[P2P-F] JOURNAL: The Education Bubble

Thu Apr 14 02:51:21 CEST 2011

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: JOURNAL: The Education
Bubble via Global Guerrillas by John Robb on 4/13/11

Peter Thiel (Paypal and other ventures) has been making some waves for
his position that higher education in the US is the next bubble. In
short, he's right. Given what we now have available in terms of tools,
it should be possible to get an Ivy league education for $20 a month.

Instead we are getting a stagnant product that is so out of date that
it doesn't deliver much social and economic value. Even worse: it's
undergoing hyper-inflationary price increases.

So, what should you do? Thiel says you should refuse to participate and
drop out. Unfortunately, that's not a solution. Just because something
is vastly overpriced (like houses or stocks), it doesn't mean that it
is worthless. A degree is still valuable because it's valued in the
workplace (even though it's not the golden ticket to employment
anymore).

The solution to this problem is to help create employment opportunities
(like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don't use
a degree as a gating mechanism. A solution that creates its own
educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and
techniques). A solution that delivers something better than an Ivy
league eduction and then backs it up with economic and social
opportunities that exceed what you get in the global econonomic and
social sprawl.

Create the pull (the opportunity) and the rest will follow.

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