Education Vs. Creation
Before you begin reading, I feel it is important to provide a short disclaimer. The ideas here are mainly my opinion, so keep in mind as you read that these words are coming from someone who has postponed formal education, indefinitely, in the name of building a startup. I don’t claim to have the answer, but rather want to add one perspective to the conversation.
My parents didn’t go to college, and their parents didn’t go to college, and so the story goes. They always told me that if I worked hard and got an education I would have a great job, and the freedom of my time. That said, my father always had a business he was running outside of his full-time job — selling everything from pool cues to scooters. He was full of entrepreneurial spirit, and taught me entrepreneurship at age twelve. He helped me start my first business mowing lawns around our suburban neighborhood in 2002. In spite of my father’s entrepreneurial focus, he has always desired a quality education for his children.
When I entered college as a freshmen I had aspirations of attending one of the best institutions in the country. Then, not even a year into college, as a 21-year-old with heaps of ambition and virtually no experience, something changed. I realized that I could learn more by connecting and working with smarter, more experienced people than myself. I was learning more from people who were building real businesses than I was learning from sitting through lectures. Better yet, I realized that interfacing with people who were smarter than me presented no barriers to entry — it wasn’t limited to those with a piece of paper that stated that they had received an education from a top-tier university.
Now, at age 24, I do sometimes wish that I had already completed my education. But more often than not I find myself questioning the value of a formal education. As the co-founder of a startup, I have found that people tend to assume that I am a college graduate. My best guess as to why this happens is that people see that I have created something that adds value to thousands of people, and is experiencing growth, and they conclude — in their own minds — that only a college graduate would be capable of such results. In other words, I have built something meaningful that adds credibility to my skills and experience. The negative effect is that this makes it easier to consider not going back to school at all.
Whether I go back to school or not is another question, but my hypothesis that formal education is not entirely important to tech entrepreneurs was partly confirmed by a quote I came across recently by Jessica Livingston, the co-founder of Y Combinator. When asked about what she has found most surprising about great founders who have built great companies, she said, “How little it matters where founders went to college.”
Of course, Livingston is exclusively talking about founders. What about creators who aren’t necessarily founders? Well, I think Salman Khan put it about as good as anyone can. In one of my favorite books, The One World Schoolhouse, he argues that “Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.” We now need an entire workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners, not just a handful of them who go on directing a symphony of machine-like assembly line workers, as has worked in the past. I know that great efforts are being made right now to abandon the Prussian model of education, but I wish that we would’ve started long ago. Imagine what our education system could look like if we would have.
Unfortunately, our education system looks very much like it did a century ago. So, why do so many people continue to rely on our formal education system? Because education is a safe investment in human capital. We invest in human capital because we expect that it will increase our ability to produce and create in the future. Likewise, those who create policy for our education system view it as a production function — inputs lead to outputs lead to spillovers to society. However, the outputs that we, as students, are hoping to be investing in, are not the same outputs that the policymakers are measuring. The policymakers, and other researchers, are measuring things like performance on test scores and lifetime earnings, simply because these are easily measured.
The problem with this is that because the policymakers are measuring the wrong things, our education system, by definition, is creating the wrong things. As students we become solid test takers, well prepared for careers in fields like management consulting, investment banking, and academia. Sure, we need quality consultants, bankers, and professors, but I think we are in a lot more need of creators who can solve the difficult problems we are headed toward as a society.
For these hopeful consultants, bankers, and professors, the cost of education continues to outpace inflation, and leaves them in enormous piles of debt. The main ranking system for universities (UNSWR) does not reward universities for holding their costs down, but rather puts pressure on them to spend more. Higher spending per student, leads to a higher position in the ranking, leads to better applicants and more prestige. As a consequence, we enjoy the same antiquated education, but we fork over a handsome premium year after year.
As Peter Thiel puts it, “For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?” I realize that this is easy for Peter Thiel to say, because he already struck gold with PayPal and Palantir. But then again, it is easy for Peter Thiel to say because he also went to a prestigious law school. The question is whether going to a prestigious law school helped him to become the successful entrepreneur that he is. But we do know one thing for sure: He’s seen both sides of the coin.
On top of paying exorbitant tuition costs, many students leave school with nothing more than a slew of memorized facts in their head. Our education system is largely focused on breadth of content, not depth of thinking. More than a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous American essayist, said, “We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.” I think one of the biggest failures of our country is that Emerson’s statement is still largely true today.
The memorization of content does not lead to solutions to complex problems. Solving complex problems requires collaboration, yet collaboration is the very thing that gets killed as you move up the education ladder. Universities like Harvard and MIT pride themselves on being some of the most competitive environments in the world. Students, instead of learning to work together to solve difficult problems, learn to rely on themselves. In other words, they learn independence, but never interdependence. They go on becoming the ultimate test-taking machines, completely missing out on opportunities to learn to collaborate on the creation of something novel.
In my opinion, if you want to learn to create and collaborate, don’t rely on universities. I’m building a startup in part because I’ve always gone where I believe I can learn the most. Perhaps, a year or two down the road, I will be enrolling in school again to finish my degree. This is certainly possible, but my best guess — and it is just that, a guess — is that I will still be creating.
I am genuinely interested in hearing other’s perspectives on this topic. Feel free to leave a thoughtful comment or reach out on Twitter @wesleyeames.
