Draft 2

Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business. Somewhat of a genius, he's been the founder of several multi-million dollar tech firms, as well as having served on the board of several reputable companies—including The New York Times, Urban Outfitters, and Eddie Bauer. In his book "The Four," he said the following:

"I teach 120 kids on Tuesday nights in my Brand Strategy course. That's $720,00, or $60,000, in tuition payments, a lot of it financed with debt. I'm good at what I do, but walking in each night, I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, adjusted for inflation, the average cost of attending college for a year has increased 346% in the last 36 years (up from $13,000 to $45,000). That's not exactly a small sum. And again, that's after adjusting for inflation. The real dollar numbers are much worse (up about 811%, from $6,000 to $45,000).

To put that in perspective, the United States income poverty line for a family of four is only $26,500, and according to Statista, there are approximately 19.78 million college students right now. If no one went to college this year, and instead put that money toward the poor, we could singlehandedly lift over 79 million people out of poverty, or eliminate poverty in the U.S. for around two years. That's how expensive college is now.

Author Stewart Brand is credited saying the following:

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

It's true. And rising tuition costs definitely demonstrate that information indeed wants to be expensive. But where do we find the evidence that information wants to be free? Well, we need not look any further than internet content platforms.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Quora. You don't need any money to get information on these platforms, and if a copy of a Math 1010 syllabus found its way to your desk, you could learn everything in that class without ever attending or paying for college. You just wouldn't get any of the credit.

Today I would like to discuss capitalism, the internet, and the future of education.

Capitalism

Perhaps you or a young student you know will have a relatively predictable education. By and large, the process of getting an education has remained effectively unchanged in the last 100 years. From about age 6 and all the way through masters programs, generally speaking, for school, you do the following:

Go to a classroom, sit at a desk or in a chair, listen to a teacher give a lecture, occasionally answer a question, receive a homework assignment, go home and do your home work. Every now and again, sprinkle in a standardized test, and you have yourself a world-class education...or maybe a really awful education. As a society, we actually can't really tell the difference yet. But the point I'm making is that no matter where you are, what school you attend, how much you paid, or whether you're 6, 16, or 26—odds are this is pretty much what your education looks like.

It's also what your parents' education looked like, and it's what their parents' education looked like too. But maybe, with a little bit of luck, it won't be what your children or grandchildren's education looks like.

I've heard a theory that the modern education system was developed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution economy. At the turn of the 20th century, companies like Ford needed workers for their factories. These people didn't need to be particularly smart or creative or talented. They simply needed the ability to learn systems and perform processes given to them. "Take this thing, bolt it to that thing, send it down the line."

Of course, I have no way of testing if this theory is correct. Ford owned a car company, he was not the head of the department of education. Economies and education are symbiotic, but I'm not sure they're always confederate. I imagine the modern education system was most certainly influenced by the industrial economy, but I'm not sure it was created by it.

And so you have these two working in parallel. Schools providing an education that matched the economy, and companies providing an economy that matched the education. Capitalism allowed this relationship to become extraordinarily efficient. So efficient that you didn't need to finish college or even high school to get a job at the factory. Of course, by 1938, as a nation, we decided that letting children work in a factory where glass bottles were made without any form of regulation was negligent to say the least, and the employment of virtually all children under the age of 16 was banned.

We even have this efficiency bakes into the nomenclature of the education system. We have primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. It's as if the education system is telling students "you're fine to drop out of school at age 11. And you know what you really don't need? College."

And the craziest thing was...100 years ago, that was pretty much true. If you dropped out of school at 12, you probably wouldn't ever be rich, but you could survive. Most people, however, just graduated high school, and then got a job. And that worked.

Less than half of high school grads in 1960 ever went to college. That number is now somewhere around 70%. And that's even with university being 3.5x more expensive now. You just didn't need to go then. You could be middle class for free. And that's seldom the case nowadays.