Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (71 page)

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. John’s, Deep Springs), most schools aren’t really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can’t churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But …

2.
College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won’t get fooled again …

This leads to a crop of potential college students who can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the “best” school they get into.

3.
The definition of “best” is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high-school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one-page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I’ve ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: so the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in
U.S. News
and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it
appear
to be more useful?

4.
The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn’t originally designed to be merely a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that’s what it has become. The data I’m seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn’t translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job, or more happiness than does a degree from a cheaper institution.

5.
Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and
rewarded schools that churn out young wannabe professors, instead of experiences that help shape leaders and problem solvers.

Just as we’re watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass-market products, I think we’re about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass-market degrees.

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I’d ask: Is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?

The solutions are obvious. There are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference (start here). Most of these ways, though, aren’t heavily marketed, nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped, two-hundred-year-old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships, and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.

The only people who haven’t gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass-marketing colleges, and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.

Apple just built a massive data center in Malden, North Carolina. That sort of plant development would have brought a thousand or five thousand jobs to a town just thirty years ago. The total employment at the data center? Fifty.

Big companies are no longer the engines of job creation. Not the good jobs, anyway.

What the data center does, though, is create the opportunity for a thousand or ten thousand individuals to invent new jobs, new movements,
and new technologies as a result of the tools and technology that can be built on top of it.

There is a race to build a plug-and-play infrastructure. Companies like Amazon and Apple and others are laying the groundwork for a generation of job creation—but not exclusively by big companies. They create an environment where people like you can create jobs instead.

Pick yourself.

“How many gas stations are there in the United States?”

Yet another one of those trick questions that William Poundstone writes about. Companies like Google and Microsoft are renowned for using obtuse questions (what’s the next number in this sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66 …), often to make job seekers feel inadequate and pressured.

That wasn’t my goal. Years ago, when doing some hiring, I often asked the gas station question because in a world where you can look up just about anything, I found it fascinating to see what people could do with a question they couldn’t possibly look up the answer to (because, in this case anyway, they didn’t have a computer to help them).

Those are the only sorts of questions that matter now.

If the training we give people in public school or college is designed to help them memorize something that someone else could look up, it’s time wasted. Time that should have been spent teaching students how to be wrong.

How to be usefully wrong.

That’s a skill we need along with the dreaming.

PS: After asking this question to more than five hundred people in job interviews, I can report that two people mailed me copies of the appropriate page from the Statistical Abstract (what a waste), and two other people said, “I don’t have a car” and walked out of the interview.

In an industrial setting, failure can be fatal—to the worker or to the bottom line.

If we’re building a giant factory, the building can’t fall down. If we’re hauling 10,000 pounds of ore, we need to move it the right way the first time. If we’re changing the legal conditions on a thousand life insurance policies, we can’t afford the class action lawsuit if we do it wrong.

Noted.

But if we’re trading hypotheses on a new scientific breakthrough, of course we have to be wrong before we can be right. If we’re inventing a new business model or writing a new piece of music or experimenting with new ways to increase the yield of an email campaign, of course we have to be willing to be wrong.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still—until we find right.

That’s at the heart of the gas station question: discovering if the person you’re interviewing is comfortable being wrong, comfortable verbalizing a theory and then testing it, right there and then. Instead of certainty and proof and a guarantee, our future is about doubt and fuzzy logic and testing.

We can (and must) teach these skills, starting with kids who are happy to build towers out of blocks (and watch them fall down) and continuing with the students who would never even consider buying a term paper to avoid an essay in college.

Our economy and our culture have redefined “smart,” but parents and schools haven’t gotten around to it.

Some measures are:

SAT scores

GPA average

Test results

Ability at Trivial Pursuit

These are easy, competitive ways to measure some level of intellectual capacity.

Are they an indicator of future success or happiness? Are the people who excel at these measures likely to become contributors to society in ways we value?

There’s no doubt that Wall Street and the big law firms have a place for Type A drones, well educated, processing reams of data and churning out trades and deals and litigation.

The rest of the straight-A students in our society are finding a less receptive shortcut to prosperity and impact, because smart, this kind of smart, isn’t something that we value so much anymore. I can outsource the ability to repetitively do a task with competence.

And what about the non-dreamers with C averages? Those guys are in
real
trouble.

Ge Wang, a professor at Stanford and the creator of Smule, thinks so. The problem is that people have to get drunk in order to get over their fear enough to do karaoke.

Ge is dealing with this by making a series of apps for iPhones and other devices that make composing music not merely easy but fearless.

He’s seen what happens when you take the pressure off and give people a fun way to create music (not play sheet music, which is a technical skill, but
make
music). “It’s like I tasted this great, wonderful food,” he says now, “and for some reason I’ve got this burning desire to say to other people: ‘if you tried this dish, I think you might really like it.’ ”

His take on music is dangerously close to the kind of dreaming I’m talking about. “It feels like we’re at a juncture where the future is maybe kind of in the past,” he says. “We can go back to a time where making music is really no big deal; it’s something everyone can do, and it’s fun.”

Who taught us that music was a big deal? That it was for a few? That it wasn’t fun?

It makes perfect sense that organized school would add rigor and structure and fear to the joy of making music. This is one more symptom
of the very same problem: the thought that regimented music performers, in lockstep, ought to be the output of a school’s musical education program.

It’s essential that the school of the future teach music. The passion of seeing progress, the hard work of practice, the joy and fear of public performance—these are critical skills for our future. It’s a mistake to be penny wise and cut music programs, which are capable of delivering so much value. But it’s also a mistake to industrialize them.

As we’ve learned from Ben Zander (author and conductor), real music education involves teaching students how to hear and how to perform from the heart … not to conform to a rigorous process that ultimately leads to numbness, not love.

Quick, what’s 8 squared?

My guess is that you know, and the reason you know is that someone drilled you until you did.

The same is true for many of the small bits of knowledge and skill we possess. We didn’t learn these things because we believed we needed them right then, and we didn’t learn them because they would change our lives; we learned them because it was required.

Here’s a second question:

It’s third down and four. There are five defensive linemen running straight at you and you have about one second to throw the ball. What now?

There’s just no way you learned this in a classroom.

Of course, this sort of learning covers far more than football. You need to give a speech. What should it be about? You have to work your way through an ethical dilemma involving your boss. What should you do?

The instinct of the industrial system is to force the bottom rung to comply. It’s the most direct and apparently efficient method to get the work done—exercise power. In fact, it’s not efficient at all. Real learning happens when the student wants (insists!) on acquiring a skill in order to accomplish a goal.

We’ve inadvertently raised generations that know volumes of TV trivia and can play video games and do social networking at a world-class level. The challenge for educators is to capture that passion and direct it to other endeavors, many of which will certainly be more useful and productive.

In his book
Civilization,
Niall Ferguson complains,

A survey of first-year history undergraduates at one leading British university revealed that only 34 per cent knew who was the English monarch at the time of the Armada, 31 per cent knew the location of the Boer War and 16 per cent knew who commanded the British forces at Waterloo. In a similar poll of English children aged between 11 and 18, 17 per cent thought Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings.

He bemoans the fact that kids only know the greatest hits of history, recognizing the names of Henry VIII, Hitler, and Martin Luther King Jr., uncomfortably juxtaposed without the connecting facts well remembered.