Should your kid go to college?

When information is free, accreditation is the only value college offers

“I mean, I’m no George Benard Shaw,” your friend says. 

“Who’s that?” 

It’s 1997, and you’re having coffee. After a pause, you say, “I don’t know.” 

You both shrug and go back to talking about the weather. Neither of you will ever know the answer, and you’re OK with that.

That was what life was like not long ago, before you had a magic rectangle in your pocket that contained all the world’s knowledge. 

Information is now free.

Does that make a college education worthless? 

What colleges offer

If you wanted to figure out who George Benard Shaw was in 1997, you would have to either 1) ask your friend who went to Yale or 2) get a library card, figure out the Dewey Decimal system, and find a book about Shaw. None of those books, by the way, will be sorted by relevance. 

Now, you can Google George Benard Shaw (here you go), and everything he ever did appears before you in less than a second. Not only that, it’s sorted by interest and relevance, allowing you to absorb the gist in less than a minute. Now, if someone asks you who he was at a party, you have an answer. 

In the face of that, what could colleges possibly offer? 

The value is not the information, as most people assume.

It’s something simple, yet difficult to create: scarcity.

Scarcity

To make anything valuable, it has to be scarce. If everyone has a college degree, no one has a college degree. 

Since information is free, colleges can no longer offer unique access, as they had when a college was where the smart people and books were. They now have to fabricate other barriers to entry. 

In other words, not everyone who applies to Harvard gets in. Further, not everyone who gets in graduates. 

If you have a degree from Harvard, potential employers can assume you probably are pretty smart and at least can stick to something. 

They can no longer assume, however, that you have more information than someone without a B.A. 

That’s one reason college degrees are quickly losing value. 

On top of that, there are other, better ways to prove you are smart and know how to stick to something.

Is there a way around accreditation? 

In short: yes.

An accredited college degree is valuable because of scarcity. Without argument, it can be useful. 

But there are other, more available, less expensive, and more effective ways to achieve a similar or greater effect. 

If an employer is seeking a social media manager, for example, one applicant has a Harvard degree and a hundred followers, and the other is a dropout with a hundred thousand followers, the employer would be wise to hire the second applicant. 

Real-world success beats hypothetical success any day of the week. 

Instead of spending four years on a degree, your kid would almost certainly be better off spending that four years creating real-world success to put in a portfolio. 

Here are a few practical strategies: 

1. Build a personal brand
   
   Have your kid figure out what kind of work they want to do, follow people doing that work, and then figure out what problems those people face. Write about it and publish it online. If your kid becomes a known expert at solving those problems, they can show their work to potential employers and impress them with something more specific than a college degree.
   
   

2. Find the “third door”
   
   In the book “The Third Door,” Alex Banyan describes the situation for most people: they have to wait in line. That’s college. The second door is for the elites. That’s nepotism. But here’s the secret: there is always a third door.
   
   Yes, you normally need a degree to work at Tesla. But there is a way to skip that process. Attend network events, send letters to people you admire, make the right friends, or acquire a big following on social media. There is always a way in.
   
   

3. Fast-track accreditation
   
   Yeah, sometimes you need the degree to get in the door. Maybe your kid is great in the classroom setting, and an Ivy-league degree is the way to prove value with the least friction. Not common, but it could happen.
   
   When you know what you’re doing and why, you get it done faster than everyone else.
   
   There is no reason to spend four years in college. Figure out what you want to do, and work out the bare minimum you need to get the degree.
   
   Don’t just assume college is “good for them.” That’s the road to sending them to extreme-debt daycare. Have a goal and get it done. 

In the information age, a college’s only value is accreditation. 

There are better paths around what the accredited college offers that are usually cheaper and more effective.

Thanks for reading,

Taylor

(Share this with parents saving up for college.)

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P.S.

What we’re looking at:

Austin Scholar (16) interviews J.D. Martinez, one of the best hitters in baseball.

Walking improves cognitive function.

Kids in the 1960s imagine the year 2000 (amazing)

Quotes we’re pondering:

"University degrees are the new taxi medallions." — Naval Ravikant

“Shout out to all the solopreneurs that had enough courage to try their own thing against the advice of their very worried parents.” — Justin Welch

“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”— Viktor Frankl