Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn.
In an act of solidarity with the late Aaron Swartz's crusade to liberate publicly funded knowledge for all, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. While it's been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about freeing and sharing scholarly information. It's also about the psychology and incentives around scholarly publishing.
At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to “being Asian.” They are too smart and hard-working for their own good.
There is a widespread belief among teachers that digital technology is hampering students’ attention spans and ability to persevere, according to two surveys.
In every complex system -- be it educational, economic, political, social or biological -- competition and cooperation must be effectively balanced. When competition becomes excessive, it becomes counterproductive.
The recent announcement that Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are cooperating to offer free online courses is a promising development. Much more needs to be done. In coming articles, I will describe how overspecialization renders much undergraduate schooling irrelevant, and how globalization and online education provide opportunities for rethinking higher education.