In any other category of business, to have such high costs and such an astoundingly poor success rate would quickly lead to mass closures. Instead the higher education industry insists it is cost-effective and helpful for students even as all evidence points to the contrary. As Charles HughSmith notes, tertiary education functions in an identical fashion to any other cartel: colleges maintain a monopoly on accreditation.71 There is no accountability for a poor product because you cannot buy it anywhere else.
And it is a product. A university can only issue a credential that is seen as a proxy for knowledge. Its relationship to any underlying knowledge is tenuous and its stamp of authenticity is largely redundant in a post-LinkedIn world.
Google, for instance, no longer asks job applicants for GPAs or academic transcripts because they do not predict anything. There is no measurable correlation between success in college exams and success later in life. When it comes to successful people who have been through the college system, Taleb refers to this as “teaching birds how to fly.” 72 Imagine a business professor standing up in front of an auditorium, teaching a room full of birds about flight.
At the end of his lecture he flings open the doors and all his students fly out. He thinks he has taught them about flying, but they were already birds.
If you are from a very wealthy family then, by all means, go to an elite college and milk it for network effects. Given that you are reading this particular book, it is unlikely that is the case, so think about the following. What we have with the tertiary education sector is a misunderstanding of scarcity. College degrees used to be scarce when in-person tuition and the oral transmission of knowledge was required. There were fewer people with degrees than there were jobs that required them. Today the opposite is true. Fewer jobs, more degrees than needed. This leads to degree inflation, which compounds the student debt burden and makes the entire system appear more essential. Where once a job required only a high school education, now it requires a bachelor’s degree. Jobs previously requiring a bachelor’s degree now insist on a master’s degree, and so on. Thus the cartel that caused the problem also appears as its seeming solution.
Your vast amount of student debt didn’t get you the job you want? Then come back and have some more debt! Nice work if you can get it.
What’s scarce today is real-world experience or even, it turns out, real-world preparedness. The number of students exiting the college system with poor literacy skills is amazing, to say nothing of those entering it. Should you wish to pursue interests that require specific degrees, then a strategy that is equally radical to the above housing suggestion is required.
If you are not from a rich family, then do not do the next best thing. Do the opposite thing. Make your college experience as cheap as possible. An online degree is fine if it is just a bullet point on a résumé otherwise filled with successful projects and proof of capability. People will tell you
education is getting expensive. Education has never been cheaper or more readily available in human history;
a college degree has never been more expensive.
Be employed or minimise your debt as much as possible. Graduating with too much debt severely affects your optionality.
If you are paying all that money, you should use the experience as an excuse to launch a bunch of projects. Upon graduation, you must be able to prove your experience. Is the dry cleaner still using the logo you designed? Is the soup kitchen still using the logistics plan you built for them?
Internships, properly used, deserve their own bullet point. Much ink has been spilled decrying them as zero-cost labour and white privilege. They are probably both of those things. They are also advantageous if used correctly. In fact, according to a large-scale résumé study by University of Wisconsin economist John M. Nunley, having a business degree listed on a résumé did not improve the chances of getting a call for an interview at all but listing interning experience improved the chances by 14 percent.73 If you can meet the devil at the crossroads, you can choke down your dignity for a spot of interning.
Use your time at college to network. Wealthy families come with built-in networks. The rest of us have to build them ourselves. If you are a
wallflower, too bad. Get better at it. That is what alcohol is for.
Now that I have gotten that off the chest, let us talk about learning rather than simply college. Given that I did a film degree that did not even have exams on the other side of the world from where I currently live, let me say that I regret almost every minute of it. The few minutes I do not regret are when I interned at Fox Studios and learned how to do audio post-production by listening to Christopher Lloyd say the same half a line over and over again until I found the correct one. (It had been mislabelled during production.) Or it was when I shot a documentary about a sunken city and had to work out how to convince two separate kings and one government minister to allow me access to the sites.
Projects and continual learning are the stakes plunged into the ground that demarcate your area of expertise. I have not been asked about my university experience in almost fifteen years. In the meantime I have presented global media and content strategy all over Europe and been acquired by a publicly listed American media company. My degree probably taught me nothing. My experience on the documentary helps me every day.
This book emerged from the success—such as it is—of my blog. And the blog emerged from being made redundant from Discovery Channel. I figured it would be good to improve my understanding of web publishing and I had some time on my hands. Should I do a course or should I just do it? Continual learning is not the process of accruing a growing pile of certificates in project management and MS Office proficiency and so on—although they can help. Continual learning arises when you refuse to let circumstances or other people’s opinions of you stand in your way. Like being lucky, it lives entirely in a singular mindset: do not worry about being good at something. Focus instead on getting better at it.
The rest is upside.