Thursday 31 December 2015

21st Century University

I absolutely love this. For the longest time in my own life I've wanted to redefine the education system and how it operates. This seems to be almost a perfect model for how I thought it should be. Bravo.
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This is the future. I would totally opt for this if it was available 7 years ago.
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A few months back I posted on Abundant Education and how we will get there. This video illustrates my point exactly. We have a crisis in higher education both in the US and Europe (well in education as a whole). Costs are spiralling out of control and the quality is not what is used to be; the classic hallmark of socialism. The incorrect conclusion is that Universities make great workers/thinkers when in fact its the other way around. Great workers/thinkers go there because for Centuries it has been the only option. Now that monopoly is falling apart and better alternatives are being created by the free market. 

Consider the above example. You pay nothing up-front. You only pay dependant on the job you get once you graduate. This means the school has a massive incentive to ensure your employable so that you can maximise payments back to the school. They take around 25% of the first two years of your earnings and then that's it. Compare that with hundreds of thousands of University Graduates who have large debts and the universities don't care what you do after; its basically a pump and dump scheme funded by Government. Students end up paying for it years after they graduate. The worst part of it is people who decide not to enter into further education end up paying for others who do in the case of general taxation. The whole system is in desperate need of disruption.

Business models like this basically solve the crisis in higher education. Contrast my recent post of where a progressive believed she could carry on with the existing system and just give it more money, thus not actually fixing anything and not even having a credible solution to anything. Entrepreneurs in contrast, rather than moan about the current state of affairs go about solving problems they see. They don't beg for peoples money but rather disrupt the conventional wisdom and turn industries on their head. Higher Education is going to completely transform over the next few decades once people start to scale the above example. Theres many different schools all trying to disrupt the current model.


If I was 18 once more and these new concepts scale to where I live I wouldn't do University again I would enrol straight into one of these programs. Retrospectively I view my whole education as largely a waste of time, full of tests, theory and talk with no value. Wouldn't it be better if we got the youth to create value for society and learn new skills at the same time. If we instilled that culture of a can do attitude; one where real world problems were not to be shied away from but to be tacked head on. It seems our Governments and many people in society have become fixated with sending more and more people to traditional University thinking this is the way to create the minds of the future when in fact the minds of future just go there because its the de-facto option. No longer in the 21st Century will this be the case. In fact the future minds will shun University in favour of alternatives listed above. Bravo to the Universities of the 21st Century!

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