Virtual Mentor No. 1: Nina Simone

It took a while to figure out how I was going to do this. So I'm stealing James Altucher's practice of having a virtual mentor every week. I'm adding one twist: the person must be a notable figure who didn't attend university or dropped out.

Basically, each week I study the life of a someone new - paying close attention to the challenges they overcame. I want to make include a wide spectrum of people from art to business to technology. I don't necessarily have to be familiar with the notable figure I choose but at least find their story interesting at first glance or admire the work they produced.

This week's virtual mentor is Nina Simone.

Simone at a concert in Morlaix, France, May 1982

I chose Ms. Simone because I wanted an excuse to listen to Pastel Blues non-stop this week :).

Some snippets from the Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians (www.jazz.com)

"Fiercely honest, Simone was admired for her eccentricity and individualism. She was known for her spirited personality on and off the stage, which included flirting with audience members and voicing her opinions about social topics of the time."

"Simone sought the help of a private instructor to help her audition for the Curtis Institute, but was ultimately denied after a supposedly excellent audition. Simone said she later found out from an insider at Curtis that she was denied entry because she was black. This heightened her anger over the racism which was pervasive in the United States during this period."

"In 1954, Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone. Simone changed her name because she didn't want her mother to know that she was playing the devil's music."

"In 1969, Simone renounced America and decided to live as an expatriate. During this period she lived in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom before finally settling in Cary-le-Rouet, France."

"On April 21, 2003, Simone passed away after a battle with breast cancer, two months shy of her seventieth birthday."

"Simone also received two honorary degrees in music and humanities from the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm X College. Ironically, two days before she passed away, the Curtis Institute, the very institution that had rejected her at the beginning of her career, awarded Simone an honorary degree."

Some snippets from the Nina Simone Webpage (ninasimone.com)

“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.”

Functions of the University

Any advancement over current higher educational models must establish clearly defined institutional functions.

This table shows the structure of educational needs in abstract i.e. I haven't included the concrete instances of what kind of intentional community or what kind of training or testing or publication and so on. Age groups were split up arbitrarily, just enough to be able to make some meaningful profiling.

Research 

This function is sometimes capital intensive. It operates on a grant/proposal system, unless we're talking about R&D firms in the private sector. I think the best way differentiating the two is that academic research tends to be speculative, while the research private companies do tends to have an immediate instrumental value. In a higher education un-bundling, there could be institutions for undergraduates and graduate students that focus on deep immersion in a field with opportunities to do research while faculty also focuses on research, advising and publishing their work.


Knowledge Distribution

The publishing industry, library systems, internet databases, etc. are all a part of the distribution system, but traditional higher learning includes the additional service of the lecture with the advantage being that students can ask questions when they get stuck. In a higher education un-bundling, there would be more emphasis on face-to-face interaction for upper level study perhaps based on the seminar model. This means that content distribution would be best accessed through the aforementioned systems. For example, the Minerva project takes advantage of the internet by offering instruction online for courses earlier in the sequence. There are also plenty of tutoring platforms and question forums (e.g. Quora, StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.) that are either in person or online that serve to fill the role of office hours at a traditional university in a cheaper and more effective way. After all, few students take advantage of office hours at universities anyways. They rather ask friends first. Which brings us to another function...

Socialization Patterns

The university offers an intentional community in which students live together. Students are partially randomized and then placed in dorms to live together (unless they choose their roommates beforehand). They may or may not be studying the same material, so the dormitory functions as just that - a dormitory. Students connect through the lecture hall usually in an organic way, just like in high school. Though, if they share the same major, they will likely see each other in several classes. This allows for networked learning on assignments, studying, projects, etc. After university, people find a place to live and commute to work. Here collaboration is a must. What was a study group in university becomes the "professional network." After retirement, an emphasis on intentional communities reappear along with these learning networks as people learn new skills.

The un-bundling here comes in the increase in self chosen intentional communities dedicated to study. Even Minerva international students are encouraged to take advantage of this by co-living with other students in their home country before finally moving to California for the last two years. Other examples include HackerHouse and many other technology oriented intentional communities. There are likely many informal co-living situations between people who are independent scholars or "education hackers."

Another idea, see: Home College: an Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again) 

I also have another idea to contribute to the idea-pool. Let's say we have this thing called the "Grandma Effect" which is a phenomenon where children show their grandma some cool trick they can do or share some idea they recently learned about and grandma responds with a burst or enthusiasm, thereby encouraging the child to continue learning more. When it comes to college education, some may argue that success in learning comes from the structured environment and accountability measures set up by professors, advisers and parents. If at only 18, a high school graduate wishes to join other five other 18 y.o. high school graduates to study geography together, they can find a space to do it over the course of 3 years or less. However, this group of self-directed learners will run into the problem of accountability and structure, as well as social stigma. Since both these Millenials and the older population are suited to intentional communities there should be a matching mechanism that would match an older mentor from the retired population with these independent learners. The Grandma Effect would provide encouragement, accountability and increase the reputation of the intentional community.

These are all grand ideas, but we also need ways to learn today without relying on a sophisticated infrastructure. I will try to write a post specifically about the strategies individuals can use based on all the books I've read on the subject of self-directed higher education.

Signaling Methods (Credentialing)

Throughout formal education transcripts and standardized test scores serve as the signal that allows students to move through successive stages of the education system. There are school sponsored standardized testing as well as outside testing e.g. SATs, ACTs, GREs etc. Each level (high school, college, grad school) grants a diploma or certificate which shows that the student has met all the graduation requirements. With the implementation of sorting algorithms, some job applications are weeded out even before a person looks at the resume if they don't have a certain credential.

Alternative credential systems are still being devised but I will touch on some interesting developments.

Integrative Platforms for Life-long Learning:

While a degree signals that a student has focused on education exclusively for 4 years, imagine what signal is created when a person creates a learning profile over the course of more than 4 years. A learning profile does more to show what a person dedicates their time to learning through incorporating a variety of content from articles, videos, and coursework to books read. One such platform is Degreed. Users have the ability to add verified credits from accredited universities, but more importantly they can automatically integrate into their learning portfolio all the academic content they consume on the net using a web plugin. A similar idea is Mozilla's Open Badges which offers badges for a variety of different skills.

Talent Analytics:

More and more companies are becoming "data-driven." There is a so called Datafication of Human Resources. From the same article, here is an example of datafication of HR:

"A major customer service provider analyzed 7,240 employees over seven locations around the world and found that “relevant job experience” in the area of customer service had no impact on tenure, performance, or long term employee engagement.  They also found that candidates with many prior positions (ie. job hoppers) did not perform any better or worse than employees who had long term employment with their prior employer. The result:  a very powerful model now in use to hire and predict high performers in customer service."

Analysis of turnover and estimation of wages are all internally important processes but there are areas where populations that were disadvantaged in the past will be able to gain employment based on their own metrics. One criticism may be that

I foresee a personal analytics platform which takes key measures e.g. Distance of Daily Commute, LinkedIn Connections, High School GPA, Nutritional Targets, Sleep and Exercise Data, Test Scores, and more that will be used in a proposal system which replaces the resume. People will not just apply to jobs, but also create their own jobs by proposing how they can add to projects undertaken by existing companies. The personal analytics will be useful as a baseline for soft skills and generic abilities while a portfolio, recommendations, MOOC coursework, bootcamps and workshop experience will serve to show domain expertise.

p-e-r-e-g-r-i-n-a-t-i-o-n, Pt. 2

...more outtakes from the paper...

The Job-Market Signalling Model.

According to the work of Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, educational credentials signal to employers the value that an employee can offer to a firm. Education involves a series of tasks which prove that the student can meet deadlines, arrive on time, and handle responsibility. Most importantly, by purchasing education, the student conveys information about his or her productivity. The need for signalling arises due to limitations on the access to information in the market. Due to a phenomenon referred to as the Sheepskin Effect, the signal, i.e. a degree, can have value to an employer regardless of whether it contributes to the potential employee’s productivity. This applies particularly in domains of study which do not have a focus on "technical" training, such as gender studies, history or anthropology. This suggests, then, that undergraduates can improve their human capital by entering a technical field or actively seeking to gain skills which boost productivity. By taking on a business venture, college students can receive the best of their plan-of-study and still build human capital.

---

One of the first things I learned as an undergraduate was the idea of opportunity costs. In fact, on page 4 of my macroeconomics textbook used higher education as an example of how opportunity costs work. This was even before I knew about signalling - a concept introduced later in the course. The text defines opportunity costs of a choice as "the value of the opportunities lost."

In the context of higher education, the opportunities lost are measured by the cost of tuition, books, and potentially room and board. Although students would have had to pay for room and board if they weren't students, the cost of room and board at college is often more expensive than other living situations. In addition, though, another opportunity cost is time, which can be measured as wages foregone (which can range anywhere from 15k to 35k/year for a worker with just a high school diploma). This means that at a typical state college, the highest cost of attendance is not even the tuition students pay. I'm surprised how little this is mentioned when media outlets cover the student loan crisis and unemployment among Gen-Y.

I also found out that there is a tendency for college enrollment to increase with unemployment. It makes sense since the opportunity costs are lowered if a person couldn't have gotten a job straight out of high school i.e. no wages foregone by attending college.

The list goes on. There are plenty of statistics related to higher education as well as other economic ideas that gave me a broader perspective on the decision to attend university. Taking macroeconomics was not required for the engineering track I was on, yet that was the class in which I learned the most that semester. Does it mean I should have changed majors? It could be a reason but I don't interpret this as a sign that economics was my special, true calling. My interpretation is that (1) we do well in subjects we like, (2) we do well in subjects that are taught in an engaging way and (3) there is always an initial barrier to liking a subject so I could theoretically like anything else just the same. The signalling narrative says that colleges just put a sticker on the students that were already smart and ambitious. Likewise, since I was already interested in economics I would have learned these things over time regardless of whether I took the class i.e. my grade at the end was just a signal of that interest, prior knowledge, etc.

Understanding key ideas in the field of economics brought me one step closer in my "peregrination" towards a deep interest in the future of higher education. In Miguel Street (the book I themed this blog after), Titus Hoyt, a scholarly man in a modest Trinidadian community, helps a lost boy find his way home. Later, he helps him write a letter to the Guardian about the experience.

"This, dear Mr Editor, was my first peregrination (p-e-r-e-g-r-i-n-a-t-i-o-n) in this metropolis, and I had the misfortune to wander from the path my mother had indiciated [sic]" (Emphasis mine)

I suppose you might say that in all things college education, economics is my Titus Hoyt and American Culture is analogous to "my mother." At times it feels like it doesn't matter what the numbers say and that whatever culture dictates takes precedence. Yet, all Millenials can benefit from understanding the economics of higher education.


For more economics and stats on college, try Marginal Revolution.

Review: Hacking Your Education (Dale J. Stephens)

Hacking Your Education... or as I like to call it: An Introvert's Guide to Honing Street Smarts, Building a Network and Embracing Self-Directed Learning  

As far as college-related books go, I've read James Altucher, Blake Boles, and Andrew Roberts (plus a ton of other shorter works). Out of all these writers, Dale J. Stephens has provided what is arguably the Summa of launching your life without college and making the most of college if you still end up going. Perhaps at some point (after plenty of experience "hacking" my own education), I should try my hand at writing what I shall call the Summa Hackademia to carry on the project. For now though, Dale's book is my Start Here! reference book for anyone who asks about making it as a Millenial.

The Physical Book.  HYE was published by Penguin Books USA. It's paperback with a page count of roughly 200 pages. It's small enough to carry around and fit in the pocket of a light jacket. To be honest, it looks kinda like a software manual. From the back at least. But it is well edited/formatted compared to some self-published books on the same subject. As for the font, I was even able to read under low-light and make sense of the ideas.

Main Sources. As a hackademic and serial unschooler, Dale's big on real world experiences. There are oodles of anecdotes from daring individuals who either dropped out of college, opted out or finished but gained entirely new skills through good ole' self-directed learning. Often what you find in this genre are people who actually did go to college but recognized the opportunity costs of college after the fact. Dale gets instant street-cred for having lived out the advice in this book.  By including short profiles of many others, the argument becomes more convincing that taking on big projects at 18 is a viable way to launch one's adult life. 

Is College Worth it? The first chapter was dedicated to assessing the value of college. Most college-hacking books follow this format. Here's an opportunity I've noticed. A significant portion of the audience is already pretty much sold on leaving the Ivory Tower to pursue their own projects. In my case, the main value of this chapter was understanding why others decided on an alternative trajectory after high school. I think there's a market for a book which provides the case for education hacking from a "mature" perspective. These books exist, I think, and I will review them. It's just that they are rare and often pre-MOOCs or even pre-internet. I plan to read Anya Kamenetz's DIY U and then, I will see how well it makes the case to a wider audience.

By the voice in which HYE was written, I just get the sense that Dale's audience was basically his age group. Don't get me wrong, though. this is still a Romantic work. It inspires wonderlust, independence, and risk-taking. As a young person, I eat it all up. I'm just not so sure my dear quinquagenarian mother would. 

Ideally, hackademics can move out on their own, but it helps to have the support of family because, to put it frankly: shit happens. If you watch any media coverage of programs like the Thiel Fellowship, reporters are always inquisitive about how the fellow's parents took the news that their  Ivy educated children will be changing course. Of course, the answer is always that parent's didn't take it well. When you're trying to make it without a degree, the last thing you want is a resentful parent(s), so I think this aversion to risk is a cultural hurdle Americans have to get past and something we all need more advice on navigating. Dale's fortunate circumstances were that his mom was a teacher with an open mind to unschooling and so he got started in that community even before high school.

The Fun Begins. After the first chapter, that's when I got into the substance of the book. Instead of telling you "Find a mentor," Dale offers a template for reaching out to high profile people you're interested in learning from. Instead of just saying "Join a interest-based community," he tells you how to get in to an exclusive conference and how to pitch ideas. I could go on and on about the things I learned here. These are the areas where Dale takes the comparative advantage over older writers. As a Millenial, he gets to include the back-door solutions that make any sensible person squeamish. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Contents:

1. Understanding the System
2. The Hackademic Mind-set
3. Identifying Your Talents
4. Finding Mentors and Teachers
5. Building a Community/Network
6. Finding Educational Resources
7. Learning from the World

These seemingly straightforward chapter titles do not speak for themselves. The gems are hidden under subsections called the "Hack of the Day." In these pages, Dale abstracts away the methods used by each hackademic he interviewed and so the reader is able to apply the steps in new situations. If you think you can't become a ship captain or live in Paris under $1000, think again. There are no guarantees, but this book makes it clear how much you can grow by forging your own path even if it backfires. Some might be skeptical about how well these ideas work when you're a minority, but Dale does a good job of addressing that skepticism through the diverse examples he includes. 

In conclusion, I really couldn't come up with any criticisms of HYE. Dale has perfected the art of education hacking and distilled his experience into book form for us all to make use of. In fact, he started an organization called Uncollege that provides plenty more resources on education hacking as well as hackademic camps and a Gap Year program where the emphasis is on experiential and networked learning through travel, internships, and projects. I'll be checking out their collection of resources on the website and re-reading HYE from time to time. Going back to my alternative title, these skills are things many extroverts like Dale pick up on the fly, but after HYE even the introverts don't have an excuse. 

Robert Greene on College

"Basically, I tell people: when you get out of college, if you go to college, you have to suddenly throw out everything you learned. It's fine that you learned about history and great novels and stuff, but you did not learn about the real world. It's a completely different environment out there. You didn't learn how to deal with people. You didn't learn how to deal with political situations. You didn't learn how to practice a real life skill. Take everything that you learned in the university and say that it was very nice and throw it in the garbage can and start your real education which happens when you go out in the work (world?)"