We need an AirBNB for Mentorship--not $35k a year wasted on college

This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.

"Free labor is the exact point of interns! Why else would you waste your time mentoring someone who is gone in 10 weeks?" How utterly, utterly naive.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html</a> <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784</a><p>To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots."<p>That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering nowadays.<p>The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means nothing.<p>"If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I don’t care what she did there."<p>... um, yeah, right.

I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world experience working with startups.<p>"Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that."<p>To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume.<p>I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training.<p>We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all.<p>This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.

The solution to a broken higher-education system is not to encourage people to avoid it entirely. It's to fix the problem and make higher education affordable in the US in the same way it's affordable overseas.<p>It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college education and not ending up with marketable skills.<p>A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default.<p>If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article) suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.

Sweet jesus, please kill this background: <a href="http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg</a><p>I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a stain wouldn't come off.

Hi Jason (since you're reading this!)<p>* I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate &#38; undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so.<p>* Interns at my company get <i>paid</i>, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship.<p>I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools".<p>edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive.<p>My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.

<i>Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder.</i><p>The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors.<p>I also tend to disagree on the notion of <i>35K a year wasted on college</i>. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends.<p>Edit: Corrected grammar.

Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they have been used for discrimination.<p>Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.

<p><pre><code> A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year. People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane! </code></pre> I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning.<p>In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work.<p>While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.

Hehe. So typical of Calacanis, yet funny:<p><i>Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers</i>

&#62; These interns are not slaves or indentured servants. They can walk out at any time<p>Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12 months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required internships).

Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees.<p>How about an online mentoring matchup where:<p>- Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with.<p>- Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.

If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem. All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of universities not offering a programming course.<p>The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application.<p>Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).

One significant problem is the pyramid of management. Everyone would want to be managed by the top person. But these are in very limited supply, and they're being rationed one-to-one. In a university, the lecturers are one-to-many.<p>How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside).<p>So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.

it would be amazing if someone wanted to build out mentormykid.com. i would seriously fund it.

Bruce Mau -- from Massive Change -- created a similar one-off program. <a href="http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/</a> . It is unclear how successful the program was. The main reason seems to be that the demand for mentorships exceeds the mentor ability to work directly with the interns. Many top architects actually charge students to participate in the studios as interns. They use some fancy french term to describe the relationship.

It's interesting how 'AirBnB' has become a synonym for 'marketplace'. That's success.

It's called the internet. Information is free - if you can't teach yourself something, you have no chance of survival in a world filled with jobs that often require you to learn and adapt independently.

What if airbnb had the equivalent of sub-reddits? For now, it just has the "sleep somewhere" sub, but you can imagine all kinds of user-created ones. A cross between Meetup and AirBnB?

I really want to work on this. I bought some domains regarding it. I can work on something quick over a couple hours and have something going.

Interesting. How will it scale, though?

I've never understood the obsession with internships. Why be an (unpaid) intern when you can hold down an entry-level tech job during college? Why aren't there more summer/break jobs for students?<p>(I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during school, full-time during breaks)

Well said, Mr. Calacanis. It'll be interesting to see if somebody actually picks this idea up and tries to make something happen with it.<p>Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that <i>"some kid gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich... waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."</i>