Generation Utopia

Education is by far the most important input into our society and economy – it has the greatest multiplier effects on our living standards of any system or industry. At the same time, perversely, it is the most inefficient system or industry. Nowhere else will you find such jaw-dropping lack of professionalism, under-optimization and, frankly, BS. Nowhere else do we get so little return for so much (wasted) money.

“Big claims”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Big evidence I will deliver. I’m an innovation researcher, and all my life I have been obsessed with efficiency, with optimizing stuff – and in education I see by far the biggest opportunity for innovation. If we get education really right we will get everything else right. A much faster growing economy and living standards to begin with, but also the more idealistic and Utopian goals of world peace, solving world hunger and curing cancer.

Unfortunately, I believe schools and universities are almost entirely resistant to change and improvements. The best strategy of genuinely disrupting the education sector, and I will justify this statement, starts with exposing (and even embarrassing) the established institutions and hurting their reputation.

Nothing Is More Important than the Education System

Education (from schools to Wikipedia) is the foundation of all jobs; of every solution to every problem (a); of every aspect of our economy and even to how equipped we are to make our own lives fulfilling. The quality of education and upbringing thus determines our very quality of life. If we want to live even better lives the single best investment we can make, by all means for selfish reasons, is education. Think about how every young person in school right now, from age 6 to 24, will one day be an entire generation of 36 to 54 year olds that run our economy – CEOs, doctors, politicians, scientists, teachers, engineers and all the other jobs.

We cannot mess up education. It is our biggest responsibility and duty as a society. If we mess up transport we will just have lots of traffic jams; if we mess up nutrition we’ll just get obese; if we mess up health care our life expectancy will drop (by a maximum of maybe 30%). You can continue this logic with a thousand other examples. But if we don’t get education right, the next generation won’t get any of the above things right.

Of course, this rationale also goes the other way. Education is the one thing that if we optimize can make the difference between the world we live in now and one with flying cars, cancer cured, peace, equality and so on. Consider this extreme case to illustrate how central education is in this big puzzle of our economy and society: Take education completely away tomorrow, i.e. all schools, all Internet access, all books, all knowledge, and we would be screwed. While our knowledge and capabilities have grown exponentially since we were cavemen, our brains have not evolved at all. And our brain is really the only thing that makes the – gigantic – difference between us and all other animals in terms of what we can know and do.

Depending on the content of our brains and how we use them makes the difference between a great scientist and Trump; and between cave(wo)men and space(wo)men. Imagine a range starting with people that have no (modern) education, i.e. Tarzan or indigenous tribes, on the left and kids of Silicon Valley billionaires with the best teachers and learning environment, a degree from Harvard and another one from MIT (or maybe little Prince George of Cambridge) on the right.

The difference between a world where our economic output equals $1,000 and $40,000 is, I love saying this, doing better things better – through science, technology and innovation, as I explained in detail here. But the knowledge of how to do science, how to engineer new technology and so on has to enter our heads first. The $40,000 today depends on people who know how to be doctors, scientists, managers etc. The same applies to getting from $40,000 to $80,000 and beyond, or to build a more peaceful and equal world. It depends on knowledge, skills, creativity, empathy, ethics etc. All this can be and has to be taught. And it’s not enough to rely on a few entrepreneurs or politicians; you need society as a whole. If we get better at education, we can go from $40,000 GPD per capita to $80,000 and way beyond, because more and more people will know how to do better things better, or figure it out at least.

In case you don’t care about these Utopian ideas, other people or peace, understand that pretty much anything you do care about will become better or cheaper. You want to be able to have better tech gadgets? People need to figure that out. You just want to be an artist? You’re more likely to be able to live off your art in a rich society.

Whichever way you look at it, optimizing the education system, i.e. making it as efficient and effective as possible, has the biggest multiplier effect and greatest return of any investment of any system. Therefore, we have to obsess about it, all of us.

Why Education Is the One System With the Biggest Potential For Improvement

Let’s start with the obvious. Classes are boring and have to be made much more fun and interactive, we all know that. There’s too much memorizing and learning what to think, not how to think (e.g. critical and creative thinking). As Einstein once remarked: “Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think”. Much of the curricula has been long outdated yet is still taught, because it is an “important base” (for the previous generation maybe). We give students standardized tests a few times a year that teach them to cram and forget most of the subject matter right after the exam. Instead, we should teach them how to apply their knowledge and develop their skills in real-life projects. And of course it’s wrong how good education is way too inaccessible and expensive, especially in an age of online courses.

The Underlying Logic: Finding the Multiplier Effects

I firmly believe that once we get the vision right of what education should really be like and get different stakeholders on board, each of the above suggestions will be much easier to implement. To do that though we need to go much deeper than this to find out not just what the problems are, but the causes of the problems – the logic and organizational habits that need to be changed. If we don’t do that we will be stuck at ideas like providing students with podcasts or increasing pedagogic training for lecturers. Think outside the paradigm and maybe podcasts could be videos and maybe lecturers could be tutors to help with specific questions.

Understanding the underlying logic, where the multiplier effects of innovation stem from, gives us more direction and a much better plan to really innovate education. This starts with what our goal is with education and what return or benefit we want from it. As education has a most central position in our world those returns include a whole range of knowledge and skills, ethics and emotional intelligence, creativity and skepticism (more in another article).

We therefore have an input and an output (the ideal goals), and as always, to get the maximum output with a given input means you are talking about efficiency (a).

And if there’s one thing the education system absolutely does not have, much less so than any other industry or part of our society/economy, it is efficiency.

What University Is Really Like

To illuminate on that claim, let me tell you about what university is really like. First, I do have to say that I learned some truly essential things at university. Most important in my opinion was how to build knowledge systematically and critically evaluate what’s true and what isn’t – the scientific method, in a nutshell. It’s something you have to practice a lot until you truly master it and it can make the difference between founding a cult or a rocket company. What I was enabled to practice even more though, and I’m absolutely serious, was how to be extremely lazy and do absolutely nothing for weeks and months at a time. In other words, how to not be efficient.

You see, from the outside university seems all professional and students look busy: They go to class every day and participate actively, then do their readings and assignments etc. But that happens only in theory; the reality could not be further from the truth. My student life style was never like that and I knew only very few people for whom it was so (maybe medicine students in their final years). Being a student consists of three phases:

What I observed with pretty much all students is that the phases with classes (80-90% of a course) look mostly like this: Opening a book and looking at the first page and not taking anything in at all and then deciding that today isn’t a good day to get started. During these phases, days are characterized by idleness, laziness and procrastination and parties at night.

I’m not saying students shouldn’t have a lot of fun, but realize that for every single day at university students (or the taxpayer/their parents) are paying around $82 (b) (1), which does not even include living expenses. Makes every single party, get-together and 420 hella expensive.

This doesn’t just mean more could be taught or that time, money and resources are wasted, this also builds terrible habits in young people over the period of several years that are largely the opposite of what people need to be successful.

Some Outrageous Personal Accounts

Overall I think university was much less work than high school, and I think the vast majority of students would agree. That fact alone should make you shudder.
I had a case study assignment once that accounted for the entire semester grade and the underlying cases were over fifteen years old – and it was an innovation course. Didn’t exactly get people excited. That same professor drew on a blackboard how to use a formula in excel and took fifteen minutes to do so while he could have just shown us on the computer (with projector) that was right next to him. I photographed this. I had a lecturer who taught seminars that sounded like she was holding a Yoga class. I have a recording of this, too.

Once I asked a professor (a rather distinguished one) why he didn’t try to engage the students more, why he just let them sit there and solve the assignment for them. He replied that university is a business model and the students have paid already and if they don’t want to engage it’s their problem. And that to put more pressure on the students would lower student experience which would hurt the university’s ranking. My jaw dropped.

I went to a global top 30 university by the way. To be honest, I was very angry throughout most of my university experience, I often felt like precious time in my life was taken from me. Considering it was relatively little work and I could do and learn other things with all my free time, I played along.

If Students Can Hack the System then Something Is Wrong

The sad truth is that for most of the time you can absolutely get away with not doing anything much as a student in most universities (c). In fact, I logged the time I spent in lectures, meetings, writing essays or studying for exams in my first year of university, and it was a whopping 27 days overall. To be fair, in my final year it was closer to 70 days (I graduated with a First, just for the record). I skipped almost all lectures except a few excellent ones and gained my knowledge mostly through reading (after all Professors didn’t learn what they teach in lectures). And I was not a unique case, most people I know who received Second Class Honours or Firsts didn’t put in much more work than me.

The billion dollar question here is: How can it be that students don’t attend lectures or seminars and can just focus their efforts on studying for an exam or assignment and can get the same results, or output, for three (70 days) or even eight (27 days) times less input? It is certainly possible as millions of students are doing this. Considering how much is at stake that is just insane.

What You Get vs. What You Should Get

Here is an overview of what you get for $14,000 (1) and a few examples of what I truly believe you should (and could) get. And I don’t think these are so much to ask for, after all, we landed on the moon for a cost of around $750 per American.

What you get for $14,000 a year: What you should get:

We Still Teach Like We Used to Before the Internet

Especially on the point of lecturers or professors, I want to stress the point that they have a gigantic multiplier effect. If there are 200 students in an average lecture theater and he/she makes $40/hour that would only be twenty cents per student. That’s sounds more like the price of taking a shower and shouldn’t be the investment for a session of conveying cutting-edge knowledge to future CEOs or engineers.

While there are some lecturers I found great and entertaining and easy to follow, I think on average I’d rate my lectures at only 33%. That means that highly competent presenters like Neil deGrasse Tyson or John Green could convey three times more knowledge than the average lecturer. So why shouldn’t lecturers be highly trained orators? Or better: Pay people like John Green $40,000/hour and show their videos to 10 million students. That would be three times more effective and still 50 times cheaper.

The System Is Locked-in

There is such a crazy dichotomy of how things should and could be and how they really are. Universities that do a good (not even great) job, like Harvard or MIT, are very rare and usually they are extremely expensive. We could save a single digit percentage of the GDP in one blow if we changed the paradigm to online courses plus highly engaging real-world projects for students. Yet, even though online courses are often genuinely well made and often do a great job at conveying knowledge they are by far not as respected as they should be, not to mention accredited.

The problem with changing the education system is that it is locked into a paradigm, from all sides and from all actors’ views, which makes it almost impossible to change. Young people who want to be successful are expected to get a degree, so they have to go to university. Universities have their reputation established as great learning institutions (decades ago before the Internet was a thing). At least the better half of all universities gets more applications than it can hold students. So where’s the hurry to change or innovate?

I remember I once met with a university task-force and I presented my ideas to them, including recording lectures and putting them online or letting students take exams early. Their reply, and I swear on my life, was that they loved my ideas, but that it would take at least fifteen years to implement.

Professors and lecturers don’t want to change their teaching-style, they have enough to do (which is honestly understandable). Deans are not going to make drastic changes and anger staff – even firing staff is easier than telling them to do things differently. Politicians won’t touch the topic, because… what do you expect?

To start a new university without a reputation is a tough chicken-and-egg game – no reputation, no students, hence no reputation. The same applies to online courses. They could teach, word for word, what a university program teaches and would still not be accredited or respected in most of the economy or society. Hence, students have to go to the established institutions and the circle closes.

What’s My Plan of Action?

The education paradigm is just too locked-in and because the vast majority of people believe in it the paradigm is reinforced. A few years ago I was optimistic about online courses disrupting the education industry, but not as long as the current paradigm is so stable. Now, I think the best strategy to spark a circle of change and innovation is to embarrass these institutions to break the lock-in from the inside. There is one thing that universities would hate, and that is their reputation and brand being damaged. This is their currency. Take it from them and there is a chance to break the circle, to force change in the paradigm and to truly innovate. This would have to be done in a highly coordinated and through-through way, which I will cover in a separate article in the future.

Conclusion

Education has the biggest multiplier effect of all systems in our society, yet it is the least efficient one in relative terms. Hence, innovating the education system should be all of our first priority. We need to move society as close to the education level of Prince George as possible so that there is no noticeable difference between him and common people on the street in terms of knowledge, skills and critical, creative thinking etc. Imagine what the world would look like.

Is that doable? Yes. I think it would be more realistic than landing on the moon in 1969, and we did that. But just like Kennedy’s pledge to go to the moon there needs to be a spark or shock to ignite a process of real change and progress.

 

References:
1. http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf
2. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/university-of-cambridge-cost-of-education-rises-to-eighteen-thousand-pounds-per-student

Footnotes:
a) Also about effectiveness here.
b) Per student expenses $14,000 are on average a year in OECD countries (1), in Cambridge even as high as $25,000 USD (2). So for $14,000/~170 days (all working days at university, hence minus weekends and holidays) = $82 a day.
c) Harvard and Cambridge might be exceptions.