This University Teaches You No Skills—Just a New Way to Think
17th November 2014
Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point.
Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. “Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” he says. “If that’s the role of universities, you’d have to be insane to go to universities.”
Uh, Ben? If you’ve got a job opening and the choice is between somebody who can code in Python and somebody with a Yale degree who can code in Python, which one is going to get hired? This conceit of ‘college is there to teach you how to think’ is obvious BS to anybody who has been to college — including Yale.
The places that really do teach you how to think are law schools — where, ironically, they’re supposed to be teaching you the legal equivalent of coding in Python, but typically don’t. Go figure.