Ghost of a flea: The social network

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June 06, 2011

The social network

Naomi Schaefer Riley suggests college is a waste of time and money, taking college dropout Mark Zuckerberg as a for instance.

It is exactly the wrong for instance (via Five Feet of Fury).

In the recent movie “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg is shown devoting endless hours in his room to computer programming. He goes to a few parties, but mostly he is engaged in his new business venture, “the Facebook.” How is this possible, one might wonder? Was he flunking out of his classes? No. Thanks to the wonders of grade inflation and the lack of a serious core curriculum, it is possible to get through Harvard and a number of other high-price universities acing your computer science classes and devoting very little effort to anything else.

I have no doubt this is true at Harvard. But then, having had the opportunity to compare Harvard graduates with students from the University of Chicago, Berkeley, McGill and many more on a long list (including a number of humbler institutions on my resume), I have no doubt this was always true at Harvard. Of course, were we to follow this line of reasoning, Zuckerberg would have been better served by an undergraduate curriculum forcing him to study Economics 101 and the history of the Peloponnesian War rather than wasting his time founding a trillion dollar empire. But Shaefer Riley's argument isn't just wrong, it is beside the point.

You don't go to Harvard to get an education. You go to Harvard to meet other Harvard students. The whole point of The Facebook was to create an electronic equivalent of a Harvard print tradition. Initially, you could only join Facebook with a Harvard student email address and gradually the magic circle was extended first into other Ivy League colleges and then in an ever expanding arc in the greatest feat of brand stretching in history.

I am sympathetic to Peter Thiel's warnings about an education bubble but Shaefer Riley could not have picked a worse case to illustrate her point. Try dropping out of a college without a Harvard pedigree - or the family money and connections that got you there in the first place - and see how far you get.

Theorum: Gormless graduates lack basic workplace skills in "communication, problem solving, presentation, customer relations and even punctuality."

Corollary: Fourteen "star professors" are launching a private £18,000-a-year university to rival Oxford and Cambridge.

The tutors will include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, historians Sir David Cannadine, Linda Colley and Niall Ferguson, psychologist Steven Pinker, former Oxford professor Sir Christopher Ricks and geneticist Steve Jones.

Next month the New College of the Humanities, based in Bloomsbury, London, will begin taking applications for three-year courses beginning in 2012.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 6, 2011 06:27 AM