Creating Passionate Users

Does college matter?

Your son wants to play in a band. You think he should be an engineer. You're majoring in bioinformatics because your parents told you it was a good career choice, but you hate it. You love to write code, but now your parents are telling you "it's a bad move, what with outsourcing and all..." You spent your first two years of college maintaining an inhuman blood alcohol level, when it hits you--you've taken out loans to pay for this drinking.

We've all accepted that a college degree == $. (Ignoring Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, of course.) College means higher lifetime earnings, and there's plenty of research to back that up. On the other hand, we've also learned that there's scientific evidence that money doesn't mean happiness (assuming you're over the baseline level of poverty). So if there's almost no correlation between money and happiness, but college means more money... where's real happiness in all that?

I've watched the wildly conflicting comments on the future of IT/programming as a profession between Dori Smith on "don't do it" and Robert Scoble on how "Microsoft can't find enough programmers".
But I'm far less interested in whether majoring in a high-tech field is a good idea today than I am in whether the question even matters. The average education in computer science, engineering, and even medicine is partly obsolete within 18 months. Some weird variant of Moore's law I guess. The conventional wisdom says that the specifics of what you learn are much less important than the fact that you're learning the fundamentals, and you're learning to learn--things you'll need to maintain your skills and knowledge in a quickly changing world.

The problem is, you virtually never hear a student say that. It's always the parents or someone speaking on behalf of the educational system. When was the last time you honestly heard (and believed) an actual current college student claim that the true benefit of their formal college education is in learning to be a lifelong learner? That's just bulls***.
With very few exceptions, college in the US is more about drinking than it is about deep learning.

Others claim that the benefit of a college degree is really more about socialization and independence. I've heard reasonably smart adults say, with all sincerity, that spending $80,000 so little Suzy could learn to live on her own was worth it. I think there are a thousand different, and often better, ways to achieve that. Suzy could join the peace corp, for example, or go on one of those "learning vacations" where you do an archealogical dig. Hell, just a three-month long trip through Europe with a couple friends and a rail pass (or, as a friend of mine did, a bike trip across Turkey) is certainly going to do more for socialization and independence than a traditional college environment, and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The real curiosity, for me and others, is why we spend so much time railing against the decline in public schools for K-12 in the US, while higher education practically gets a free pass. The only major complaints you hear are about the rising costs, when to me--that may be the least of it.

In Declining by Degrees, a PBS documentary and book, one of the central questions is about why we aren't looking more closely at what really happens between admission and graduation. Or I should say, looking at what doesn't happen. From the intro:

"The decline in the quality of American undergraduate education has not yet become a major public issue. Americans may be cynical about their public institutions and leaders, but their skepticisim does not extend to the nature and content of a college education."

"... the result of this mentality (we are resisting the temptation to label it "mental illness") is graduates who are narrowly educated--and often are "trained" for work in fields that will have changed before the ink on their diplomas is dry. Those graduates have scant understanding of civic responsibilities or of the possibilities of life beyond work. Accumulating a sufficient number of courses and credit hours to earn a college degree is, in the public mind, synomous with being educated. But having a diploma bears little resemblance to being educated. "Higher" education has been lowered."

So here we have a pile of issues:

* Does it still make sense to major in a high-tech field? (and the offshoots I didn't mention about whether gender makes a difference)

* Does it really matter what you major in, or is the benefit of college something beyond the actual field of study?

* If college = money, but money != happiness, what does that mean with respect to a college degree?

* Does it still make sense to go to college... at all?

But I think the biggest question of all is something entirely different:

Where does passion fit into this equation?

Everything I hear about is whether a kid -- male or female -- should pursue this field or that field, what the long-term career prospects are, etc. I almost never hear much discussion about whether it matters if they have a passion for. It's true that sometimes college is the best way for them to discover their passion, but I've seen way too many young people traumatized by the thought of telling their parents that after three years of pre-med, they're switching to something like... ornamental horticulture (a big area of study at my alma mater, Cal Poly SLO).

The reason this matters to me now is because I'm right in the middle of it. I've been watching Dori with some envy... going on visits with her son to check out prospective colleges, talking about application forms, entrance exams, all that stuff I naturally assumed I'd be doing when my daughter Skyler turned 16 or 17. The older she got, the better she did in school, and the brighter her teachers found her to be... the more certain I was that she'd follow "the natural path" of the countdown to college that starts somewhere around 10th grade.

But it didn't work out that way. Skyler, it seems, could not care less for conventional wisdom, what her friends do, what the numbers say, and most especially--what her mom might think. Skyler believes that life's too short to spend that many years on something you don't love.

So she decided to just work for a while until she figures something out. And then a few weeks ago, she announced the discovery that Boulder is home to a world-class vegetarian cooking school that in addition to cooking classes, includes courses in professional development ranging from creating a business plan for a restaurant, to starting a personal chef business.

Vegetarian cooking is her passion. She believes in it, she loves it, she takes great pleasure in it. She evangelizes it to others. What horrifies me is that even though I knew she felt this way, it never occurred to me that this was something she might consider instead of college. But she got me with this one:

"Mom, your degree was exercise physiology. You spent your first five years out of college as a glorified aerobic instructor. Then you taught yourself programming, took a few night classes at UCLA, and made a huge career switch into computers, and found you loved it. You have your own computer book series. Yet you told me you had just a single computer class in college, and you hated it. So... tell me again why college was so great for you?"

And then the kicker:

"I have no idea if I'll ever open a restaurant or develop this into a professional career, but whatever investment I make in this will serve me and make me happy for the rest of my life. I'll be using what I learn here in my personal life, almost every day, regardless of my career. How many people can say that about 90% of what they learned in college?"

The part I still have to get over is that feeling of a missed opportunity. Of unfulfilled potential (too many Microsoft ads?). This was a straight-A kid. One far brighter at 12 than I'll ever be. One of those about whom people say, "She could succeed at anything she wants." yet what we all secretly meant was, "She could succeed at anything we think she should want."

Lucky for her, she learned at a much earlier age that passion matters. That money is far less important than joy (and that money doesn't buy joy). And that whatever decision she makes now, does not determine the rest of her life. She understands that the chances of anyone having a single career for life -- or even a decade -- are asymptotically approaching zero. And that nothing -- not finances (or lack of) or gender or age -- will stand in her way if she decides to learn something. And if what she wants to learn at some point in the future is best studied in a formal higher education environment, there's nothing to stop her from going to college then.

Still, I look longingly at the cute Target dorm furniture and think, "maybe one day..." Then I hear what my friends are paying in college tuition, and snap out of it.

I'm no longer convinced that we should assume a traditional four-year college should be the automatic default for all high school grads, esepcially given the state of these institutions today. And I seriously wish people would stop looking at me with pity and concern, shaking their head when they realize Skyler ("but she always seemed so bright...") isn't going to a "real" college. Wake up and smell the 21st century...