Flunking Higher Education: How Colleges Have Failed Their Students (and the solution)

College is the barrier between minimum wage and the middle class. There are very few for whom this does not apply.

The aggravating part is that, despite the significant resources required to obtain a college degree (time and money), employers usually only care that candidates (1) have a degree and (2) majored in something somewhat relevant to the position being applied for.

The problem with this setup is that the student doesn’t gain a real-world understanding of the career path they’re choosing until they do their internship. (And, let’s be honest, most internships have little substance.)

It’s highly possible that a student enjoys the theoretical exploration of a particular field (psychology, for example) but discovers that the real-world utilization of the degree doesn’t match one’s expectations.

In this situation — where our expectations don’t match up with the reality of our work—we’re taught to “tough it out” and move our way up the chain.

Fuck that. There’s a better way.

Flipping the Script

The solution to this problem is actually rather simple. The current assumption is that a high school student has the foresight required to understand how their career will look based on the selection of a college major.

This ludicrous assumption sets students up for an inefficient college experience—or flat-out failure. Upwards of 70 percent of students change their major at least once during college. Many change it multiple times.

Rather than teaching “skills” first, we need to teach students about the “reality” of the career paths they’re choosing. A professor cannot do this; it has to be taught by someone who’s currently working in the field. This framework encourages an open and honest discussion about the pros and cons of the selected field.

Importantly, this must occur outside of the traditional education system to ensure that it doesn’t becomes another mechanism for colleges to sell potentially worthless/obsolete degrees.

Leveraging the Sharing Economy

We are currently in the midst of a revolution known as the “sharing economy.” The sharing economy promotes access to resources that are owned, but underutilized, by individuals. This model is used by Uber, AirBnb, Turo and Lyft.

We often think of resources as tangible goods. However, there’s no reason that the sharing economy model can’t also be applied to the field of career exploration. In this context, the resource is information.

Imagine if we could actively facilitate conversations between college-bound high school students and professionals in the fields in which they believe they want to enter. Wouldn’t this have the potential to dramatically increase a student’s understanding of the industry before they commit an exorbitant amount of time and money towards it?

This is the problem I want to solve, and its resolution has enormous benefits for employers, too. Many employers complain that Millennials are passive about their work. However, this isn’t a generational problem, it’s an institutional one. Our educational “order of operations” is fundamentally wrong. We can fix this my ensuring that students’ motivations are aligned with their educations.

It’s become truistic to say that the education system is broken. I certainly believe this, but there are already extraordinary people endeavoring to solve that. My mission is more fundamental: I want to ensure that students have the opportunity to vet their career paths before investing an enormous amount of time, money and energy to a specific field of study.