The Golden Age of Education

December 27, 2011

10 years ago, if you did well in high school you’d get into college. If you went to college and finished your degree, with fairly high likelihood you could get a job with a respectable salary. Nothing in the world is ever truly a given, but I think it’s fair to say that what arose in colleges were certain tracks that you could follow to the end where there was a job waiting for you. If you studied Finance, Engineering, or Business, you were competing for the the best jobs but you always had a fallback. Most other majors were in a similar albeit slightly less comfortable position. The occasional philosophy major aside, the career outlook was looking fairly bright. It’s in the news every day now though, the demand for jobs is not being met – winter’s coming or is already here.

There are a lot of theories floating around on what is the fundamental cause of the prevalent high unemployment rate, and with any complex problem the answer is probably some mixture of everything. A bad economy, jobs being displaced by software, and a generation not trained for the demands of modern society all likely factor into our current predicament.

It’s that last one that keeps me up at night. We spend 20 years educating our youth for a job that they will spend an average of four and a half years at, going through roughly 11 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 44 . The curricula taught at universities are completely out of date and out of sync with industries, and for most people you get a total of four years of professional education for the next 50 years of your life despite the fact that industries are created and destroyed in the span of a decade today.

We need something new. We need a system that can keep up with the increasingly fast pace of changes in industries and emphasizes lifelong learning instead of condensing it into four years to last a lifetime. We need it to be better, faster, and more efficient, and I think the startup community is finally starting to feel it. I don’t think it’s an outrageous prediction to say that 2012 will be the beginning of a golden age for education.

Note: Here’s a list of new online education initiatives that I’ve cherry picked from Reddit. I tried to pick ones that have picked up a lot of steam in 2011 just to make a point that this area is no longer being neglected by entrepreneurs.

This is obviously not a comprehensive list, just some of the interesting ones that have been growing in popularity recently. Check out Reddit’s list for something much more thorough and less engineering-biased.