolesce. Only humanity remains untouched.

Comments

[wireless barcode scanner]

Surely engineers need some structured training, even someone as boring as CPA needs some instruction in the legalenvironment. etc..

[super solano hair dryers]

Look at Ken Robinsons RSA lecture in London. Be interested in your comments

[hon file cabinet]

I'd try to prove this theory but I'm too busy working two jobs as a monkey of the civil service and retail world to try and make ends meet until I can afford to go back to college and get a degree so I can GET a higher-paying job.

[emergency survival kit]

We also need to rethink what education is for. Our current model is based on the needs of post enlightenment industrial needs,(essentially, organisation fodder) whereas the age we are in and developing will rely on everybody contributing what they are best at (and passionate about). Not everyone will make it, but it's a good starting point.

[discounted contacts]

957 geek points for using "grok" in a sentence.

I'm surprised to have gotten as far as I have without a college degree (save for a correctional officer's certification). Much of what I've learned that's necessary for my job is due to my autodidactic nature (and a rather impressively worded resume-"HERE! Look at all the fancy catch phrases to explain my career experience and please forget the fact that I haven't finished college"). If I wanted to learn a program, I took the initiative to use the information available in libraries and on the internet. It was a quicker and cheaper alternative than spending semesters in college. But unfortuately employers aren't concerned about your initiative and know-how. They wanna see that PAPER! The situation I'm in is that my career will not advance any further without it.

[commercial espresso makers]

That's why I feel there's a benefit to having a degree. People with degrees tend to get paid more and are afforded better opportunities than people who don't. The only way to circumvent the need for having a college diploma is for the mindset of a large percentage of the corporate structure to change and look at an individual's personal experience and not fret over their lack of higher educational experience. I don't foresee that happening any time soon. A degree guarantees that someone sat down and took the time to learn a skill, and not just "say" that they did. Employers don't want to take a chance on "maybe".

[commercial coffee maker]

In my discipline (web development), I rate degrees as trending strongly toward uselessness. They can make for a useful tiebreaker, but chances are that a person's credential has little or nothing to do with their team fit. As for talent, well, source talks and b.s. walks.

[chi hairdryer]

We also need to rethink what education is for. Our current model is based on the needs of post enlightenment industrial needs,(essentially, organisation fodder) whereas the age we are in and developing will rely on everybody contributing what they are best at (and passionate about). Not everyone will make it, but it's a good starting point.

[carpet cleaner rental]

immediate contact with every expert in the world". or did you feel the same way before, since after all the postal service existed then?

college doesn't educate you, and it couldn't. it provides you with all the resources you require to ACQUIRE an education.

the main reason college doesn't work, is that formerly 20-year-olds were young adults, and now they are overwhelmingly old children.

[ohio state store]

The idiocy of articles like this are astounding. For example the author claims that after WWI anyone could live anywhere and they did. What? Has the author ever heard of the settlement of North America? What about the great potato famine forcing migration to the US? This is just one example of how stupid this article is. My advice try college again or just become a hermit.

[College Singapore]

With developing competition and global demands ,there are educational challenges to compete in diverse markets ,hence different economies are taken step to implement advance education .

[j]

I sorta want my Doctor to have a college degree of some sort. Maybe if you try something more substantive than communications or el ed?

Surely engineers need some structured training, even someone as boring as CPA needs some instruction in the legalenvironment. etc..

I call BS -- you're either a kid right out of school who's pissed he's not a CEO yet, or someone who never made it in the first place and is amazed that his website hasn't made him independently wealthy yet.

[misanthropope]

it is just a BIT of overstatement to reason "the internet exists, therefore i am in immediate contact with every expert in the world". or did you feel the same way before, since after all the postal service existed then?

college doesn't educate you, and it couldn't. it provides you with all the resources you require to ACQUIRE an education.

the main reason college doesn't work, is that formerly 20-year-olds were young adults, and now they are overwhelmingly old children.

[Len Hardison]

Hi Alex,

Would you mind elaborating a little more on how college failed you?

[Joe Munculus]

The idiocy of articles like this are astounding. For example the author claims that after WWI anyone could live anywhere and they did. What? Has the author ever heard of the settlement of North America? What about the great potato famine forcing migration to the US? This is just one example of how stupid this article is. My advice try college again or just become a hermit.

[Andrew Bertrand]

College is really becoming useless. I attended two years of college for free (due to scholarships and grants obtained in high school) before I decided to leave the world of academia behind me. At that point the only marketable skills I had obtained were "how to meet more people" and "how to get them drunk". So without completing my "education" I set off with my limited skill set to conquer the world. To show the value of networking over having a degree I am proud to say that I am now opening my own bar in the downtown business district of Wichita, Ks.

[strayfarce]

957 geek points for using "grok" in a sentence.

I'm surprised to have gotten as far as I have without a college degree (save for a correctional officer's certification). Much of what I've learned that's necessary for my job is due to my autodidactic nature (and a rather impressively worded resume-"HERE! Look at all the fancy catch phrases to explain my career experience and please forget the fact that I haven't finished college"). If I wanted to learn a program, I took the initiative to use the information available in libraries and on the internet. It was a quicker and cheaper alternative than spending semesters in college. But unfortuately employers aren't concerned about your initiative and know-how. They wanna see that PAPER! The situation I'm in is that my career will not advance any further without it.

That's why I feel there's a benefit to having a degree. People with degrees tend to get paid more and are afforded better opportunities than people who don't. The only way to circumvent the need for having a college diploma is for the mindset of a large percentage of the corporate structure to change and look at an individual's personal experience and not fret over their lack of higher educational experience. I don't foresee that happening any time soon. A degree guarantees that someone sat down and took the time to learn a skill, and not just "say" that they did. Employers don't want to take a chance on "maybe".

I'd try to prove this theory but I'm too busy working two jobs as a monkey of the civil service and retail world to try and make ends meet until I can afford to go back to college and get a degree so I can GET a higher-paying job.

Or maybe I just DID prove that theory. Eh?

[Marc]

The [original] link (before it was changed to the general NAAL site: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/kf_dem_edu.asp) to the NAAL study does not only not intimate anything about 71% of anything, but it suggests a direct relationship between education level attained and prose literacy.

Also to address someone else's comment, Steve Ballmer has a BA from Harvard, and dropped out of graduage business school at Stanford to join Microsoft. Tremendously successful business and technology personalities may be more prevalent than in other industries, but they are still outliers.

[Nikki]

Question- First the article says: "I'm connected to every fortune 500 CEO within one degree." Then, 3 paragraphs later it says: "Thanks to the Internet I am connected with almost every CEO within two degrees."
Just a little confused- one or two degrees of separation? Or just the Fortune 500 folks with one degree and every other CEO two degrees of separation?

[Ivan]

I generally agree with you that college classes are useless as far as learning "real stuff". I learned MUCH more at my part time sysadmin job at the university then in all the programming classes put together.

What I appreciate about uni though is the people I have met. The internet is terribly inefficient in making non-professional bonds.

So the question I pose is this: how can we keep the campus, the social interactions and the girls in short skirts but remove the "get a degree" objective?

University should be like a support network: you have smart profs experts in their field that can help you on your quest.

[ThatGuySteve]

As soon as I had graduated college, I felt my degree was obsolete (in fact I just posted it maybe 2 days ago).

But I have managed to broaden myself through constant interaction online.

My personal feelings are that you won't learn anything in business until you do it. If they could harness that though in business school, then maybe I wouldn't feel as if I wasted my money on a fancy degree!

[ty]

if you know where you are going college is a waste of time! look at bill gates, steve jobs, steve ballmer, richard branson. they knew where they were going and what they where going to be.

[ben]

This TED talk is pretty instructive, IMO:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

In my discipline (web development), I rate degrees as trending strongly toward uselessness. They can make for a useful tiebreaker, but chances are that a person's credential has little or nothing to do with their team fit. As for talent, well, source talks and b.s. walks.

What a bona fide degree from a residential campus proves is that a person can devote several years of their life to wading through hidebound, bureaucratic nonsense. In some settings (here's looking at you, enterprise folks) this is nothing short of a survival skill.

...But as a measure of applied ability at a particular job?

...Rutting useless.

[Richard Merrick]

Hi Alex

We also need to rethink what education is for. Our current model is based on the needs of post enlightenment industrial needs,(essentially, organisation fodder) whereas the age we are in and developing will rely on everybody contributing what they are best at (and passionate about). Not everyone will make it, but it's a good starting point.

Look at Ken Robinsons RSA lecture in London. Be interested in your comments

http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/sir-ken-robinson-the-element

[Allan]

@ Stephen

I would also recommend that you start early on the path to entrepreneurism. Even as an undergrad you can get things started and succeed as an entrepreneur. Give yourself the very difficult decision of having to choose between graduating or running a young but growing and profitable company. It's easy to just assume you're going to finish school. Give yourself a difficult choice to make.

[Alex Krupp]

Stephen,

My recommendation is to find classes that involve reading academic journal articles each week and then either blogging about them or discussing them. Being able to understand the academic literature in the various fields you're interested in is huge. First, many business opportunities come from being able to read academic literature and then translate it into real world products and services. Second, most of the best ideas come from combining techniques from multiple fields.

If you ask the department chair you should be able to figure out if there is a class like this in that department, and if so definitely take it. Obviously this works better for something like Cognitive Science or Sociology than for Math.

I dropped out a couple times but did end up going back and finishing. Senior year I actually did get something valuable out of college because I did this.

[Stephen Bateman]

So here's the story. I'm in college, and I think that it's a really valuable transition between childhood and adulthood, and a good time to get some intensive training in a specific discipline.

What do you recommend. Not that I'm planning to rely on an undergrad business degree, but I'd like to hear how you think
college's can counteract the obsolescence