Learning from the Thiel Fellows

Over and beyond the stipend given to Thiel Fellows is the access to Peter Thiel's network. While I am neither a Thiel Fellow nor do I have access to the Thiel Network, I still have benefited from the existence of the Thiel Fellowship! It's not that I secretly have access to some rotating solar panels or take some life extension pill created by any of the 20 Under 20, but rather that I've carefully looked at the smaller achievements they've made and used it as inspiration. This inspiration I've gotten from these guys is the true value of the Thiel Fellowship as a "philanthropic" effort. I mean, there are very few voices in the public discourse sending the message that Millenials are not "lazy and entitled," but instead, are capable of both taking charge of their own learning and seriously working on life-improving projects in the process.

Some of these lessons I've learnt include having the courage to take on projects that have an extended time-line (looking towards the horizon) and going out and actively seeking the community you need to realize your project. In addition, I've learnt much from reading a book written by one fellow Dale J. Stephens about life-long learning. There are other small things I picked up like from some other fellows like: getting lots of whiteboards to study and brainstorm with, building a personal website, reading more academic journals and networking/aiding peers who want to build something.

Also, consider one distinguishing feature of the Thiel Fellowship application. For many programs, after decisions have been sent out, you're either in, not-in, or on the waiting-list. If you didn't make the cut, not much becomes of all the effort involved. With the fellowship, the application is less exclusive (even if you don't get it you might still get access to various opportunities), involves building up a lasting portfolio and still has the potential for smaller grants and opportunities. Taking all of this into account, it seems to be a success.

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.

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?)"

p-e-r-e-g-r-i-n-a-t-i-o-n, Pt. 1

With the burgeoning student debt and rising unemployment rates among recent graduates, Some millennials are facing a hard time where previous generations had a brighter outlook. On top of it all, a decrease in physical and emotional well-being has been documented among indebted Millenials. There is decreasing confidence in college career-centers as avenues for job placement, and college graduates are recognizing the need to compensate for skills they did not hone in their undergraduate years. Initiatives to make instructional material accessible to the public such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the edX platform have lessened incentives to attend college solely for educational purposes albeit increasing the probability that some students will achieve more than previously possible. For undergraduate students disillusioned by the student debt crisis and an unpredictable job market, entrepreneurship during college can provide viable alternatives to conventional career paths due to trends in the academic landscape favoring students with the ability to capitalize on its abundance of resources.

“Oh God, Mr Titus Hoyt, where you learn all these big words and them? You sure you spelling them right?”

Funny enough, I wrote that stuff for a college paper of all things. What I really wanted to say in the paper was that some students are better off going the entrepreneurial route, foregoing college altogether. The question you must be asking is, what could possibly give a student the audacity to write a college paper about the failure of college. It makes sense if you read "abundance of resources" as bread and circuses.

I first recognized this flaw before deciding on any schools. I recall overhearing my mom say to a friend on the phone with a sigh, "I don't think he wants to go to college." I guess the sentiments I was expressing at the time were like the overall sentiment Tyler was describing in that one Fight Club scene:

"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables... We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Maybe 16 year old me wasn't exactly "pissed off", but the fact I was slowly learning was that this magical place called college I had heard about all these years was just not going to give me the tools to succeed in the job market of the 21st century. Of course, it is debatable whether one should place emphasis on employment but that's for another post.

After getting my acceptance letters, I neglected my misgivings. I was going to be a Civil Engineering major. That was recession proof guaranteed, right? A Real Degree, they say. It turned out that I wouldn't be a guinea pig for the engineering degree experiment after all, since the curriculum proved to be an intellectual space in which the uninitiated flail around hopelessly trying to figure things out. Talk about filtering classes. I had been too late to the party. No amount of Amazon Prime documentaries or moments of awe in New York City or Dubai could inspire me to like engineering, at least the way my curriculum worked. This wasn't for me, it was tailored to those who knew they would be engineers for years prior to college, I thought. Couple that with the stereotype that engineers have uni-dimensional personalities and you get a whole heap of turn off. (Obviously, engineering is an occupation which is neither inherently cool nor inherently drab. It all depends on what you personally find interesting. I still think that through learning about a subject from a non-academic context first can help in developing appreciation, but more on that in another post.)

Cue Macroeconomics. I was always interested in economics, but could never fancy myself an economics scholar nor economic analyst. But oh did I enjoy studying economics, because when it comes to higher education economists will tell it to you straight, without resorting to some transcendental woo behind a college degree. Not many others would offer information that potentially jeopardizes their own industry or at least the positions their academic peers enjoy.

More on the economics of higher education and what I actually learned at college, in part 2...