A Firsthand Analysis of the Structure of Higher Education

I am a big fan of formal education.  My mom was a teacher, and from the beginning, I grew up in an environment where a commitment to learning was the norm.

Looking back on my life so far, I can honestly say some of the most influential people and experiences have stemmed from formal education.

I want to be clear that my purpose in writing this piece is not to complain about school.  Could our education system be improved?  Of course.  That’s a topic for endless debate and something I’m frankly not qualified to comment on.

Instead, I want to focus on one concrete (and fixable) issue that I have firsthand experience with:  The structure of college.

The structure of most colleges sets recent grads up for failure.

In the past three years, I have become obsessed with studying the world’s most successful people.  After just a few biographies and interviews, you notice every leader approaches life from the same perspective.  Without fail, they all understand and appreciate “the process.”

• Want to run a marathon?  You start with 1 mile and then steadily progress through a series of steps over 4 months until you can run 20+ consecutive miles.
  

• Hoping to become the highest paid female athlete of all time?  Maria Sharapova attributes that to the monotony of grinding out progressive tennis exercises for decades.
  

• Itching to start a company?  Read Think and Grow Rich.  Surprise!  There’s a process every Buffett, Gates, and Bezos followed at one point or another.
  

If viewing life as a series of compounding “processes” is so central to success, why is the mentality surrounding college the exact opposite?

Even though students, professors, and administrators probably won’t openly admit it, college is set up from day #1 as a series of sprints NOT the marathon it should be.

A few examples…

• In almost all cases, exams are a joke.  You cram two days before the test, regurgitate the information, and then immediately forget all of it.

• Foreign language requirements in the US?  Please.  Ask the guy who went to a few language classes in Florence that one semester how much Italian he knows.  But fear not, the little box on his transcript is checked.

• Summer internships prove to be a double-edged sword.  Yes, those three summer internships you just completed exposed you to a smattering of industries, but let’s be real…  Your bags were packed before things got hard and the monotony of working life set in.

After being trained to view life as a series of “sprints” for years, recent graduates are woefully unprepared for the realities of the next forty years of their working lives.

They get burnt out after a few months on the job (happened to me) and view situations through the idyllic lens of college, not reality (also happened to me).

The bottom line is the process of life is hard.

Life is not a class that ends in December.  Life is not determined by the quantity of little boxes you can check.  Life is definitely not the job placement percentage your school touts on the cover of magazines.

Too often, college is viewed as a means to an end.  Rather, we should think of it as an opportunity to teach perseverance and condition students to understand and appreciate life as a series of building blocks.

This means more foreign languages, long-term projects, instruments, sports, etc. and less cookie-cutter exams.  How to fund it, you ask?  Well my friends, I’m afraid that’s a topic for another post…

See you next Sunday at 8:30pm.  🙂