like this.
Students are protesting
because their government is cutting subsidies to education.
And the big part of the reason for this,
both the government cutting subsidies
and student now cry is that
getting a college education doesn't cost what it used to.
If you graduated more than 2 decades ago,
you might be surprised to know that
it now costs students over two and a half times
as much as it did for you,
and that's in real dollars for any economists in the audience here.
It's not an easy problem.
On one hand the cost is becoming harder for both,
students and government to bare.
But in the other hand employers are demanding
an educated workforce.
They want employees with complex analytical skills.
The world now runs oot of what we dig out of people brains
not just what we dig out of the ground.
So, that's the problem.
Now what's the fix?
Let me be completely honest with you.
I have no idea.
But what I want to suggest is that maybe we've been looking in the wrong place.
We've been expecting change to come from schools and governments,
but what if the change came from us.
I'd like to share my story and suggest that maybe
an education doesn't need to be expensive
and what's more,
maybe we can learn better without it.
So in my case I was lucky.
When I was accepted to college,
I managed to narrow down my choice in major to two choices:
Business and computer science.
I was really interested in both.
With one you get to build companies,
with the other you get to build technologies.
And these two are not mutually exclusive.
After all Bill Gates was a hacker before he built an empire. (Laughter)
But in my school I could only major in one.
So I did what any freshman would do,
and did a careful rational cost-benefit analysis.
[Gender Ratio] (Laughter)
So business it was, and after graduating
I have no regrets.
I learned a lot and I had a great time.
But after finishing my education,
I had this longing for the path not taken.
I really wanted to learn computer science.
But going back to school didn't appeal to me
four more years of my life,
acceptance boards, tuition bills,
I didn't want to postpone my life and rack up debt,
just to pursue a curiosity.
I wanted the education, not the school.
Then I remembered that Universities like MIT, Harvard, Stanford,
had a habit of putting up classes online for free.
I've done a few of these before and then a thought occurred to me.
If you could learn a class, why not an entire degree.
That was the beginning of an experiment.
Would it be possible to get an MIT education in computer science
without ever going to MIT?
So it's an intriguing idea,
but already you could probably notice
the complexities and objections that may raise
so going to the MIT is a lot more than just what you learn in the classroom.
So how can you possibly hope to replicate something
which is such a multifaceted experience.
So I like to think college is a lot
like eating at a five star restaurant.
You're never paying for just the food.
You get the wait staff, elegant decor, the fancy french wines.
You're paying for a complex and multifaceted experience.
And the same is true at college.
You get networking with your intellectual peers,
research opportunities and credentials from elite institutions.
And like the fancy restaurant
you get a big bill at the end.
And you know what, sometimes this system works,
but just as you probably don't want to go to a five star restaurant,
every time you get hungry,
you probably also don't want to go back to school
every time you want to learn something.
I didn't want the five course meal.
I wanted my education "a la carte".
So what mattered most to me, was being able to understand
the big ideas of computer science;
like algorithms, artificial intelligence,
encryption, and the Internet.
And being able to implement those ideas in computer programs.
So I decided to make my challenge simple.
My goal will be to try to pass the exams an MIT student would do
and to do the programming projects.
I admit it is a simplification.
It omits a lot of the MIT experiences.
But for what I wanted to get out of it,
it was a pretty good simplification.
And what mattered more,
it was a simplification that worked.
So I was able to build a curriculum of 33 classes,
that with one or two minor exceptions
was identical to the course list an MIT student would use.
And I was able to build this using only MIT's free online available information.
The only cost was for a few text books
which meant I could follow this entire program for under $2000.
So I had my goal and now I have the material.
Now for the hard part: actually learning MIT classes.
I'm not kidding myself, MIT is a really hard school
it's notoriously difficult even for bright students
and what is more, I'm not going to have the help of faculty,
and professors, and classmates that I can easily get help from.
In theory the project's doable but it was too difficult in practice.
When I told my friends about this,
that I was planning on doing an MIT degree on my own,
they reinforced those doubts.
They told me they could not imagine
trying to learn a MIT degree on your own.
It'd be too difficult without constant guidance and support of faculty members.
But that last point didn't ring true for me,
because when I went to college, I was in lecture halls like this one,
where the professor would give a talk
to an auditorium full of 300 students.
Yeah, sure that if I had a question I could rise my hand,
but if really didn't understand something
it was up to me to learn it
so perhaps the doubts and worries over do-it-yourself degree,
had more to do with it being unconventional,
than it being genuinely more difficult than a formal program.
As I started doing the first few classes,
my results were even more surprising.
I found I was able to learn faster using this approach
than I ever had while in university.
So far from being an obstacle,
it turned out that not going to MIT
had made my job a lot easier.
Ok, so that last bit deserves a little bit of explanation.
After all, an MIT student has access to everything I do, and much much more.
How can I possibly have an advantage over a student
when I have a fewer resources?
It defies common sense.
So in order to explain this, I need to do a little bit of a detour.
I need to go into the geeky realm of personal productivity.
So there is a tool called the time log.
And here is how the time log works.
You jot down the starting and the stopping times
for every activity you do.
And I mean every activity, from when you wake up in the morning,
to when you take out the garbage.
My guess is that most of you here have never done a time log before,
because just imagine how irritating that is to do.
But if you do one, the results can be eye-opening.
Here's a recent Wall Street Journal article
where the reporter did just that.
She writes:
"I soon realized I'd been lying to myself
about where the time was going.
What I thought was a 60-hour workweek wasn't even close.
I would have guessed I spent hours doing dishes when in fact
I spent minutes.
I spent long stretches of time lost on the Internet
or puttering around the house, unsure exactly what I was doing."
Because I am huge geek I've done time logs before
and I can say the situation is even worse for students.
The vast majority of time students spend,
isn't spent learning, it's spent commuting to class,
copying notes at Starbucks, and trying to stay awake in lectures.
If you could total up the amount of time
that students spend forming new insight,
and remembering facts which is of course
what learning is, it would be tiny.
And for the most part, this is not even the student's fault.
After all, entrepreneurs often notice
a startling difference in their productivity,
at a start-up versus a big firm.
Big institutions mean bureaucracy.
They mean paper work, they mean doing what you're told
instead of what's important.
So being an educational entrepreneur can offer some learning advantages
over people in a formal system.
So, take lectures as a perfect example
So, when I would do MIT lectures, when I started doing the classes,
I would watch them at one and a half times the speed.
This may sound very difficult, but the difference
is barely audible in human speech,
if it goes too fast, you just hit rewind.
Students in a regular classroom don't have access
to a fast-forward or rewind button,
even though I'm guessing most of them would like one.
And the impact of this isn't trivial.
By being able to watch lectures at a slightly faster pace,
and watching them sequentially,
I was able to take classes that normally span four months,
and watch them in two days of real time.
Or take assignments.
Students do assignments because they have to.
Yes, sometimes they facilitate learning,
but sometimes they don't.
For example, if you are struggling with a concept
why wait weeks to get your answers back?
When I would do a hard MIT assignment,
I would do the questions with the solution key in hand,
one question at a time,
because it's tight feedback loops like this
that cognitive scientists recognize as being critical to learning.
And you don't need to be a genius to apply these ideas either.
being able to replay keys segments of lectures;
being able to get immediate feedback on your skills;
these are structural advantages that benefit slow learners
as much as they benefit fast ones.
So, where am I right now?
As of this moment I've completed 20 of the 33 computer science courses
in the MIT curriculum.
And by completed I mean
I've passed those final exams and I did the programing projects
associated with those classes.
What's more, because of speed-ups like this that I have mentioned,
I'm on track of finishing the program in 12 months instead of 4 years.
So today the big topic is about how technology is going to change
educational institutions and classrooms.
I think this misses the point.
The big upheavals in education aren't going to be about schools,
They are going to be about students.
And I am not alone in believing this.
There is already grassroot organizations
looking to rethink education, not from the top-down
but from the bottom-up.
These are movements that are not planned by schools or governments,
but from students who are fed up with the limited options
the current system provides.
Education hacking is the new trend.
So billionaire investor Peter Thiel gives 100,000 dollar scholarship to students,
not to go to school but to drop out, and start something interesting.
So when the best and brightest and most motivated start singling their talent
by not going to school, the rest of the world will take notice.
And it is not an "all or nothing" proposition either.
Jay Cross, the founder of "Do-It-Yourself Degree"
is putting together a list of universities
based on the number of transfers credits they accept.
That means you can go to a real university,
and get a real degree,
but minimize the amount of time you have to spend
learning in the classroom.
Look, I get it, maybe you don't want to go to MIT
or try to learn an MIT degree on your own just for fun, I get that.
But even if you decide to do your education the old fashion way,
this still impacts you.
The world is changing too fast to believe that learning stops
once you get your diploma.
Being able to teach yourself complex skills and big ideas
is going to be essential to stay ahead.
So, like it or not, most education in the future
is going to be self-education.
Universities aren't going away anytime soon,
they will always offer things self-education will miss.
They're a great experience
even if they're sometimes an expensive one.
But that said, I believe self-education is the future.
If a person like me can learn an MIT degree in one quarter of the time
and 1/100 of the financial cost,
what's to stop you from doing it too?
Thank you.
