submitted by jwithrow.
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Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Reworking Higher Education
January 26, 2016
Hot Springs, VA
The S&P closed out Monday at $1,877. Gold closed at $1,108 per ounce. Crude Oil closed at $29.77 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 2.02%. Bitcoin is trading around $395 per BTC today.
Dear Journal,
“I am too happy to be snowed in with my family! ” Wife Rachel scolded me for suggesting she wasn’t enthused about the snow days in my last journal entry.
“Well honey, the art of story-telling requires a little flare every now and then…”
“But you make me sound like a bad… oh crap, now you are going to use this in your next article!”
She makes it too easy for me.
We ended up with about sixteen inches of snow on the ground when the flakes finally tapered off on Saturday afternoon. For me it is the simple things that make this life so special, and I can think of nothing more simply special than a snowy
weekend in the mountains filled with family, food, fire, and french-pressed coffee with a splash of Irish cream.
Little Madison was especially happy to have an entire weekend of uninterrupted play with both mommy and daddy home. For my part, I am continuously amazed at how rapidly her growth and development progresses. I was amazed when Maddie learned basic sign-language from her mother as an infant. I was amazed again this weekend when she brought her sign-language book to me, sat on my lap, and then proceeded to read the book to her dad page-by-page.
Watching my little girl’s unfettered creativity and zeal for learning, I can’t help but turn my thoughts to the state of “education” today. I have written a fair amount about primary education previously. Watching Madison in action has convinced me that it is possible for anyone to craft a world-class primary education by leveraging non-interventionist principles with modern technology. I have written very little about higher education, however, and that’s where my thoughts migrated to today.
There is a budding populist sentiment here in the U.S., championed by Bernie Sanders on the political stage, suggesting that college should be tuition-free and debt-free. I think those folks are accurately pointing out the fact that sky-rocketing tuitions have created a situation where a college degree is often not worth the mountain of debt it comes with for many people.
I certainly think that was the case for me. I took on significant debt to major in business at a public university. I have come to find out, however, that a public university – being completely sheltered from market forces and populated by professors who have never worked a day in the private sector – is pretty much the last place you should go to learn about business. It took me five years to realize I had been fed bad ideas and faulty economics, and it took me nearly another five years to drop all of the acquired poor habits and dig out of the financial hole.
Wife Rachel’s case is even more extreme. She majored in nutrition and dietetics at a major public university and came out with nearly four times more debt than I did. Then she found out that the nutrition job market was pretty much non-existent. Somehow she ended up in corporate banking which is where she met, and eventually married, me. I’ll have to ask her if I was worth taking on all of that debt.
But here’s what’s even worse – or perhaps more humorous if you are a semi-stoic optimist philosopher – she could have gone online to a handful of credible websites and learned everything worth knowing about health and nutrition in her spare time for free. No student loans required. Hah!
So I do think Mr. Sanders and his supporters are on to something here. But then they start proposing solutions and I can’t help but notice that their solutions actually aren’t solutions at all.
Make college free? That doesn’t address any core issues. In fact, it’s worse than a non-solution because it would require them, using the police-power of government, to steal a lot of money from some people and to force other people to do things against their will in order to implement. Personally, I think civilization functions best when you adhere to a pretty simple philosophy: Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.
Now to be fair, it’s not like the presidential candidates on the other side of the aisle are champions of liberty and non-intervention either. There have been absurd and downright horrifying proposals coming from the red team also. But people love to divide themselves up into teams and rally together against the other guys so the masses continue to cheer the circus on. Personally, I am more fond of H.L. Mencken’s perspective: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
Enough about politics, however, let’s get back to higher education. As with everything, the solutions to sky-rocketing tuitions are individualist in nature simply because everybody is different. Everybody has different skills, interests, passions, and goals. It is up to each individual, preferably with a little guidance from parents or someone more experienced, to determine how to structure their own education so that it is in alignment with their personal skills, interests, passions, and goals.
This will require a fundamental shift in thinking about higher education. College is currently viewed as the path to employment, and a college degree is seen as your ticket to a job. This way of thinking views higher education as a credentializing system, and it turns colleges into diploma mills. Then wife Rachel pays nearly six-figures for a nutrition degree and a few sorority parties.
Within this paradigm, all that matters is completing the approved curriculum to earn the degree. Personal development is secondary to becoming credentialed. Since the degree equates to credentials which equates to a good job, nearly all high school kids are steered towards college and financed by the federal government which drives costs up and quality down.
To match higher education up with individual circumstances, college would need to be viewed as something of a personal development tool rather than a diploma mill. In this light, it is up to individual students and families to determine whether or not a college education is suitable given their personal goals and interests.
Some students would be much better served by learning a trade, finding an apprenticeship, and making a little money right away rather than rushing off to college. After all, there’s nothing that says they can’t change their mind later. Maybe they would work a trade for twenty years, raise a family, build a financial nest egg, and then take up a totally different second career. Maybe this would entail going to college later in life; maybe it wouldn’t.
Business-minded and entrepreneurial students would likely be much better off by networking with successful business owners in the community – locally or online – in order to learn about how real-world businesses operate. One way to do this would be by identifying a business of interest and offering to work for free for an agreed upon period of time to learn the ropes. They could always work somewhere else part-time to pay the bills during this free apprenticeship period. Or, if they had crafted a world-class primary education, maybe they would already have an online business or two throwing off a little cash-flow to cover expenses.
Entrepreneurship requires patience, persistence, and a ton of trial-and-error. It is extremely difficult to dive into the entrepreneurial world with existing debt burdens hanging overhead because revenue is often sporadic and unpredictable at first. Not only does college not teach anything meaningful about entrepreneurship, but the requisite student loans make the entrepreneurial path unfeasible for new graduates.
Students interested in more specialized fields like engineering or dentistry (I wouldn’t recommend nutrition – see above) would probably need to go the college route. Although I think it would be possible to learn these fields via an apprenticeship model, licensing laws require you to have completed formal education in many of these specialized areas. But these students have an individual solution available also – they could take advantage of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) to test out of the first two years of college. That would cut their financing costs in half. And, over the long-term, college tuitions would necessarily drop dramatically if far fewer kids were going to college because they were learning trades and starting businesses instead.
Even history-buffs and philosophers would benefit from viewing higher education as a personal development tool rather than credentializing service. Maybe they would still major in history, philosophy, or sociology in college, but they would not be under the impression that their degree would yield them lucrative employment and they would not be mortgaging their financial sovereignty in exchange. Instead, they would pursue their chosen curriculum because they felt like it would help them to grow and develop personally, whatever that may mean to them individually.
These students could test out of the first two years of college using the CLEP program as well. Of course the Internet provides access to a plethora of information regarding history, philosophy, and sociology at no additional cost, so going to college for these majors is more of a novelty than a necessity since the job market outside of teaching is pretty much non-existent in these fields.
The beauty of such an approach to higher education is that everybody wins. Or at least everyone gets to make their own decisions for their own reasons. The above examples are the most practical applications that I can think of off-hand, but there are plenty of other applications and possibilities that will occur to others. There is no one-size-fits all plan. The key is a fundamental shift in thinking, as well as a respect for the uniqueness of every individual.
By the way, the opportunity to take this approach already exists. Nothing at all needs to change about the current system for individuals and families to custom-tailor their higher education in an affordable way. While college degrees are still viewed as essential, my experience suggests that they are becoming irrelevant to employers outside of the specialized fields. I worked as an officer with signing authority at two major mega-banks, and not once was I asked a question about my degree or my education – not even when I interviewed for my first corporate job. If you are polite, hard working, well-read, and well-spoken then you are employable whether or not you have a parchment with an institutional seal on it.
The economy is changing rapidly thanks to modern technology, the Internet, instantaneous communication, and decentralized peer-to-peer networks. From my perspective, the current educational model does not prepare kids for the world in which they live. I would go so far as to say that many of the social problems the politicians campaign on endlessly are simply symptoms of this dynamic. That’s the bad news.
The good news is: the solutions are not terribly difficult to implement and they certainly aren’t political in nature. Higher education is not compatible with the plug-n-play model; it is intensely individualist in nature. The more the current model continues to devolve, the more people will recognize that they have the ability to take control over their own education to make it less costly and more suitable for them individually. This type of change does not stem from elections, legislation, or edicts; it stems from a fundamental shift in thinking within the minds of individuals… one-by-one.
More to come,
Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher
For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and individual solutions, please read The Individual is Rising: 2nd Edition. The Individual is Rising is available through Amazon and at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. Please sign up for the mailing list to be notified of other projects as they come to fruition.