I’ve been wondering how change really happens. It seems to me to be one of those foundational questions. If you know how to get from where we are to where we need to be next, I want to talk to you. Over the past half a year, I have invited a dozen really big thinkers (and feelers) to talk to me on Kelly Corrigan Wonders and at the end of each conversation, I summarize my takeaways. I share them here in the hopes that they will be useful to us all as we inch our way toward something better.
On higher education:
Both my kids will in college next year spending 529 monty that myhusband and I have been tucking away since way back when Rudy Guiliani was sane and heroic. When writing checks that large, you can’t help but wonder about the value so I gathered a few people to help me see the big picture:
Tara Westover, author of Educated
Lande Ajose, senior policy advisor for education for the state of California
Jeremy Rossmann, MIT dropout and founder of The Make School
Here’s what I took away from those conversations:
1. The best possible outcome of higher education is that each generation becomes a part of the great ongoing conversation about matter and meaning and finding smarter and bigger world-positive ways to serve.
2. The worst possible outcome of higher education is a lifetime of debt without a degree.
3. All research supports higher education; every metric — health, happiness, stability, and economic mobility — rises as individuals are educated. As exhausting and seemingly endless as the work is, we can’t give up on the dream of educating our whole country.
5. Though every article you read about college talks about the tuition at Yale or Stanford, the actual average cost of college in the US for public four year university is closer to $9,000.
6. Rankings, like the kind you see in US News and World Report, are very good at selling magazines and perfectly ruinous to higher order university goals.
7. Everything that gets discussed and debated on the way to class, on the way home from class, at 2am in the dorm, is at least as formative as whatever happens in class.
8. Test optional is a good development for everyone. So is the growth of outside-the-box colleges like Jeremy Rossmann’s Make School.
9. Liberal Arts — meaning critical thinking, lateral thinking and diverse thinking — is weirdly essential to a world where the future is unknown.
Many thanks to Tara Westover, Jeremy Rossman, and Lande Ajose for the role they each play in shaping education. Learn more about Tara Westover here, Jeremy Rossman here, and Lande Ajose here.
