times more, over their lifetime, than people with just high school
degrees.
There are precious few places in the world and times in our life
when we are put in the simultaneous presence of eager and bright
young minds, brilliant thinkers, and the luxury of time to mature and
generally ponder the opportunities set forth by the universe.
So, go to college—you may even learn something. But even if you
don’t, a brand-name college on your forehead will be your greatest
asset until you have assets, and it will never stop opening doors. HR
departments, graduate program admissions committees, and even
potential mates are busy people with lots of options. We all need
filtering mechanisms and simple rules of thumb to wade through our
choices, and it’s just too easy to think “Yale = smart; U. of Nowhere =
not as smart.” And in a digital age, smart is sexy.
No one likes to admit it, but the United States has a caste system:
it’s called college. At the height of the Great Recession, unemployment
among college grads was less than 5 percent, while those with only
high school diplomas suffered unemployment rates above 15 percent.
And your degree of success is stratified based on the college you
attend. The kids who get into the top twenty schools are fine. They can
pay off their student debt. Meanwhile, everybody else incurs the same
level of student debt, yet faces nowhere near the same opportunities
for an ROI on that debt.
The cost of college has skyrocketed in recent years, at a rate of 197
percent vs. the 1.37 percent inflation rate.^1 ,^2 Education is ripe for
disruption. There’s a commonly believed fallacy right now that
technology companies, specifically VC-backed technology education
companies, are going to disrupt education. That’s bullshit. Instead,
Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford are the favorites to disrupt
education when they fall under heavy and sustained government
pressure over the irrational and immoral hoarding of their mammoth
endowments. Harvard claims it could have doubled the size of its
freshman class last year with no sacrifice to its educational quality.
Good. Do it. More students, paying no tuition, at the best schools will
disrupt the system, not Massive Open Online Campuses (MOOCs) at
mediocre colleges. (See Apple chapter: hope they do it.)