An open letter to Peter Thiel

<p><pre><code> So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your money and energy behind your convictions? </code></pre> First, Thiel is already doing this with 20 Under 20. Second, Founders Fund just led a $33M round for Knewton [0], which is doing adaptive education.<p>Third, the extent to which the beneficiaries of usurious student loans now find themselves on the back foot is amusing. "First they laugh at you, then they fight you..."<p>Wadhwa has realized that he can't simply shame the critics of higher ed into silence (as he's attempted for the last few years [1]), so now he's saying:<p><pre><code> "We can now make education affordable and pervasive." </code></pre> I don't think Wadhwa understands what this means. It means things like ai-class.org, ml-class.org, and db-class.org replacing large lecture classes. It means companies doing a lot more stuff like MCSE, and a lot less stuff like paying for people to do two years of an MBA. It means coworking spaces like biocurious at $150/month [2] replacing the expensive (and inaccessible) university labs.<p>Most of all, it means obsolescing the higher ed business model of charging $60,000 per year [3].<p>In other words, while it's refreshing to hear people in higher ed finally start to acknowledge that the benefits they provide need to be greater than their costs, they don't understand that the solution involves the end of college as we know it.<p>How could it be otherwise when there is now a six-order-of-magnitude gap between the cost of watching a Khan Academy video ($0) and the cost of dozing through the same content in a Harvard lecture hall ($250,000)?<p>[0] <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/founders-fund-33-million-learning-knewton/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/founders-fund-33-million-le...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/25/students-stay-in-school/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/25/students-stay-in-school/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://biocurious.org" rel="nofollow">http://biocurious.org</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost...</a>

This is just silly. I started reading this article with a couple biases in mind: I can't ever remember reading anything by Wadhwa and thinking anything other than "That is the conventional wisdom, yes," and Thiel is correct that college is a bubble (<a href="http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/higher-education-the-next-big-bad-bubble/" rel="nofollow">http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/higher-education-the-next-bi...</a>)<p>But Wadhwa's advice is just ludicrous. If it's 2005, and you claim that housing is a bubble, the proper response isn't "Go put your money where your mouth is: start manufacturing mobile homes, or tents, or something." It's a non-sequitur: people are overpaying for education <i>because they treat it as an asset</i>: if you double the sticker price, buyers react by assuming that they're buying twice as much of it.<p>The right responses to a bubble: short it, or at least structure your life so you're not dependent on it. In real estate, that means renting rather than buying; in higher ed, that means dropping out and investing your efforts into tasks that better measure your underlying talents, and don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.<p>It's just a weird defense of the status quo: nowhere does Wadhwa ask questions like: have we overestimated how many people should go to college? Are we even willing to tell people that they'd be happier (and society would be better off) if they became electricians or plumbers? It seems like Thiel's framework is flexible enough to imagine a country where 50% of the population earns a masters, or where only 5% pursue a BA. Whereas Wadhwa's framework is robust enough to imagine a swing of half a standard deviation away from whatever the status quo is.<p><i>Full disclosure: it's a little early to tell, but I'm fairly successful; I dropped out of college my freshman year.</i>

Many of the online learning solutions quoted throughout this comment thread are excellent for people who are autodidactic (and I suspect a vastly disproportionate % of the HN audience are autodidactic).<p>But, for everyone else who lack the will power, discipline, attention span for self-education, college is a great way to structure higher education. College is more than just a piece of paper, it's an opportunity to explore new subject matters and grow both intellectually and socially.<p>College isn't for everyone. Most private colleges are too expensive to be affordable to 90% of the attendees. But, nearly every state offers a high quality public university at 1/10th the price, so if cost is the main reason why college is taking such criticism in this forum, then I'd agree in merit, but I'd encourage more students to consider public college options instead of skipping college all together.

As I've seen him do all too often before, here Wadhwa writes with too little analysis of the situation he is commenting on. Right now, there is a status quo of HUGE subsidies for higher education. Higher education is second only to K-12 education as a line item in the budget of my state and other states. When billions of dollars extracted from taxpayers--including taxpayers who have no prospect of ever attending college--are injected into the current system, it is little wonder that some people have trouble imagining any different system, and most people who try to set up alternatives to the system are doomed to failure. "The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers. Their subsistence, so far as it arises from their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776) "In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)

Education in the USA is a massive financial scam, whether or not you think formalized and standardized education is a good idea. I'm with Thiel on this.<p>From Wadhwa's bio:<p>Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learning, and faculty member and advisor at Singularity University.<p>Vivek declare your income from Berkley, the CERC, Duke, Harvard, Emory and Singularity and we'll be happy to explore how much your lifestyle could be impacted by Thiel's point of view.

<i>...So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your money and energy behind your convictions?...</i><p>I am just another internet commenter, so take what I say with a grain of salt. All I'm doing is repeating what I've read and heard.<p>But if I had a nickel for every time somebody suggested that you could start with the end goal in mind, then somehow <i>invent</i> your way there, I'd have several dollars.<p>The more general your investment strategy, the more likely you will find something that works. So at the most general, say some kind of web app or service, you still have only a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 chance of hitting anything. And that's with all the other variables stacked your way.<p>This isn't a magic trick. Just because Thiel has done so well in many areas doesn't mean you can point him at a random problem and expect something useful. If you're a guy who wants to fund new startups in solar-powered mobile education, good luck! You're going to need it. You've already constrained yourself to unimaginably high odds without even getting started.<p>I used to see this same kind of reasoning applied to landing on the moon. For years, whenever there was a tough problem, some yahoo would come out of the woodwork and say something like "If we could put a man on the moon, surely we can do X" And you could put whatever you wanted into X.<p>As it turns out, there are a lot of Xes which we cannot solve, no matter how many men walked on the moon. And looking back, even putting them on the moon was a lot tougher than we thought. We managed to work out the tech and lost the will to continue the mission. Not all impossible obstacles are technology-related.&#60;/rant&#62;<p>I'm sure the author meant well, and his call for folks to help out education is a good one. We need all the help we can get. That kind of rhetoric is just a pet peeve of mine.

The issue is not education but schooling. We don't invest very heavily in education but spend inordinate amounts of money on schooling. How many people could be given an education for the price of a building with someone's name on it?<p>Once a child is taught to read and write, basic arithmetic, and critical thinking, they should have the tools necessary to teach themselves most subjects. It's easy to fix education, it's difficult to fix schooling.<p><a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/gatto2.1.1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/gatto2.1.1.html</a><p>"Self-evaluation – the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet – is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth."

In my opinion, having watched parts of the debate, Vivek Wadhwa and his colleague were setup to fail in the debate. It is not necessarily because they themselves were wrong but because the way the argument and the debate were presented. Given the massive amount of problems with Higher-ed, it is very easy to argue against it by pointing out the obvious and the non-trivial problems. As such, Wadhwa was always on the backfoot trying to defend something which has inherent flaws.<p>If you turn the tables, and have Peter Thiel provide a solid policy prescription and then have Wadhwa poke holes, I think they would easily come on top in the debate.

I thought the comment to "put your money where your mouth is" was interesting, given that Peter Thiel has done exactly that: funded programs that provide alternatives to college. Not the end all solution, but between his money and the time he has spent bringing the debate into the national light its hard to say he isn't doing exactly that.

I don't understand how the naysayers of higher education can argue that any amount of viewing lectures can replace legitimate interaction with an expert in the field.<p>I've taken a lot of classes where I could watch a video of the professor lecture 100 times and be completely lost without the ability to interrupt and ask "excuse me, but how did you go from the base case to the inductive case" or "could you explain that more".<p>If you take STEM classes where the class size is under 40, i.e. upper division classes, you are both able to do this, and you almost NEED to do it. I really don't see people learning operating system design, complex analysis, abstract analysis, circuit design, and organic chemistry, from Khan Academy ...

I find it a little silly that people <i>still</i> think the problem in education lies with not adopting modern technology.<p>I'll say this again: the problem with modern education lies with <i>bureaucracy</i> and <i>operational inefficiency</i>. <a href="http://www.uwo.ca/" rel="nofollow">http://www.uwo.ca/</a> is a wonderful example. I feel like I should write a more detailed post about this.<p>I actually took the initiative to write several angry letters to the administration, and eventually got a meeting with the Registrar's office. Among other things, I told them about <a href="http://www.schedulizer.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.schedulizer.com</a> which is pretty much everywhere in the USA already. Their response: "Well, if it doesn't cost us anything, we don't see any problems, and we don't need to do anything, we can potentially allow it to be implemented it in 3-4 years."

&#62;"I stressed that children gain a lot more from college than just the education."<p>Therein lies part of the problem. We treat 19-22 year olds as children.

A University allows you to explore your interested in a nice structured manner, allowing you to get feedback from respected professionals and though leaders in different fields. It also gives you a chance to try out your hand at different fields, and figure out which ones you are good at, and where you can be successful in the future.<p>These are what make education important and essential....<p>However, if you know what you want, then you obviously don't need University to make you successful.

Oh cool; higher education. My hobby horse.<p>Here's the thing.. all of these statements are <i>true</i>:<p>- Higher education can give you a great professional career path<p>- Higher education can give you social skills<p>The problem is this; there is a third option, which is not to go into higher education and to do something vocational. Unfortunately we live in a world where this is a <i>worse</i> option.<p>That is fucking unbelievable.<p>I just got someone in to do a bit of extension work on my house. It looks great, it is precise craftsmanship from someone who has worked at it his whole life. He learned it vocationally and worked his way up to a pretty successful living. OK, so he is not making millions, but neither do most graudates.<p>Here in the UK, at least, it is assumed you are aiming to go to university and get a degree. In my time it was pretty bad, I think now it is even worse.<p>That's such a worrying idea; I mean, if everyone is a high flying management executive, who the hell are they managing?<p>Kids are sold this idea that you have to go and get a degree and then your life will pan out for you. What a joke; you can hardly blame students for being dissillusioned when they realise that they now have a stonking debt, and there are still no guarantees.<p>I'm not criticising the risk of doing higher education on debt, just that we lie to our younger generations and pretend that it is a done deal if they just get through a couple years are uni.<p>Fucking stupid.<p>We need to refocus. Going from school at 16 to college to learn, say, graphic design is awesome. Except as a society we are supposed to roll our eyes and go "oh, college.. right."<p>I myself fall into the second of my bullet points; my career now is entirely through finding a job for my hobby skills, learning a new "trade" (digital forensics) on the job, and working my way up. Sure, I learned a lot about critical thinking in my degree, but the real takeaway was earning some friends, developing some social skills, making connections, letting myself go for a bit (uptight as a kid, sigh..). My career is entirely self-made at this point (learning programming myself, before uni., Learning forensics. Learning business acumen. etc.) - there are many many similar people out there but because I went to university I must be somehow awesome at this! here's the joke - my grade was about average because I barely turned up for lectures, having more interesting things to do :)<p>The aggravating thing is that I look at really smart, capable people being passed over because they never went to university. Because it is ingrained, now, that for any vocation there is a degree for it.<p>The education revolution, when it comes, doesn't have much to do with cost. But with perception.

&#62; <i>If you indeed believe that we are headed for disaster, please work on averting it.</i><p>The way I see it, Thiel may have other priorities. Among other things, he is a big (the biggest, if I recall correctly) donor for the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), which works on reducing existential risks. That does pretty well for "averting disaster", though we're not talking about education here.

with growing complexity of civilization and growing length of human life, it is natural that to maximize the productive lifetime output of a human person, the amount of education that person receives has been necessarily increasing through the history.<p>Wrt. current state - if you can make people learn basic amount of the knowledge necessary in today's human civilization [ie. BS = K12 + college] in 12 years - fine, drop the college years, otherwise the public education standard must be increased to K16. Higher education right now means MS or PhD. People with bare K12 are the ones left behind and deprived of a chance of being a productive and successful member of the civilization .

All I read:<p>Peter, "put your money and energy behind your convictions" since "the world is ripe for another revolution" through "tablet-type devices" that are "ubiquitous".<p>Tl;dr, this whole thing is stack of non-sequiturs.

I think Higher Ed efficacy and Higher Ed financing are two separate issues. The system is broken, that does not mean that the system should be abolished. Granted there is a high level of student debt:<p><a href="http://projectonstudentdebt.org/" rel="nofollow">http://projectonstudentdebt.org/</a><p>But that does not mean that education in and of itself structured in curricula and colleges is actually a bad thing. Even with subsidies, education is quite a huge financial challenge for most people. And increasing privatisation of education will only lead to more student debt, almost to the point where the opportunity cost is too high to go to college. That is fine for the genius 1-2% of the USA but for the rest of the US the structure does not really create knowledge based human capital so needed to be competitive in the current global landscape<p>The financing of education brings about a core philosophical issue, which is, is education a public or private good. In most European countries, it is considered a public good, and as such the state's responsibility. As such student debt issues are almost marginal in these countries. However, on the other hand, education and research quality in these universities is really low, as evidenced by rankings:<p><a href="http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp</a><p>(I know rankings are debatable but this is the only worldwide global ranking system so lets just use it as a proxy for approximating how good a university is). I also know that due to huge amounts of student loans subsidized through private lenders, the whole education financial system came to an absolute halt in 2008, whereby lenders could not lend to eligible students to go to college. This is due to the fact that education loans are also packaged into securities and sold to investors. They are also some of the highest performing loans. The US government mainly guarantees these loans, but in 2008 had to actually inject money to get loan market flowing again.<p>So the question is, is the university just a place to teach, or somewhere we advance humanity through sometimes isoteric research that may become relevant 20 years from now. The US system has betted on the latter of these two options for the past 30 years or so. The University system in the US is more of a business than a place of education. The increased privitisation of education has thus lead us to this place. Does it make sense to privatise it more given the current situation? In my opinion, probably not.<p>As for people calling for the Khan Academy Model, please look at what they are doing recently: they have partnered up with the Los Altos School district to integrate their platform in classes. That increases the use of tech in education, but it does not necessarily entirely change the way education is imbibed to children. Same with Knewton, which works with universities.

He refuses to highlight the Highway robbery of both tax payers and students by the Banking Elite.<p>Guess what folks the K12 budgets have not alarmingly increased over the past 12 years, just colleges. We have a system where elite bankers get to rob tax payers and students with Loans that defy the uniform commercial code with on term limits and other somewhat illegal terms.<p>Than we allow that banking elite class to stack the trustees that are elected at state colleges so that there will always be a raise in budgets and rates every year.<p>Here is the difference...30 years ago a student could pay for college tuition from a job right out of high school.<p>Are we really gaining something when we allow colleges to enact unfunded liabilities such as retirement to those who only put in 10 years and a sports program that basically is a farm team for professional sports without professional sports paying for the that farm team?