Replacing universities?

So, I was talking to one friend at my college yesterday, and he mentioned how he had been spending 4 hours every day since the last six months on learning Artificial Intelligence and now he’s gotten really good at it. Sort of like, he can win Kaggle challenges, build projects that seemed like impossible ideas before, parse through earlier-incomprehensible huge chunks of open source code, look for bugs in them and make pull requests.

So much progress for just six months without any professional training in software development or artificial intelligence. The obvious follow-up thought that I had was whether he being able to begin with something completely new, start experimenting, give such a distraction-less focussed effort into it and become employable at something within six months was a consequence of being a college student? Is it really this easy when you’re working full-time in a 9-to-5 job to build side projects, figure out your calling, become extremely good at new skills which aren’t a part of your jobs? Is it even possible?

Maybe, just maybe the sort of mid-life crisis people get into is because they are just stuck in these loops of doing work and following routine that they don’t like and they can’t find an escape where they can kind of buy some time for themselves, experiment with new stuff, and land up in a place just out of serendipity. Something like college?

Can we bring this concept of college, and open it to people of all ages, not just from the early twenties to figure out their lives. This is different from Masters, Ph.D. or even or other Learner’s Program that some universities offer. It is not meant to force specialization, but offer a bare minimum curriculum, and give you just about enough time to socialize and find new things to work upon. Something in the middle of a vacation from work and a sabbatical.

And today, I happened to stumble upon this talk by Paul Graham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI where he talks about replacing universities. In response to one of the questions after the talk, he mentions that building YC is like delivering an experience of collective growth in person instead of him being a proponent of a university-less world where people socialize only over social media.

This moment was when I realized, what it would mean to be in college once again. Something like being in YC. Something like YC is a perfect solution. A place to live and work together for a bunch of like-minded filtered-by-skills/aptitude/intelligence interest-based group for three months. The size of the group could vary from ~50 to ~500. But that’s the point.

People just apply to programs like these and spend time doing stuff out of sheer fun of doing it and hence, end up with something valuable. Because isn’t this the only organic way of coming up with something great.

The groups could focus on interests like entrepreneurship (kind of like YC), programming, design, painting, screenwriting and a lot of other things.

This not only solves the problem of recreating college for adults post-college, this even tries to become an idea for replacing college for undergrads and adults in early-twenties. Instead of just focussing on academic pursuits, this gives students an opportunity to do well in particular interests, which could also be academic, but provides with greater optionality, solves for credentialing and gives people a chance to really figure out stuff for themselves.

That’s how I think universities could be replaced.