His answer is his new book, “The End of College,” which is both a stinging indictment of the university business model and a prediction about how technology is likely to change it.
.. “The story of higher education’s future is a tale of ancient institutions in their last days of decadence, creating the seeds of a new world to come,” he writes. If he is right, higher education will be transformed into a different kind of learning experience that is cheaper, better, more personalized and more useful.
.. College is about developing the self discipline necessary to get your work done, even if there is a kegger this weekend and the finale of the bachelor tonight. College is about living with a bunch of folks that you don’t necessarily get along with and not killing them in their sleep. College is about learning to maneuver through idiotic bureaucracies and game the system. Above all, college is about learning to take responsibility for yourself without having your parents imposing rules.
What a College Stunt Says About Higher Education Today
Mr. Dumas certainly could have taken classes without his college tour.
.. What they don’t offer online, at least so far, is the experience Mr. Dumas emphasizes: that of hanging out with other young people who got into top schools, and who thus have social (and, in some cases, actual) capital to offer.
.. It’s possible that such learning organizations will allow students to create their own communities, ones with much lower financial barriers to entry, and that over time, those communities will reduce the influence of the elite-university network ..
But they haven’t always succeeded. In the Yale Alumni Magazine last year, David Zax wrote that 69 percent of Yale’s class of 2017 came from families making more than $120,000 a year. And even lower-income students who are admitted aren’t necessarily welcomed into social groups on campus, as Eleanor Barkhorn at The Atlantic has noted.
The Man Who Snuck Into the Ivy League Without Paying a Thing
But according to Dumas, one of the best perks of college that’s available for free is the networking. “I think more than anything it’s meeting people. It’s contacts. It’s social capital. The kind of people I met in Berkeley or in Yale, I don’t know anywhere else in the world with so many smart, cool open-minded, crazy people can be concentrated,” he says. “And when you think of all the dropouts right now that start companies and stuff, it’s all people that didn’t need a diploma, that didn’t need to pay anything. They went to school to open their minds and meet friends, or meet strategy partners, or something like that.”
From this vantage point, a diploma starts to look a lot like a receipt printed on fine cardstock. It is proof not that one has learned something in college, but that one has paid for it. Without a diploma, how can Dumas prove to anyone—a potential employer, or even me—that he’s undergone an intellectually stimulating experience?
.. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and MIT found that what matters more than anything else in a job application is whether the candidate knows someone at the company.
Your College May Be Banking on Your Facebook Likes
EverTrue, which he founded in 2010, enables educational institutions to parse the social media activities of their graduates. The company’s social donor management program, for instance, can evaluate alumni interactions with a college’s Facebook pages to help distinguish those people likely to give to a capital campaign from those more interested in a specific athletic or academic cause.
.. College development offices have for decades adapted the consumer-profiling techniques used by marketers at for-profit companies. Some schools employ their own in-house researchers to follow, say, the stock market transactions of individual donors or to look up the value of their homes on Zillow. Others buy information from data brokers on their most generous alumni or prospective donors.