It Ain't Easy Being Upwardly Mobile and Poor

As you may recall, I grew up poor and ended up going to college.  Surely, that’s success, right?  My investment in education and motivation behind this blog stem from the belief that by writing about these issues we can craft a better system that ensures that more people go from poor to more.  I have to say, though, that I read a rather disappointing article in Jezebel that highlights a Cornell study.  The study shows  that poor people who go to college are less likely to marry than rich people who go to college or poor people who don't get advanced degrees.  Especially guys (oh boy...is it stuffy in here or is that just my college degree laughing at me?).  This post will be less study-based and a bit more of a personal reflection on some of the largely unconsidered barriers to poor people succeeding.  It is no small task providing the ideal system that promotes equitable advancement through education, but even if you did that, it is no guarantee that people will (or perhaps should) jump to take advantage of it. 

There are a lot of impediments to a poor person that make you really give pause as you move up the educational ladder.  One of the big ones is that a lot of the information you learn has no relation to your background.  As my European History teacher said, “this class is the story of DWG” (dead white guys).  One of my favorite poems "Prière d'un petit enfant nègre" (Prayer of a little black boy) from Haiti provides the thoughts of a young Haitian boy who laments going to the French schools that talk about history from places he will never know and that take him from walking under the mangroves with his dad.  If you are not wealthy and white, it is really hard to connect.  It’s not that you can’t relate to or learn from people that are unlike you, but when everyone you learn about is remarkably similar to each other but completely different from you…well, it sends a signal.  It says that history doesn’t remember your kind.  School reinforcing your smallness while you are trying to escape it is not the greatest encouragement that you are going to go far.

Even if you, as I and many others have, get past your historical absence from textbooks, you then have to deal with a feeling of extreme guilt.  Every time you mess up, it is wasting all the sacrifice of your family.  When I went to Stanford, I was suddenly in an upper-middle class environment that I wasn’t paying for.  Even as I lived relatively frugally, I’d get to go on ridiculous things like ski trips and wine tasting that I wasn’t paying for.  It is hard to not feel guilty when you are skiing in Tahoe (and trying not to mow down defter six year olds on the slopes) while your single mom is heading to work at the crack of dawn to make ends meet.  Guilt is a powerful impediment to enjoying your success and to even viewing it as success.

There is also the intense separation of points of views that creates big tension between your past and future relationships.  As you get more educated, people start to resent you for being condescending or “thinking you are better.”  It is funny because they encourage you to get an education, but once you try to encourage them, it sounds like meddling or judgment.  To have friends or relatives think you are some out-of-touch, paternalistic know-it-all is a strong disincentive.  In minority communities, this can manifest itself as “being too white.” Meanwhile, you start to resent them for their stubbornness, for refusing to acknowledge that studies have shown that “x” will make their lives so much better.  In this, you and the person who once encouraged you both start to question the wisdom behind upward mobility.

The separation is not just the tension of your differing educational levels, but also of your changing interests.  Typically, you are educated outside of your community if you are an upwardly-mobile poor person (my high school was 12 miles from home in Chicago, my grammar school about 6).  My education got me excited about languages and foreign countries, and conscientious travel is not all that big where I come from.  I really care about buying local.  My mom and I have constant spats about it because she’s very right when she says, “It’s nice that you can afford to buy at small places, but I need to go to Target.”  Likewise, I’m right when I say, “Yes, but places like Walmart are shown to kill jobs in Chicago and you are hurting people just like you.”  It’s an awful catch-22, and it’s an impediment.  What the hell do you talk about at Thanksgiving that won’t provoke a fight?  I thought that was the job of a drunk uncle, anyway.

It is also really hard when people you knew can’t understand what you are doing with your life.  You are an “international something or other” major who wrote a very long paper on “something to do with Arabs.” “Yes, I did write my honors thesis in International Relations on Iraqi refugees.”  “Right, and what is this diplomat thing again? I know you’ve told me, but I can’t remember.”  Then try explaining to people “I work on promoting the labor provisions of free trade agreements.” (blank stares abound).  The thing is that people suspect you are successful, but all the people you really want to impress can’t understand well enough to be fully proud because they get what you’ve accomplished.  It's even worse because they expect you to be knowledgeable about EVERYTHING, and you suddenly get questions like "The doctor says I should get a biopsy, but I don't know...what do you think?"   Try responding, "Ask me about the Democratic Peace Theory, not medicine."

What’s worse is that in the end, you are changed but you don’t fit into your new life so well either.  Your middle class friends talk uninformedly about how to help the poor—your people, what YOU yourself once were—or what poor people need.  People laugh at you when you say that you were on welfare as a kid and were attacked by gangs on the way to school because “what? You went to Stanford, give me a break!”  Worst of all is that gnawing feeling that you’ve changed.  You know you can’t go back, but you can’t fully buy into your new class.  You will buy expensive coffee and think with disgust, “damn, when did I become such a bougie tool?” And when you don’t fit in, that means it is harder to find someone to relate to where you are coming from or where you are heading to, and that is why the Jezebel article notes the upwardly-mobile poor have such a hard time marrying.  

So, to be poor and then successful, you need to overcome leaving your neighborhood, inviting a widening gap between you and everyone you knew, learning new things that you can’t use to help those who once encouraged you, feeling perpetually out of place, and constantly questioning yourself.  Put that way, it doesn’t feel like success.  Plus, if it is success, then why do those who encouraged you have such a hard time with so much of it?   If you are just changing to fit society’s model of success, are you not just a pawn like all the other poor people who feel they lack any control in their government or society?  

These questions don’t get raised in policy circles because poor people rarely get that entry and because these are frankly hard emotions to just put out there.  Class makes people very uncomfortable, so they also don’t often want to hear these kinds of things.  Worse yet, because you escaped and so many others did not, you may not be the best voice for those other poor…maybe you too are different?  

So the next time you offer a voucher to a parent who doesn’t take it, the next time you hear about high drop out rates in charter schools with great results, kids who reject scholarships to stay close to home or not go to college…maybe you’ll understand why.  Maybe you will also get why the battle to improve our education system is not just logistical, political, and systemic…it’s also psychological.

Because Every Parent Wants a Standardized Child

Testing can be a very useful tool to help students cement learning and help teachers to better design their lessons. Testing, in its ideal form, is a form of reinforcement, which is a critical component of learning something. When I posted on teaching foreign languages, I noted that tests are a great way for students to have to use the skills they have been recently taught, apply them, and commit them to memory.

Just like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, however, tests can also be misused and have deleterious effects. Tests can be used only to gauge and not to reinforce learning. Tests can be poorly designed to cover what students have learned. Tests can be designed so that the student doesn’t need to know the material to do well, but merely needs to know test-taking strategies. Tests can be timed in a way that does not reinforce learning. Tests can be designed to trick, rather than to teach. Tests can be designed in ways that disadvantage certain segments of society (while many debate whether there is an ethnic bias of tests and there are certainly exogenous factors, it is worth noting that Asians consistently do better on SAT math, whites consistently do better on reading/writing, and those with an A- or higher high school GPA do better on tests in general, suggesting some kind of bias). When a test is standardized and administered from afar at an arbitrary time, the likelihood is that the more negative side of testing emerges.

This is a real shame because under President Bush’s signature education bill “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), standardized testing became a mandatory component of our education system. Now, this is not just problematic because it increases the likelihood of the dark side of testing. It is worse because it appears that the bill is largely a boon to giant multinational corporations that make a fortune, but have very little accountability for the tests that determine whether your son or daughter—or your child’s school—is a failure. According to a very comprehensive article by Barbara Miner at the onset of NCLB, required testing could cost $2-6 billion a year in direct costs and up to 15 times that amount if you factor in wasted class time and test preparation. Worse yet, not all the NCLB-required testing was funded by the federal government. Because all multiple choice tests cost about $1 to grade while those including essays can go up to about $7, State and District Departments of Education may have an incentive to administer the least useful kinds of tests when they are strapped for cash (as they have been for quite some time).

When you hear the names of the companies that administer these tests, your blood should run cold: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Riverside and Harcourt. Now, it is slightly odd that something that is “standardized” is administered by several competitors nationwide and that the type of test can vary from all multiple choice to a heavier focus on short answers and essays. Aside from having very deep connections to the Bush family and to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, these companies also may sound familiar to anyone who has ever used a textbook or taken a college entrance exam. Why does this make my blood run cold? A multinational company with insider political clout could decide what materials are taught in your child’s class, what metric their worth as a student is evaluated along, and what college they get into. If your child isn’t a good test taker or isn’t a strong English speaker (but is otherwise quite brilliant), your child could be doomed from the get-go, as no part of their career is untouched by a major testing company or its parent corporation.

Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education and prominent voice in the Education Sector, went from supporting to opposing NCLB as she saw the increased testing used not to improve faltering schools, but to simply shut them down. The majority of schools shut down were in low-income, minority, and non-English speaking communities. Rather than accept that poverty and achievement are deeply connected, these policies further entrench the achievement gap between wealthier and poorer children. Further, they close schools in these neighborhoods, reducing the sense of community that was once present and the connections between parent, child, teacher, and school. And while I noted the link between two Republicans—Bush and Romney—to these testing conglomerates, Ravitch makes the very good point of noting that Obama’s “Race to the Top” program very much continues in the same pro-privatization and –testing vein as Bush’s policies (and to be fair, Obama does have a responsibility to enforce NCLB until it is revamped by Congress).

As I mentioned in my post on charters, unions are often the scapegoat for failing schools. The logic goes that intransigent teachers who are lazy and inept band together to keep failing their students while extracting higher and higher pay and benefits. In my home state, Illinois, for example, the majority of education costs are now flowing into paying pensions. This simplistic line of reasoning that selfish, unionized teachers are failing our kids and taxing the system ties everything into a nice neat bow and makes you just want to move all children into non-unionized charters with their non-union Teach for America staff, right? WRONG. Turns out, the state with the highest test scores is Massachusetts which is 100% unionized. The country with the highest test scores is Finland, which is also 100% unionized and administers only one standardized test towards the end of high school with a random sampling taking the internationally administered PISA test. (And the reason why pensions are such a large part of education spending in IL is largely because corrupt politicians have not been paying into pension funds for years, compounding the debt to rather poorly paid teachers.)

Washington Post Education Blogger Valerie Strauss notes that there are some unfortunately misguided assumptions behind standardized testing in theory:

• A sample of material that arbitrarily ends up on a 45-question test (especially multiple choice) can assess the quality and amount of what a child is learning.
• High test scores of students at any particular school prove that there is high student achievement and quality teaching at the institution.
• Teachers are motivated to improve by punishments or rewards based on test scores.
• Test scores better reflect student learning than any other form of assessment.
• High enough stakes to a test motivate people to worker harder to meet the challenge.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Koretz notes, test scores “usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.” Further, Gerald Bracey has made a pretty compelling list of things that a standardized test cannot measure and that a teacher that teaches to a test may never instill in his or her students, which includes “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity. “ I find that I use most of these characteristics far more at work, on this blog, and in life than I do my ability to define an archaic word or to select a poor approximation of the “main idea” of a boring short story.

On a more personal and anecdotal level, I would note a few things about my standardized testing abilities:

• As I got older and learned to think more critically, I went from being amazing at Standardized Tests to being above average, but not particularly stellar. At the same time, I had learned how to speak five languages.
• I retook my SAT and got a 150 point boost by using testing preparation booklets to learn strategies, rather than actual knowledge. Now, how can a test score vary by so much in a couple of months and be considered reliable as an assessment of what I know?
  
• My teachers and I never received any meaningful feedback from a standardized test that allowed us to improve my learning or better identify how I learn.
• I took my GRE after spending 9 months in three different countries speaking Italian, then Spanish, then Arabic and did way better in math than in reading/writing, even though I am not a big fan of math and have much more experience and instruction in reading and writing related courses. My grades were always much stronger in English and Social Studies than in Math or Science.
• As someone who is rather fidgety, every day-long test I took was maddening and made me want to jump out of my skin.

Beyond my personal experiences with tests, an Education Week article written by Alfie Kohn and published in September 2000 (pre-Bush, pre-NCLB) warned of the rise of testing with some rather disconcerting facts:

1. About 89 percent of differences in state testing scores were statistically found to be tied to parents’ educational background, number of parents living at home, type of community, and poverty), which have nothing to do with instruction and everything to do with the need to address systemic inequalities that affect students before they enter the education system and when they leave school each and every day.
2. Standardized tests measure superficial thinking.
3. Most standardized tests were designed not to test learning, but to rank students and separate them, with some tests containing as many as half of their questions designed so that most people couldn’t answer correctly.
4. Time spent to prepare students for and then administer tests comes from other instruction (and I’d add that as testing rises, our system is stagnating and doing worse, so let’s think for a moment).
5. Many good teachers, seeing this negative trajectory, are leaving a system that they find increasingly poisonous and harmful to children.
   
6. Most specialists even in 2000 agreed that children should not be tested at too young an age.
7. Our children are being tested more than any other time in history and more than anywhere else in the world.

Some of these concerns will prompt California Governor Jerry Brown to make a laudable call for less class time wasted on standardized testing today, according to the Sacramento Bee. Brown also noted that testing tends to cause instructors and schools to shift their focus to what is being tested, which is usually limited to Math and English, but little else. Even if good teachers manage to avoid "teaching to the test," most students, taught to be validated by grades and scores and eager to do well, will take the hint and shift the focus of their studies. Even as a smart kid who loved to learn, I would take to heart the words "you won't be tested on this."

We need to eliminate nearly all of these tests. We need to ensure accountability for the ones that we keep. We need to ensure that the tests are used to reinforce learning and support struggling schools, not to rank children, punish teachers for teaching the most underprivileged, and close schools in ways that disproportionately affect minority and low-income communities. And we need to decide as a society that we are not going to accept poverty as an excuse for failure but that we are actually going to make meaningful changes that mitigate the effects of poverty rather than bullying teachers into being responsible for a child’s background and upbringing.

At the end of the day, real life rarely has one clear, obvious answer…so should our kids be molded and assessed by an instrument that does?

Act on it!

1. Teach kids some of the greater values of empathy, critical thinking, and creativity at any chance you get, be it through parenting or volunteering to mentor a child to supplement for the decreasing amount of classtime dedicated to such values.
2. Write your Congressmen (federal and state) and tell them what you feel about standardized tests, what you think can be done to improve student assessment, and demanding that testing companies be more accountable and student-oriented.

Speak out!

What is your experience with standardized testing? What are the pros and cons that you see with the use of testing nowadays?

What are some better ways to assess children’s learning and teachers’ or schools’ performance? Should these be jointly assessed?

Easing the College Debt Bubble Before It Pops

In what was the first of several posts in my "Is College Worth It?" Series, I questioned whether college should be the default destination for all high school graduates. One of the big reasons for asking the question, I noted, is the amount of debt students are accruing--and increasingly unable to pay. Everyone remembers how the economy almost collapses when bubbles have burst in the past, right? Remember how all that bad debt to homeowners to buy houses way out of their price range resulted in the collapse of the housing market? Well, the next bubble may have been identified, and it is student debt.


The Problem

Student debt is often called "good debt." It is an investment in yourself, the story goes, because you will make more and pay back that money no sweat with the swank job you land out of college. College also cost a lot less. Now, college prices are increasing astronomically. The College Board reports (pdf) that over the past decade the tuition for public four year colleges has increased by 54 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. For private universities, tuition increased by 33 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a huge increase, especially when we already have seen that nearly a third of college graduates are not improving in any higher-level thinking skills. With high unemployment and increased credentialing, many people are not getting those good jobs they were promised. Without good jobs and with greater amounts of debt, more and more people are unable to pay. Even those who drop out are often saddled with debt (69% of college drop outs have debt according to the Economist).

When people cannot pay, suddenly good debt becomes bad debt, and increasing amounts of bad debts create bubbles. As the Huffington Post reported, this year the amount of student loan debt eclipsed the amount of credit card debt. Yikes, maybe dropping you Visa on some Gucci is the new "good debt." Either way, over 10 million American students hold debt amounting to at least $750 billion dollars with Sallie Mae alone (wasn't that the amount of one of those bailouts?) and perhaps as much as $1 trillion if you include private loans. The average student graduating in 2010 owed about $25,000. Without jobs, the amount of students that could not pay and defaulted on their loans increased from seven to nine percent last year.


Just How Enslaved Will You Be?

Let's do some brief calculations using the FinAid! loan debt calculator:

• If you have the average amount of debt ($25,000) after college and you get a "reasonable" interest rate of 6.8%, you will need to pay $290 a month for ten years and need roughly $35,000 in annual income. At the end of the day, you will have paid almost 40% more for your college education ($35,000) than you were told college would cost.


• If you go to a private university, and borrow $25000 per year at the same interest rate, you will be paying $1,150 per month for ten years and will need to earn about $92,000 per year after graduating. At the end of it all, your degree will have cost you $38,000 extra in interest.

With so many students affected and saddled into debt for so long (student loan debt is one of the few kinds of debts that you can never get rid of, interestingly enough), something needs to change. Parents and students need to stop taking it for granted that college will always be worth it and that they will be able to pay off whatever debt they take on. Schools and banks need to do a better job of both reigning in tuition and fees and making sure that the consequences of taking on debt are clear to borrowers. The federal government needs a better managed system. I am a bureaucrat, and I work with many talented colleagues. They are not so talented at managing loans, as evidenced by my having to call the Department of Education FOUR times to try to figure out how to consolidate my loan. The fourth call was me telling some clueless Department of Education sap how to go about doing their job, and that is scary.


What can be done?

One of the big failures I see with the Occupy Movements is that they have not moved beyond identifying the above problem and pushing for concrete policy changes. So, I would like to propose some things that will help ease this bubble at the grassroots level, in the banks, and in the government.
At the grassroots

1. Students need to understand the burden college will represent for at least ten years out of school. HS counselors should be trained and required to dispassionately walk through how much going to a school will cost, how long it will take to repay that amount, how much income one will have to earn to repay, etc.


2. Parents and students might read more of the works of James Altucher and
   decide whether or not there is a more cost effective way to learn than college
   that will not saddle them with so much debt (particularly in the case of
   students who are not terribly inspired to go to college).


3. Start saving money early for your child (or self) and consider delaying college until you have a sizeable savings. If you save just $500 a year from your child's birth,
   the calculations I did above change dramatically. Someone with the average
   amount of debt now only owes $16,000 and pays only $190 a month. Someone
   with 100,000 in debt will pay a large, but more manageable $1047
   monthly.


4. Encourage your child to pay some money while in school to reduce the
   amount of principle.
   

In the banks

1. Don't allow banks to capitalize interest until 6 to 12 months after graduation (when interest capitalizes, it becomes part of the principal, meaning you are going to pay interest on your interest!).


2. Cap interest rates at a certain percent (I would say 5%), and let them float if the national borrowing rate is below that amount (but not above). I pay a much higher rate (7.3%) to borrow than banks pay to borrow money right now. That is ridiculous given that education is a public good.


3. Small banks are more responsible lenders and loans should be federally backed and administered through them. They are likely to be more honest and communicative and will want to help the student to pay back the debt. Further, it distributes the debt so that it doesn't hit any one single lender and cause a huge collapse.


4. Offer rate incentives for responsible payers, or consider offering perks to those who save and take out a loan or to those who take out a loan and continue banking with your institution.

In the Government:

1. The federal government should guarantee, but not service loans. They have proven time and again that most of them are simply not capable. It's not their fault either: you are asking bureaucrats to be bankers. You might as well have them managing oil rigs or building bridges. Regulating to ensure equal access to credit for college aspirants is more appropriate than providing the loan.


2. Make student loan debt not-for-profit: if the federal government makes far more than the ticket price of the degree plus inflation, there is an issue. The government already reaps the benefits of lower likelihood to commit a crime and a higher likelihood to have a job. Georgetown's Center for Workforce Development found that kids with graduate degrees have only a 3% unemployment rate.


3. Create a program that allows parents and children to deduct savings for college from their pre-tax income. If the tax payer is footing the bill either way, it might as well be for actual skills development instead of paying interest.


4. Build stronger alternative schooling that feeds directly into high school (especially vocational programs) so that kids have a viable option if they choose not to go to college.
   Increase awareness of grant programs early in high school to avoid saddling people with debt. EdWeek blogger Caralie Adams wrote a piece on how many parents do not know about federal grant programs, based on a report from the College Board that showed that poorer, less educated, and Latino parents were all far less likely to know about these opportunities. Fewer than half of parents knew the cost of a college education in-state.


5. Promote policies that reduce or eliminate debt with much more certainty for key sectors. For example, teaching would be impossible for me right now given teachers' salaries and my own debt. But, if I was allowed to pay at an income-based rate and had my interest capped, I could enter many fields that would allow me to invest more in society.


6. Deny funding to and publicly censure colleges that raise their rates unjustifiably. If a college is not doing better at producing employment, post-grad degrees, or enhancing students' skills, they should not be allowed to increase tuition. This is particularly true for schools that do not incurr higher expenses directly related to student learning or in schools that increase class sizes (without staff increases), widely slice majors, or defund research or volunteer opportunities for their students.

Are Universities Universally Desirable?

All children should go to college, right? You get paid way more and you are guaranteed a job, so it’s a no-brainer. When I look at friends from my Master’s program waiting tables or scrambling to find an internship after paying $75,000 at a “good school," I have to wonder. If our kids often get a subpar basic education and no support to have a goal they pursue in their educational career, why the hell would we send them to college?

So much of what I got out of college and grad school came from learning languages, traveling, working, and volunteering (not from my classes). So much of my love for learning exploded out of me after graduating (this blog is a great example). I look at my job, which is related to my masters, and I realize that I was clearly able to do this job without the “required” masters degree (I started at the same time as grad school and was able to do the same things when I started that I do now). I have to ask, what was the value?

I’ve been asking this of many friends applying to advanced degree programs, much to their chagrin. It is so ingrained that they have never gotten the “well, are you sure you need a Masters?” conversation before. I’m not trying to dissuade them, but to help them focus on what they really want and the best way to get there. Looking at my student loans, I ask the question at least once a month. You'd be surprised to hear how many aimless folks are pouring into grad schools "because the economy is bad, and hopefully it will be better when I get out." Yikes! In this post, I will attempt to dispose of the assumption that college/grad school is desirable for all students.

An appalling study released in January 2011 revealed that a large chunk of students are not learning in college, and many barely study. Apparently, 36% percent of college students make no improvement in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing skills during four years of college (45% of students learn nothing during the first two years of college, which is depressing for those getting 2-year associates degrees or dropping out early with debt but no degree). Much of this probably has to do with students averaging less than 20% of their time in class, studying, or doing homework compared to the over 50% they spend on socializing. Now, I am the first to note how important social development is in college, but you are paying oodles of cash to develop intellectually and cognitively not to shoot the breeze with others who are equally excited to be moving out of years of agonizing puberty.

This raises questions about the constant push to increase the amount of students going to and graduating from college. According to the Obama Website, “President Obama has doubled our investment in scholarships and financial aid so that students from working- and middle-class families can access and complete the college education they need to get the good jobs of the future” (emphasis his, not mine). In fact, policies like these have worked with college enrollment surging from 8.5 million in 1970 to over 20 million in 2009. It is good that Obama is focusing on funding elements of education that do not increase debt for students, while reducing the maximum loan payments in time and amount paid.

That said, Obama’s goal and the status quo it now represents may be quite faulty. Should everyone go to college? I would argue that the answer is no. Should everyone have the opportunity to, most definitely. I think it is really sad, however, that more and more jobs that once required no degree now require a BA, and MA, or a Ph.D. I got my Masters while working at the Department of Labor, and I can honestly say that my Masters was worthless to my job (and I got a job in the exact field I studied for). In many cases, even if the student is learning (that other 64%), what they are learning may not be close to enough for their job. That means you have people locked away in academia either not learning or not learning applicable skills for 4, 6, or even 10 years. That is up to a decade of not supporting themselves, of accruing loan debt, of often not contributing to society and the economy.

I wish more people would question the hegemony of college degrees as the golden ticket. If my plumber can quote Aristotle, that’s great, but he shouldn’t have to study Greek philosophy to do a completely unrelated job…and that’s where we are heading. There is a really interesting blogger James Altucher who notes that there are many ways to learn much more directly at the same or a lower cost than college. He lists 8 different ways of learning beyond high school that are much more productive, integrated with the real world, and diverse enough to cater to a wide variety of learning styles that are not well suited to four more years of education for the sake of a degree. The alternatives can be summarized as “create something, master a skill, or explore and reflect on the world.” Specifically he mentions things like starting a business, writing a book, mastering a skill or a sport, creating art, making people laugh, traveling the world, or volunteering for a charity.

I think some people do well in college, learn a lot, and are able to contribute to society. In the end, they often get their money’s worth. That said, to assume that everyone should or could progress down the same path is not logical. Nobody learns the same way. Further colleges are often distanced (the so-called “bubble” or “ivory tower”) from reality, so solutions developed in the academic vacuum have less practical value than one would hope. Further, with stringent cuts to departments and majors that offer concrete skills or produce products and services (languages, research facilities, etc.), the value of a college degree for those who do learn well is in question. Worse, colleges are accepting more kids without upgrading capacity or increasing teaching staff (this is a big problem in law schools,though not exclusively).

The important thing is to find the learning style that’s right for you, and the learning environment that most helps you develop. I think Altucher offers many great ideas for alternative ways to develop the same skills that college can cultivate. That said, Obama is right to make college more accessible to all people regardless of race or income. For me, college was worth it, but grad school perhaps was not. Each person is different and it would be great if we could encourage these differences. I would now like to see policies that enable people of any level to become entrepreneurs, volunteer, or create value for society in alternative venues if college is not right for them.

Speak out!

• If you didn’t go to college, what would you have done with the time and/or money?
• If you know you aren’t a good school learner but you get a full scholarship, should you still go to college for the sake of it?
• What are some ways to get the most out of your college/grad school education? What are other pursuits besides college that you can think of that would cultivate similar development or skills?
  

Act on it!

• Before you ship your kids off to college or before you yourself decide to apply for a Master’s degree without an actual goal in mind beyond the piece of paper…consider what will really contribute to your goals and if you need to.
• Help a high school kid to identify their goals and understand the financial burdens they may be taking on before they go to college (according to this nifty calculator, turns out I should be making nearly $200k to pay the amount of money I pay per month for my grad school debt…if only!)
• Identify extracurriculars you can take on or specific skills you can develop through your program to ensure that you emerge from college or grad school a more capable and fulfilled person.