Higher Education Is Dying. Here's Why.
A common expression I think about often is how the hardest part about Harvard or Princeton, or any of the other major Ivy League schools, is getting in. And right now, there’s so much pressure on high schoolers to get into these schools. But I don’t know if that will be the case in the next 20 to 30 years.
Even before COVID, colleges and universities were going out of business. There are too many of them and they are too expensive. Add in the fact that more and more people are realizing that in many ways, these schools simply offer a rubber stamp on your résumé, but don’t showcase a person’s actual ability, and there will almost certainly be a reckoning against institutions that don’t hold prestige and can’t stay afloat. Maybe the top 100 schools — those that have solid brand recognition, and are good schools with big endowment — will survive. Many would-be students, however, are wising up to the reality that often, the debt they get themselves in isn’t worth the hassle at a second or third-tier school. And those schools aren’t going to be able to enroll enough students to pay tuition, and they don't have large enough endowments to cover the losses. So they're going to die.
I'm incredibly lucky in many ways to have gone to Princeton. I was able to meet incredible people while I was there and I learned a lot about myself. But the promise Princeton holds is that you're getting one of the best educations in the world and access to one of the best networks in the world. And I didn't really get an education that was actionable and pushed me towards a career, and I very lightly use the network. I am also keenly aware of the fact that going to a school like Princeton doesn’t carry the weight it did 30 years ago, and it certainly will carry even less weight 20 years from now. Simply put: I don’t think I can justify the price tag of 70-something thousand dollars a year, for what I got out of the experience.
Can a Legacy Be a Burden?
I was raised in a family and a culture where college wasn't an option — which itself is a rarity. Fewer than one out of five people finish college in a 10-year time horizon following high school, and fewer than one in three go after high school to begin with. So I'll be the first to say, I grew up in a very rarefied culture, where every kid in my graduating class of high school was expected to go to college, and almost every one of them did.
My parents met at Princeton, and my grandfather and great-grandfather both went to Princeton. I grew up going to the annual alumni event, and to hockey games, and my grandfather would tell me stories. This all added up to a lot of inertia: For me, Princeton felt ordained.
When I was in 10th or 11th grade and we started talking about college, I fell in love with a much smaller school called Hamilton College in New York. I liked that it was going to be intimate, and that it was in a beautiful, natural setting. It felt like maybe a better fit for me. So I applied to Hamilton and got in, and I heard two weeks later about Princeton. By that point, I had been rejected from three other Ivies, but my legacy at Princeton was perhaps enough to kind of get me from barely no to barely yes. And whenever I spoke about my options with people, they always asked me the same thing: Why would you not go to Princeton? Why would you sleep on the opportunity to go to one of the best schools in the country, and perhaps the world? So I went.
I don't mean to play the world's smallest violin about this process, which has shaped me in many positive ways. But at the same time, I've been in a vice of pressure since I was five. The private school I went to was very intense, and I have very intense parents and my friends' parents were intense, and Princeton's intense. So from time that I could tie my shoes to the time I graduated Princeton, I was dealing with an inordinate amount of pressure. I was writing 20-page papers very regularly for classes, and constantly feeling not quite enough and like I needed to be better. I was always trying to grab the next rung of the ladder to pull myself through life. That ethos is one that I'm challenging now, both as an entrepreneur and as someone who has left the nest and is questioning the way he was raised.
I've watched a lot of people I knew when we were kids crack under the pressure that was instilled in us from the time we were children. Some completely broke down and just couldn't handle it anymore, but the more common and sadder story was the overwhelming malaise I saw in my classmates. They are sleep-walking through life — they're doing fine on paper, they have a job and it pays some decent money, but they're not connected to what they're doing or the people that they're with. It's like the flame inside them has been put out because they, what sustained them for so long was that intensity, and they never had to develop their own inner drive.
How to Define Success Outside of Grades
The pressure I was raised with was definitely one vector, but I’ve also always had self-imposed goals, ideals, and a framework to counteract it. It’s the combination of both these things that has pushed me forward, both in life and toward success.
Most of the people that work for me have a deep pathology. You can tell where they need to prove something to themselves or to the world, for whatever reasons that ring true to them. To make it at a small, scrappy startup, you have to want it. You can't have just gone to MIT and know you’re smart and believe that's going to carry you through. You have to have a fire. Just being under a lot of pressure and writing papers at Harvard does not an inspired, passionate person make.
A lot of kids that get into good schools think that that means the world owes them something. But unless you can hack it and you have drive, passion, and an ability to get punched in the mouth and get back up, you're not going to succeed. I know that because every kid that I hired because they were impressive on paper has fallen by the wayside at my company, and some did so very quickly.
What drives me these days is probably the inverse of what drives my employees, none of whom went to college in the traditional sense. I'm the fourth generation in my family to go to Princeton, which is a headline that often puts me in some box. But I'm also going to outwork anyone because I want my success badly, and in a way that I hope undoes some of the damage of what someone might think of me if they were to just look at my résumé or hear my story. I'm not going to hide and say that I don't have privilege, because I do, but I also will show up and work harder than anyone else I know. I want to show up and impress people on the merits of how I act, not what college I went to. And I’m not sure college breeds that kind of fire, especially in those for whom their education was always a given.
The Price of College Is Too Damn High
Scott Galloway, a tenured professor at NYU Stern School of Business, says that colleges and universities are the biggest luxury brands of our time. Companies like Porsche and Hermes have profit margins of 40 or 50 percent because they're luxury goods and people will pay a premium for the name. But to take Galloway’s class, students are paying a 92 percent premium, if you factor in his salary and all of the costs for the school versus what they're charging. There's not a single luxury good on planet earth that has a 92 percent premium the way many schools do.
I don’t have student debt because my parents were able to pay for my education in full, but I know many people who do. The student loan debt figure is around $1.7 trillion dollars. And while I would call my Princeton experience additive, I don’t think the education I received was worth $300,000 as a transaction. And in that way, paying for a brand-name education is an inefficient use of funds — especially when hiring managers are now seeking qualified applicants with a fine-toothed comb. If I need a Facebook ad manager who's very data-oriented, I can find a very specific person, not just a broad-spectrum smart person who went to Harvard.
I have four employees, and not one of them went to college. I'm the only one on my whole team at my company who went to college at all. The proliferation of the internet has absolutely shaped that as a matter of course. Getting an education used to mean that you had to go to an institution that held the knowledge, but if you want to learn about something today, there are all kinds of courses online. You can also build your own education by being a freelancer and making mistakes and working your way up. Within a year or two, you could be making six figures as a freelancer, all from what you learned on Google and social media.
I always say to my team that the best ideas should win. I don't care where it comes from, and I don’t have any expectation as to who comes up with it. I just want good people who care and work hard and are earnest. Maybe because I'm somewhat of a masochist and I'm hard on myself, I'm drawn to people who are hard on themselves, who feel like they've been held down by the world a little bit and are pushing back. I like that hunger that comes with that. And I think as more and more people who have become disillusioned by student debt and the college experience come into roles where they can hire people, they’ll be looking for similar traits.
What Does the Future of Higher Education Look Like?
A huge miss right now with colleges is that they simply don’t or can’t cater to each student’s specific career curve. If you’re spending that much money, you would hope to understand where that path is taking you and what is out there. My friends and I didn't know that our current jobs existed when we were enrolled at Princeton. We didn’t even know they were options.
In Europe, 30 percent of people that go to school, learn a trade. They become a plumber or an electrician — careers that our society needs to function. I'm a huge proponent of trade schools in the old-school sense. We need people that have those hard skills, because if something minor happens with my sink, I can probably fix it, but anything more than that, and I need a professional’s help.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a trade school for softer skills would look like. General Assembly is a good example: It often serves people in their late 20s and early 30s wanting to make a career change, who take a six-week intensive for $6,000 and learn how to be a UI/UX designer or a copywriter or a developer. That feels like a good transaction to me, and I wish I'd learned more about what was out there professionally when I was younger. I wish that Princeton had done a better job preparing me and my peers for the job market, as opposed to holding on high this idea that a liberal arts education makes a well-rounded thinker, and you’ll figure it out later.
If young people can bypass the astronomical student debt, and get the basic skills to start a career, they’ll already have a leg up against their peers who take the more traditional route. If you want to be a writer, I firmly believe you should learn those hard skills at a trade school that teaches you one thing only, so you can get really good at it and make a career off of it. Within a year or two of working the career, you should have paid for your education, as opposed to now where it's 10 or 20 years of work before you've paid off your student debt, if you’re lucky.
For now, college still holds some clout, and I recognize that for many young people, it’s still important to go. But I would caution them to weigh their options carefully, and really think about their options before signing up for hundreds of dollars’ worth of debt. If you can go to a top-tier college, and you can afford it, by all means, take the leap — you’ll probably still find it worthwhile. But if you are doubting the process in any way, I’d encourage you to interrogate the why. See what else is out there, if anything. You might be surprised at the future you find.