Education

College isn’t for everyone, and we need to stop telling kids that it is.

Dramatically increase the intensity, challenge, and bar for K-12 education. Heavily support kids who can’t keep up with after-school lessons, but don’t hold back the rest of the class. There will always be a distribution of outcomes but that’s okay.

Most people have some kind of genius within them. There are many different kinds of intelligence: scientific and mathematical, sure… but art, music, hand-eye coordination, social, creative problem-solving, endurance. But this doesn’t mean that everyone’s equally smart. There are still distributions within each kind of intelligence. Invest more in finding and fueling this hidden potential, not in serving the lowest common denominator.

Focus on enabling and unleashing the top 5% of kids in each field.

• Generally, the top 1% of a field are more impactful to society in 50 years than the bottom 50% — Jonas Salk, Henry Ford, JP Morgan, General Patton, Michael Jordan, Ella Fitzgerald, each had a bigger impact than a thousand other “average” people in their fields, combined.
• Of course, some of that is luck, but it’s clearly possible to identify savants early on.
• If societal progress generally comes from the outliers, then every child should have the same basic foundations, but the gifted children should receive disproportionate academic investment.

Heavily invest in trade schools. Plumbers are likely to have a more secure professional life than most white-collar workers in the age of AI.

Stop talking about student loan forgiveness. Subsidizing the cost of something makes the price go up. If you don’t believe this, take an entry level economics course.

Fix the broken parts of the student loan system:

• Allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy after 7 or 10 years
• Go after predatory student loan lenders — just like we go after predatory practices in any other financial sub-sector. They currently have an unregulated oligopoly.

Institute pay for performance in education. The goal of the education system isn’t to “protect teachers”, it’s to educate and elevate students. The best teachers should make 2-5x the average because their work is massively impactful to society. Fire the bad teachers.

Disband teacher’s unions, solely because they will fight pay-for-performance tooth and nail.

(Both the pay for performance and disbanding unions points applies to all public sector organizations. There’s a slightly better argument for private sector unions to create leverage, but the government isn’t profit-maximizing the same way.)

Continue experimenting with charter schools, vouchers and other means to raise the bar in thoughtful ways. Experimentation should never be a political issue.

Institute similar outcome-oriented systems with colleges: every accredited institution should be required to publish post-graduation outcomes on a 0, 1, 3, 5, and 10 year horizon. It’s easy to crowdsource this with simple authentication of alumni email addresses.

Start taxing endowment funds in excess of $250K / enrolled student.

The third rail: public discourse and social norms