Juventas Fugit –

I strongly believe that today, business school – even at the best institutions – is a complete waste of time and money for anyone with a bit of self-motivation. It’s not that the material is totally useless – though it has changed little in the past 100 years and is now largely available for free online –, but relative to the significant cost it’s just not worth it.  

Here are some of the common arguments for business school:

• It’s a great networking opportunity. Yes, if you attend a prestigious business school you will meet and bond with lots of other people interested in business who managed to get high scores on their entrance exams. Sweet! But there are plenty of other great ways to meet amazing people (who didn’t just pass a test and write a good essay). They include: joining a group / club or similar in an area that you’re interested in, going to local events, cold-emailing / tweeting / messaging people you admire to ask if you can take them out for a coffee, etc. I don’t believe the GMAT – or any standardized test for that matter – is at all a good indicator of intelligence or future probability of success. And it is definitely not an indicator that someone will be fun to hang out with.  A majority of the most incredible people I’ve met have come from just being involved with the startup community.
• I want to learn from the best professors. Read their books. Most of the professors at these schools – especially the best ones – have published their insights long ago. Ever heard of The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen? How about anything by Michael Porter? Google any famous b-school professor and you’ll find most everything you need. 
• I want to learn finance, excel, [fill in the blank]. Read a book, use Investopedia, or some other online resource. It’s much cheaper, you can go at your own pace, and most of the classes in business school will just have you read them anyway.
• The ‘case method’ teaches you about tons of businesses in a short period of time. I’m sorry, but reading and discussing a situation is no where close to actually learning about these situations, businesses, and industries, and how to make decisions in a constantly-shifting, pressure-filled environment.  The only way to do that is by actually doing it. If you want exposure to a lot of different business models or sectors, start or join a company that will give you that level of exposure. Also, do you really think that a former CEO, when being interviewed for a b-school case, is going to tell the interviewer the real reason he made the decision to sell the company was because he was cheating on his wife and he wanted to bury the returns offshore before the divorce?
• It’s a signal for my current / future employer. Why not try to accomplish something that actually proves you’re intelligent / competent / hard-working, etc?  If you’re in sales, show how amazing you are by selling!  If you’re an engineer or designer, make something beautiful and post it online for all to see.  Putting an ‘MBA’ on your resume is a poor replacement for accomplishment.
• I want to change jobs. This is the most acceptable reason in my mind, but do you really need to spend that kind of money for a certificate and a job fair? Why not spend the time learning about the space, attending local events you care about, and reaching out to people at companies you’re interested to grab a coffee and chat. If they’re not interested in you, try making yourself interesting by learning everything you can about the space and publishing your thoughts on what you’ve learned online (in a blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, etc).
• I want to learn from / work with bright people (my classmates). This, I respect. If you’re not already at a company where this is possible, consider changing jobs. There are many incredible startups hiring right now. If you think a masters program is the best / easiest way to do this though, consider doing a program where a) you’re learning real skills, and b) you’re collaborating with people very different from yourself, who really bring unique / new ideas to the table.  If I ever do another degree, it will probably be at a design school where I get to actually make stuff and learn things from others that I can’t simply by reading an article online or in conversation with a friend.
• It’s free (my company is paying for it / I have a scholarship). If you have a scholarship with no strings attached, great. But be sure to consider whether this is the best way to spend the next year or two of your life. If your company is paying, there are generally pretty significant strings attached (a commitment to work for them for the next few years).  Be careful about this.  It may sound great, but I think the gain is tiny relative to what you’re giving up in personal freedom.
• It’s fun! I can think of many better ways to spend that kind of money on a fun experience. Why not travel? Or pay someone incredible to apprentice under them for some period of time? 

To be clear, I’m not stating that business school is inherently evil, I just think people should be more aware of what they’re getting for the time and money spent. And I think there are definitely better ways to spend both.

There’s no reason why 30 students should sit in a classroom and be lectured on the same thing at the same time at the same pace when everyone learns differently. There’s no reason why the tens of thousands of algebra classes are each being reinvented right now across the country by teachers of variable skill levels. There’s no reason why college students should go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for courses and a diploma that may not take them where they want to go. And there’s no reason why teachers should waste time conveying materials that can easily be found online, when instead they could be inspiring students to be curious, discover themselves, and apply what they learn.

Despite how huge the education market is (estimated at $750b in the US alone), many VCs are afraid to invest in ed-tech because there was a lot of ‘road kill’ in the space after the dot-com bust. But much has changed in the past decade: the addressable market has expanded dramatically (10x more people are online, have 10x as fast connections, and are connected at least 10x as much), and we’ve recently seen a proliferation of internet-enabled mobile devices, data storage and processing innovations, and the spread of open source content that have brought about great efficiencies in content distribution, consumption, and production.

The importance of the Internet in changing education is more relevant than ever: we continue to move from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy at a rapid pace, yet our school system is still stuck in the Industrial Revolution. 

There are a great diversity of opportunities to innovate in the education realm. On the learning side, we need to create new ways to make it:

1. Fun. All physics lessons should be as fun as Angry Birds.
2. Ubiquitous. I should be able learn anywhere and everywhere, taking full courses on my iPhone or any other device.
3. Adaptive / Customized. Machines should learn how I learn and teach in a way that works best for me.  

And on the accreditation side we need to find ways to get people credit (/certified) for practical skills they enjoy in a much faster, cheaper, and more accessible way than is provided by the accreditation bodies who hold a monopoly on the education system today.

I’m not arguing that we should try to overhaul the current system and force schools to adopt new technology and ideas, but rather that if we create compelling learning and teaching products outside of the school system we can push change from the outside, in.

Some Inspiration:

• Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham on hacking education (especially the comments)
• Khan Academy (watch the videos!)
• Sir Ken Robinson & Jane McGonigal’s TED talks
• A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF)
• Turning Learning Right Side Up
• And many others (ask me!)

I hope this is obvious: forcing students to answer a series of questions under the clock is probably the stupidest way to test proficiency in a subject area. The ultimate goal of teaching is not fact memorization, it’s application. Exams under intense time pressure are useless: they are not at all a representation of the depth/breadth of a person’s knowledge in a subject area, nor how capable they are in applying it.  And worse, they encourage short-term memorization of information that becomes useless a month after the test. How much information do you remember from the last exam you took?

I admit that there are some professions where memorization-based, timed exams are more relevant – such as emergency medicine –, where the need to recall random facts under time pressure is actually a skill in and of itself. Though I would argue that even this skill will soon change as on-demand medical data is more easily accessible.

Thanks to the Internet and the relatively powerful mobile devices we now carry around, we have moved from having a ‘local’ to a ‘networked’ brain, where data is now able to be stored and accessed not just from our own head, but from society’s collective mind. These devices have literally become an extension of our brains: they help us navigate complex terrain, recall detailed information from years ago, and give us access to billions of pages of data covering almost every subject thinkable.

This model is obviously not without costs in terms of human independence, but we have always been social creatures, and this is simply the evolution of that capability to communicate and work together. Given this incredible new model then, how we use that information becomes so much more important. Exams should be structured to reflect this, and focus on data-rich application and creativity.

A month ago I bought a Kindle, and after a week of use I brought it back with me to Oxford, leaving my iPad in New York. It was a great decision.  For the longest time I had dismissed the Kindle as silly, calling it a ’segue technology’ – a device that would just be around until the iPad or some other multi-function tablet squashed it.  Who needs another media consumption device? I was totally wrong. 

What I had forgotten – living in the tech world and spending every free moment on email, Twitter, and blogs – was that reading a book is a very special and unique experience. It’s immersive, demanding complete attention, and involves opening your mind and letting yourself be transported to a different place, or a different way of thinking. This requires a device that disappears entirely as you start to use it: it has to be light enough that you forget you’re holding it, be large enough that you can immerse yourself in a page without it being unwieldy, and be easily readable in your favorite spaces – under a tree, on a beach, or in front of a fireplace.  

It also has to be free of distractions. The iPhone is great for short-form communication, skimming tweets, checking Facebook, listening to music, and watching online video on the go, among other things. These functions all happen to co-exist very nicely in one device: you’ll read a tweet with a link takes you to a web page with an interesting video that you then want to email to a friend or broadcast.

But reading a good book – and really absorbing the knowledge or story – is a totally different experience. If you find the right book and environment, it’s truly magical. It deserves a device focused solely on making that experience incredible.

The information age has fundamentally changed the job requirements of a teacher. A vast majority of the world’s basic knowledge is now ubiquitous – stored and easily accessible online from almost every computer and billions of mobile devices. Why, then, are we still forcing students to buy expensive textbooks and hiring teachers to lecture on subjects whose content is largely available from a quick Google search?

Before the 15th century, only a small subset of people on the planet had access to society’s accumulated knowledge. In the past 500 years, while the accessibility of knowledge has advanced dramatically, teaching methods have largely remained the same. Imagine the standard high school algebra class: the same set of materials is being taught in every school across the country by hundreds of thousands of teachers of varying competency. Yet a quick Google search reveals enormous amounts of free online materials on the subject that anyone can use to learn from right now on their own. So why do we still employ thousands of teachers to convey those exact same materials to students?

Rather than have restless students sit in a lecture and be instructed on a subject, we should teach them how to discover the subject themselves, and let them be free to explore. Teachers (sherpas?) should point students towards online resources like Khan Academy, and students should be left to explore different areas that interest them on their own with some basic guidance as to the minimum required competency of the subject they must achieve.  The teacher would act more as a mentor and guide, working with individual students on conceptual issues that arise in their learning, and ensuring they find the best resources on the subject along the way.

I hated school – and was a terrible student throughout most of it –, yet I love to learn. This doesn’t make sense. Teachers should not teach – they should inspire their students to learn, instilling curiosity and holding their hand through the discovery process.

While angel investors and early-stage venture capitalists invest pre-revenue or sometimes even pre-product, university admissions officers are the true early-stage investors: they invest pre-idea! When you think about it, it’s actually striking how similar admissions officers are to VCs: they invest in people, they (the university) hope for large returns in the future (by way of donations), it’s an expensive investment on both sides, and a stamp of approval and access to the network of a cream of the crop ‘investor’ is highly valuable.

As much as I bash universities for not providing the right educational experience for students and allowing enough room for experimentation – most of my learning definitely happened outside of the classroom –, there is no denying that my Harvard diploma has opened doors that would have been a lot harder to maneuver into without. That stamp of approval – similar to an investment from Kleiner or Sequoia – has made it a lot easier for people to have faith in me at a young age.  And of course, my peer-group at the universities I’ve attended has also been a huge factor in my success. 

Are universities paying enough attention to who they hire as admissions officers? Probably not: it’s not exactly the most prestigious and sought-after employment position, and I’m sure it does not pay anywhere near what a venture firm pays. As a result, the people they hire are not anything like the world-changing rock stars they should aspire to admit. A similar argument can, should, and has been made for teachers, but this seems like a much easier issue for universities to fix - an issue that directly affects their top line.

When I say ‘fix,’ I mean universities should hire admissions offers good enough to identify passion, creativity, tenacity, and a big vision, without simply relying on easily-gamed, non-representative indicators like GPAs, standardized test scores, club memberships, and application essays. Wake up, Harvard - you’re hiring poor investors and it’s going to hurt when you’re the last one in the room to figure that out.

I was exploring the Brooklyn Botanic Garden two weeks ago, thinking about how nice it would be return with my Kindle for some grassy reading, when it dawned on me that we now have the opportunity to totally rethink how we use libraries, and what a ‘library’ actually is.

Libraries haven’t changed much since the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt - they still exist as physical spaces crammed with shelves of books that bring people together to devour knowledge. This model has worked pretty well for the past few thousand years (except perhaps for the fact that Julius Caesar accidentally burned that one down), but today, thanks to the digital world and mobile internet, knowledge has been detached from paper and can be called upon anywhere.

This paradigm shift of ‘knowledge in the cloud’ presents the opportunity for us to rethink how we use libraries, and public space in general.  I propose the following:

1. Instead of local and federal governments spending money acquiring new books, they begin to shift libraries onto e-readers, striking a deal with publishers to grant those within the library walls unlimited access to their entire catalog of books (whether the person is on their own device or a library-owned one). Access rights could be managed through the library Wi-Fi network.
2. Governments then use these ‘unlimited reading licenses’ purchased from publishers to spread open reading access to other public spaces as well, perhaps parks and public transportation, creating a whole new way to experience public space.

In this scheme everyone wins: governments would spend less on maintenance and incent the use of public space, publishers could entice people to buy more books by allowing them to ‘sample’ it in libraries, and everyone would have access to vastly more knowledge than any single library could ever hold.

There are massive opportunities here beyond what I’ve outlined, to retool libraries into spaces that can also accommodate other cultural experiences – perhaps facilitating the display of art and music – while at the same time keeping alive the best part of the library experience: social learning.