What's an Education Worth?

/

This story from the WSJ has been making the rounds today: 

Struggling Thunderbird Business School Finds a For-Profit Lifeline

It's worth a read for anyone interested (or in) management education. The short story is that the Thunderbird School of Management has leased its main campus to a for-profit campus operator in order to stay afloat. While the recession has hit every walk of graduate education, Thunderbird lacks an affiliated university and is thus particularly vulnerable to the downturn. And while it may be an extreme case (applications are down 75% over 15 years), it's worrying when viewed as a canary in the coal mine.

Thunderbird's solution (a twenty years lease to a for-profit campus operator) is also worth a pause. In the short term, it keeps the school running and allows for valuable (and substantial) investments in campus infrastructure. Over the long term, it's worth asking whether shifting a formerly non-profit educational institution into a for profit enterprise fundamentally harms its educational mission - a question that's particularly apropos in the context of the current discussion on higher education in America.

Personally, I believe that full time, dedicated, and in-person educational experiences offer an unparalleled value in terms of networks, skills, and expanded horizons they allow students to develop. At the same time, the options for free, online, and interactive learning platforms are improving, which means that the benefits of the "in the flesh" experience need to be quantified and communicated to students; especially once a school can no longer claim "education" to be it's only goal.


 

The Quantified Self

/

On any given day, I walk about 14,000 steps, or 7 miles, and burn 2,650 calories. I walk less when I work from home, by a factor of about 2x. I sleep 7 hours per night, take 14 minutes to fall asleep, and wake up an average of two times per night. I run more than my wife, but less than (many of) my friends.

All of this data comes from an experiment, running about three months now, with carrying a personal fitness tracker by Fitbit. The little device sits in my pocket and records how active I am throughout the day. With it, I know my general level of activity as well as the intensity of specific workouts, and all of this data uploads to an online profile to be shared with a circle of friends. And while the little gadget certainly hasn't revolutionized my life, the ability to be aware of and engaged with my own fitness is pretty appealing.

As it turns out, a lot of people are banking on exactly that idea.

 

Read More

When Less is More

/

Although there's plenty of research that highlights the importance of constraints in creativity and innovation, it's often hard to imagine that being true in our own lives. After all, if I can cook this delicious meal in my own kitchen, imagine what I could do with double the budget!

Less is often more, though, and I recently had a chance to see that maxim in action by taking part in Research As Design, a short-form course designed by Marilyn Cornelius, Amanda Cravens, Anja Nabergoj, Nicola Ulibarri, and Adam Royalty, now in its eleventh iteration at Stanford. The basic premise of the course is that although research can be an enormously creative endeavor, academics rarely have any real training in the creative process. The course goal is thus to apply the design thinking mindset and tool kit to the process of academic research. If you're at Stanford, I highly recommend participating. If you're not, get in touch with Marilyn anyway: they've got great lessons and they're eager to share.

The prompt for this post, though, was a momentary outburst of frustration from one of the students during a brainstorming exercise. We were working as a group to identify solutions to an issue in our research when the instructors imposed an arbitrary constraint: the solution had to cost a million dollars or more. It honestly made no sense. How do you stay focused while working on a difficult problem? Jewel-encrusted headphones. Build a private office on a desert island. Hire Ryan Gosling to distract the people who were trying to distract you. What?

The goal of brainstorming is to encourage outside-the-box thinking. Adding arbitrary, or even silly, constraints does this by making you think of crazy, impractical, or even impossible solutions. Not only might one of these "crazy" solutions turn out to be totally feasible, but at the very least you're forced to identify (and maybe ignore) the implicit assumptions that had constrained you before. It sounds crazy, but it works.

And here's a testimony to prove it. Phil Hansen is an artist who suffered irreparable nerve damage that eliminated his ability to draw straight lines. Rather than being stymied, he took this constraint and used it to launch his art into a new realm of creative (and sometimes crazy) expression. Take a few minutes to watch his 2013 TED talk here:

​

Happy, Healthy, and Hard at Work

/

Every election brings with it odes to the "job creators" and long-winded discourses on importance of entrepreneurship, and this one was no different. After all, we know that entrepreneurs create jobs, and that employment figures drive election results. And although it turns out those are both partial truths, it IS true that entrepreneurship is good for the economy. But is entrepreneurship good for entrepreneurs? It's an interesting question that scholars like Chuck Eesley (in my research group) and others are working to unravel. It's been established, for instance, that the financial returns to entrepreneurship are negative relative to more traditional employment. In other words, entrepreneurs would do better to take a job than to create one. At the same time, research also finds that people don't necessarily enter entrepreneurship for the money: concerns such as autonomy and bringing ideas to life tend to top the list. But while being your own boss certainly sounds nice, entrepreneurship also brings a tremendous amount of stress. A common mantra among entrepreneurs is that "there are no weekends", and a coworker once joked to me that "the best way to ruin a marriage is to start a company."

So what's the net impact on entrepreneurs? A recent study by Michael Dahl and colleagues at Denmark's Aalborg University tried one novel way to find out.

Read More