I did my undergraduate work at Rice University in Houston, then did a year of graduate school at Northwestern.
I learned nothing useful at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism except how to get a job writing for newspapers and magazines. You may have noticed that newspapers and magazines don’t exist anymore. I knew they were on their way out then and argued with my teachers (don’t dare call them professors), insisting we needed new business models, to think through the challenge.
At Rice I just read a lot of books. My first political science class required 15 of them. Each history class had several, and I took a lot of English. I had to draw conclusions from my reading, write them down in coherent essays, then be ready to defend them in front of full professors and other nerds.
There was no specific goal for my program. There was no job waiting at the end of it. Just new questions about what I would do with my life. Whatever my choice, I was told I would be good at it. The t-shirt read “I go to Rice, I must be smart,” and we believed it.
Most colleges I’ve seen since are a lot more like Northwestern than Rice. They teach specific, work-related skills enterprises funding them say they want. Then the businesses change their minds and the graduates have nothing.
The Other Purpose of Education
The other purpose of mainstream colleges is social. They put you together with other like-minded people and you help each other up later. Colleges create old boy networks.
I got this from Northwestern. I found my people. So long as journalism remained a thing I found the company of other Medill graduates compelling wherever we met. But journalism is no longer a thing employers want. Now Medill brags it’s an “integrated marketing program.” Medill can go to hell.
In any field leadership must be earned, and you won’t find leadership in an organization chart. As Malcolm Gladwell learned at Athena Health, real leadership may lie six levels down, with an underpaid drudge who knows where the bodies are buried and how to dig them up.
Rice turns out these people by the carload. At least, it did when I was there. I see the brochures they send out now, showing wealthy kids with perfect teeth, paying $100k and more, and I wonder. Are they still learning how to think? Are they still learning the value of thinking? Can they still take apart a complex task, master it, and teach it to others?
The Money is Wrong
Education is not supposed to be about getting you a job or making you powerful. It’s supposed to be about learning how to learn and learning to love learning the way you love breathing.
Lately, I have noticed a few people in business warming up to this fact. The same people who made colleges into trade schools now condemn colleges for becoming trade schools.
This leaves a lot of computer science grads feeling like this journalism grad does. Ripped off.
If you love thinking like most Rice graduates I know, however, you won’t live the conventional life of people whose names get up on buildings. You’ll probably become an iconoclast like Rodney Brooks, who created iRobot and is now warning that current humanoid robotic startups are going nowhere. Rice turns out a lot of such people.
Brooks thinks differently about robotics and he’s right. Money is ignoring him. That doesn’t matter. Because he’s right. In the end college is for learning how to think so you have the confidence that makes your conclusions certain.
Business doesn’t want people who know how to think either. They might disagree. That’s what the attack on Harvard (and Rice) is all about. Business wants people who will obey them, not people who will replace them. Since they’re where the money to fund the enterprise comes from, this problem won’t be fixed easily.
