An interesting book that I recently enjoyed reading is "Start-up nation". The author tells us about the infrastructure, support, capital and overwhelmingly nurturing culture that the Israeli government has created in order to foster start-up companies, esp in life-sciences.
Fast forward to 2011...a tough job market...and the # 1 employer of college graduates being Teach for America (> 46,000 applications last year!) and Andrew Yang has an idea and decides to launch Venture for America (VFA), which will attract our best and brightest grads to start-up companies in the US and plant an entrepreneurial seed in their mind, early in their careers. Interesting!
The question remains, what is the best way to educate our future generations, particularly Millennials who are just graduating and entering a tough job market?
Some (Peter Thiel included) argue that education, in the traditional sense, is too costly and does not have value for certain people. Street smarts, starting a company, leading, and entrepreneurship are not skills best acquired in a classroom. But isn't there a baseline foundation that one needs before getting to all of that? Peter's experiment is to offer a handful of students funding for their companies in exchange for not attending college and jumping right in. Time will tell whether this proves to be a positive experience.
Increasingly, part of the debate has been home-schooling, online education, and most recently a new institution (Avenues) which turns the entire preparatory/Northeast feeder school curricula upside down and offers a unique educational model for our next generation.
As someone who has invested a lot in my personal education, including ivy league school, graduate school, post-graduate training, and then sub-specialty training, I argue that there is tremendous value in a formal education. However, most of my important life lessons and the ethos of who I am, were formed outside of the classroom...and some really by chance. Those experiences have really colored the fiber of who I am....but all layered on a strong foundation of a formal education.
