The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [128]
“What’s very wrong about that metaphor is that companies themselves are not unitary entities. They’re complex entities that are made up of many different people, and getting them to work together is a huge part of being successful in business.
“That’s not the kind of thing you learn in school—how you work together with people on a project for years at a time. Maybe you do it for a short homework assignment. It’s typically not a very functional thing, in an academic context, and people don’t work as hard in such things, because they know it’s kind of a joke. Group projects tend to be not as serious, and people don’t take them as seriously. Well, doing many things that are important in the world is like a group project, but it’s actually very serious. That’s outside of the standard, hypercompetitive individualistic academic paradigm.”
Thiel also sees our current education system as encouraging a kind of conformity that is anathema to innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation. “There’s a degree to which great companies are somewhat contrarian. You have something you’re very passionate about, which other people don’t necessarily agree with. If you’re trying to do something new, that’s never been done before—if you’re going from 0 to 1 instead of from 1 to N, if you’re the first person who’s thinking about this, who’s working on this project—it will typically not be seen as respectable, reasonable, sane, by everybody else.
“There’s something about the education system that is heavily geared toward the sane and the respectable, and away from the first and onetime, and the unique. It’s the difference between substance and status. Status comes from a well-defined game that people play, and the status rules are pretty well defined. Get this credential, get this job, do this, this, and that, and you’ll have status—it’s this well-defined status hierarchy.
“Whereas in things that are substantive, something that makes a difference to people’s lives, the meaning doesn’t just come from this competitive social dynamic. At its best, education is substantive. At its worst, it’s a pure status dynamic. An awful lot of formal education has become extremely status oriented. I was speaking to people who were going to business school a few months ago. I asked them, in a very friendly, neutral way, ‘How many of you are doing this because it’s a credential, and how many of you are doing this for the learning?’ It was basically, everyone, 100 percent credential, only.
“There’s something weird about a system where it’s all credentials, and everybody knows it’s credentials, and it’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz who’s hiding behind the curtain. I think formal education has become very status oriented, and very far substantively from what people are interested in accomplishing in their lives and the world. And it’s gotten worse as our society has become more tracked.
“You have parents sending their kids through age eighteen to piano lessons, and sports, and you do this, and this, and that, and tutoring for the SATs. At its best, education would be much more creative, and much more autodidactic: ‘I’m passionate about this area, so I’m going to learn about it intensely.’ At their best, companies are also autodidactic. You could envision formal education that’s very compatible with entrepreneurship, but that’s not where we are as a society, for all sorts of historical reasons.
“The costs of college have been going up extremely quickly, and it’s taking more and more years to pay that investment back. And that’s assuming you want to do the things for which the credential really helps.
“To me, it’s highly debatable whether college is an investment decision or a consumption decision. I think for most majors aside from premed, engineering, and the hard sciences, college can best be thought of as a consumption decision. It’s like a four-year party. [Note: Actually, a five-year party,