Since the beginning of pandemic I have been standing a stump screaming about how terrible the COVID-19 is but also how it is an opportunity. Check out Chaos = Opportunity and later I was asked by Adelphi to give a presentation about it, find that here: Reframing Crisis as an Opportunity. So when my dear friend Joanna Templeton sent me a link to Scott Galloway’s book titled Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity without any context or any other words, I realized that I had to buy it and read immediately. It’s a great read, but…

Here is a summary of the book as I see it:

• Chapter 1: The world is undergoing a great disruption because of COVID-19
• Chapters 2-3: There are a number of lean-mean disruption machines out there ready to take over everything.
• Chapter 4: Higher education is ripe for the taking. Folks are about to start disrupting. Expect Apple, Google, MIT, etc or some combo to monopolize higher education in the coming years.
• Chapter 5: CURVE BALL ALERT! He goes into this discussion about the importance of community and then proposes the Corna-Corps, a group of recent high school grads that can be low-skill health care workers, contact tracers, etc.

So in this blog post let me first dive into what the higher education argument discussed in chapter 4 and then pivot to the missing chapter 6.

Galloway proposes the following algebraic equation for the value proposition of higher education:

Which the physicist in me started to think way too hard about. (Btw Scott, I was ready to do some math in your book The Algebra of Happiness and was sad there wasn’t any, LOL.) But it is starting to get to the core of the question why do people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college. It would interesting to see some one do a study on if the equation fits. Of course that is outside my realm so I will leave that to the social sciences.

Galloway makes an argument some what like this, I think. Schools like Harvard, MIT, and Yale turn away so many good candidates at their universities that are capable of being successful there. There are just a lot of good students out there. The students who don’t make it into the elite schools pile into near elite schools, that have very high tuition, so that they can be proximity to these big name schools. So why wouldn’t an elite school such as Harvard, which now has about 7000 undergrads, partner up with a big IT player such as Google and increase the the number of undergrads to 70,000? In there, there is room for disruption of the higher educational model. If everyone could go to Harvard, why would you ever go to Wesleyan? Of course this argument has been around for while starting with the MOOCS. But up until now online education as been seen by some people as a subpar route through higher education – now its just normal.

There is a substantial discussion about how the rich use higher education as a exclusionary tool. Galloway suggests a series of recommendations for higher education including increasing the power of state schools, find ways to tax universities that are rich but are not inclusive, reform tenure, and encouraging gap years. All good things.

Scale is important. I think the direction of the scale is what is missing. Instead of getting bigger, having more options, and having access to bigger and better professors and facilities. I think the secret for successful higher education is to reduce scale.

I can train a student to be a diode laser physicist but the technology develops so fast that the specific skills I teach on diode lasers might become obsolete quickly. It is better that I teach the student to be physicist. Where the skills and training are more related to how to think and solve problems. You can be one of 70,000 students that watch a Nobel prize winner discuss the finer points of black hole formation. Which you should but education should not stop there. You need a caring wonderful professor there to walk you through ideas. To be there for you. To lift you up. To point you in the right direction. To yell at you when you are slipping.

Galloway says:

Education is local. Here is what Galloway is missing. Those ringers are ringers because they connect with their students and connect their students to the world. (BTW Adelphi, we can work out a plan to triple my salary.) I teach a 100 students a semester. Talk to my students, I am looking out for their futures and its what I do. I quite literally tell them I love them. I am trying to connect them with jobs. I am trying to help support my community. I can’t do that for 1,000 students and I definitely can’t do that for 10,000.

When I think of education, I think of this, folks out exploring the world together:

The solution isn’t bigger and at higher scale. The solution is smaller and connecting more. Move more in the line of the work Michael Sorrell is doing at Paul Quinn college. Make college cheaper and personal by connecting to the community.