Don’t Get Stuck in the College Trap
American higher education is in a complete free-fall. Student loan debt averages out at $29,400 per student. 53.6% of all college graduates are underemployed or unemployed. The United States has more janitors with chemistry degrees than it has chemists. There are more than 50 universities and colleges in the United States that charge more than $60,000 per year. And the […]
My Bachelor’s Degree Means Nothing
This is a guest post by Steve Patterson, a video producer living in Atlanta, GA. You can contact him here, and see some of his videos here. My shiny bachelor’s degree holds a secret: graduating from college isn’t impressive. It’s embarrassingly easy. Not because I’m smart, but because the standards are so low. For the […]
Don’t Accept the Premise
It’s easy to feel the need to take sides. So many problems, questions, and issues in the world seem to have two opposing answers, and we’re constantly asked to choose which we accept. But the real, radical change comes not from those who pick a side and advocate their solution better than everyone else, but […]
How to Survive Working With a Remote Boss
This is a guest post by Cynthia Bell. The workplace today is quite different from the workplace of 30, 20, and even 10 years ago. Open office designs, in-house baristas, and, for many organizations, bosses managing from across the country are now the norm. Between video conferencing, email, and instant messaging, physical proximity to the […]
The Value of Playfulness
Reading a very interesting book recently, I came across this passage: In this task (the candle problem), research participants are given a small candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks and are asked to attach the candle to a bulletin board in a way that the candle can be lit and will burn […]
Peter Thiel on Markets, Innovation, and College
We had the pleasure of sponsoring the Thiel Summit, a two-day conference for young people who applied to a fellowship run by Thiel Foundation, a program co-founded by PayPal and Facebook co-founder and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. The theme of the summit is that young people can innovate and bring about the next major technological changes, […]
Why You Should Work For Free
The following article is excerpted from our book, How to Get Any Job You Want: Advice for Future Career Seekers. Want a free PDF copy of the full book? You can download it here! With young people nearly shut out of the market, I would like to suggest the unthinkable: young people should work for […]
The Praxis Curriculum: Learning to Learn
I send weekly updates to our participants wherein I challenge them with a question, or a task, or a contest, or give a few thoughts on their business partner experience, what they want after Praxis, etc. I tend to focus more on the broader experience and the business component, since Education Director TK Coleman works […]
The Entrepreneur as Historian; The Entrepreneur as History-Maker
The Praxis participants just finished up their first module with oral examinations in Philosophy, Logic & Ethics. Now they have the task of moving into our History & Culture module, which includes hours of lectures on the significance of history, how and why historical trends change, and several full-length books covering the history of business, […]
Education, Not Schooling
The fact that education and schooling are two totally different concepts and acts isn’t something new for most people, but recent research says that traditional university education is actually counter-productive to the learning process. Though this may seem surprising, the reason for this counter-productivity makes it seem clear why this happens. Schools are essentially systems, and […]
Why NOT Take a Gap Year?
A gap year is, simply put, a year off from school. It can come in the form of a year between high school and college, a year during college, or a year after college and graduate school. During this time, people usually learn new skills, travel to other countries, gain professional experience in the workplace, […]
Why Assignments are Usually Dumb
We’re all pretty used to assignments. In fact, most of us are so used to them that we have a hard time completing projects or tasks outside of the artificial assignment structure. Assignments typically take the form of a supposed authority figure or expert telling you to complete a task, providing a deadline, and giving […]
You Don’t Need College to Succeed: This Graph Shows It
Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, Facebook, and so many other companies, is one of the biggest supporters of the idea that higher education doesn’t necessarily mean higher probability of success or pay. Rather, Thiel promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, and hard work as the pathways to success. Over at the Washington Post, Thiel […]
Being a Student vs. Being a Participant
There’s nothing wrong with being a student. In its broadest sense it means to learn, and learning is of course instrumental to every kind of success and a form of happiness in itself. But the word connotes a particular type of learning. When you hear the word student you think first of someone sitting in […]
Entrepreneurs unbundle and rebundle
An economics professor and entrepreneur friend of mine always used to tell me that entrepreneurs noticed bundles of resources that could be made more valuable by unbundling, and they noticed unbundled resources that could be made more valuable by bundling. He used to give the example of cars. At some point in time, the combination […]