The Student Life

Chapter -5

College as a ranking mechanism

Big companies have limited employees, of course, so there's only one plant manager. Big universities have just one head of the English department. Big law firms have just one managing partner, and even the Supreme Court has only nine seats.

As we've seen, the ranking starts early, and if you (the thinking goes) don't get into a good (oh, I

mean famous) college, you're doomed.

This is one of the reasons that college has become an expensive extension of high school /colleges. The

goal is to get in (and possibly get out), but what happens while you're there doesn't matter much if the goal is merely to claim your slot.

When higher education was reserved for elite academics, there was a lot of learning for learning's sake, deep dives into mysterious thought that occasionally led to breakthroughs. Once industrialized, though, college became yet another holding tank, though without the behavior boundaries we work so hard to apply in high school /colleges.

In the post-industrial age of connection, though, the positioning and the shortage are far less important. We care a great deal about what you've done, less about the one-word alumnus label you bought. Because we can see whom you know and what they think of you, because we can see how you've used the leverage the Internet has given you, because we can see if you actually are able to lead and actually are able to solve interesting problems—because of all these things, college means something new now.

Big companies no longer create jobs

Big companies are no longer the engines of job creation. Not the good jobs, anyway. What the data center does, though, is create the opportunity for a thousand or ten thousand individuals to invent new jobs, new movements, and new technologies as a result of the tools and technology that can be built on top of it.

There is a race to build a plug-and-play infrastructure. Companies like Amazon and Apple and others are laying the groundwork for a generation of job creation—but not exclusively by big companies. They create an environment where people like you can create jobs instead. Pick yourself.

The cost of failure has changed

if we're trading hypotheses on a new scientific breakthrough, of course we have to be wrong

before we can be right. If we're inventing a new business model or writing a new piece of music

or experimenting with new ways to increase the yield of an email campaign, of course we have

to be willing to be wrong.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still—until we find right.

Instead of certainty and proof and a guarantee, our future is about doubt and fuzzy logic and testing. We can (and must) teach these skills, starting with kids who are happy to build towers out of blocks (and watch them fall down) and continuing with the students who would never even consider buying a term paper to avoid an essay in college.

What does "smart" mean?

Our economy and our culture have redefined "smart," but parents and school /colleges haven't gotten

around to it.

These are easy, competitive ways to measure some level of intellectual capacity. Are they an indicator of future success or happiness? Are the people who excel at these measures likely to become contributors to society in ways we value?