A few weeks ago, I attended a conference at Stanford University. We finished in the late afternoon, and as I walked out into the sunlight I noticed groups of people, young and old, all streaming in the same direction. I decided to follow them. We came to a large courtyard where several thousand people were gathered in front of a stage. It was the university's 123rd freshman convocation.
Richard Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, was at the podium, dressed in academic regalia, telling a story about an American Indian student who had gone from the reservation to Stanford and become a NASA scientist. Dean Shaw announced that the freshman class included students from 49 states—"We miss you, Arkansas"—and 66 countries.
Then he looked out across the crowd of students and parents and said, "We have made no mistakes about your admission." And, in a rising voice, "You all deserve to be here!"
The crowd burst into applause.
I wish he had said something else. Something like this:
I know this is an important day for all of you. You have spent years of your lives trying to get here. Driving into Stanford this morning must have seemed like living a long-imagined dream.
And yet, I know many of you are nagged by something. Here you are, at a moment of unambiguous success and promise, sitting in a campus that looks like an American Versailles, the very best place you could possibly be. But you can't quite let yourself enjoy it, not entirely, because part of you is wondering, "Do I really deserve to be here?"
Well, as dean of admissions, no one is more qualified to answer that question than I am. Let me tell you, definitively, so there is no confusion among us.
You do not deserve to be here. Not yet.
"Deserve" is a heavy word, freighted with a shared sense of obligation. It can be understood only in a context of ethics. It denotes merit earned from service—that's where the "serve" part comes from.
That means service to others. And no, the nonprofit you founded in high school to shelter abandoned ferrets does not count. We live in a society increasingly defined by winner-takes-all competition.
You're the winners. And you won by serving yourself.
You had a lot of help, of course. That story I told about the American Indian rocket scientist is interesting because, and only because, it's unusual. Most of you came here from privileged places. It was hard to miss all of those late-model luxury cars lined up in front of the dorms this morning, disgorging your stuff. You've inherited financial and social capital that the average person can scarcely imagine.
And let me be the first to say that Stanford is no better. This was just another struggling private university until the federal government started flooding the valley around us with billions of Defense Department research dollars after World War II. This palace of learning was built by the labor of less fortunate people, as palaces always are. Our predecessors were smart and diligent and sometimes wise, but most of all they were in the right place at the right time.
So I worry about you. Fate has endowed you with gifts, and instead of becoming humble, you want reassurance that all you have was well earned.
It gets worse from here. You may have noticed that, out past the medical center and the golf course, the campus is bordered by something called Sand Hill Road. If you follow it west for a few miles, you'll come upon row after row of buildings full of money. Vast amounts of money. Even more money than we have here at Stanford. And that, believe me, is saying something.
The men in those buildings are investors, and they will trip over themselves trying to give some of their money to you. They will tell you that your idea for a smartphone app that sends a text message every time your pet ferret updates his Tumblr account is nothing less than a world-changing business plan, poised to sweep aside the tired and the old and replace it with a new generation of leaders.
People with the guts and brains and vision to take on the establishment. People just like you.
They will say you deserve it, and I'm afraid you'll believe them.
It's customary during ceremonies such as these to welcome one and all to the university family. I'm not going to do that, either. Universities worthy of the name insist on integrity of meaning. The word "family" means something. You just arrived here today. You are strangers to us, and, in many ways, to yourselves.
Fortunately, you have a chance to think about yourself in a different way. Stanford is best known for extending the boundaries of human knowledge, for uncovering mysteries of science and technology, and for creating and discovering things never known before.
But there are also people here who think very seriously about other things. Human things, like ethics and obligation and desire. Some of them work in our departments of history, literature, and philosophy, while others can be found among our engineers and scientists, too. Their concerns are as old as civilization, always present, never resolved.
Talk to them. Learn from them. You have the rest of your life to create the future, but less time than you realize to create yourself.
Don't mistake my talk of service for an appeal to your selfless nature. That need you feel to deserve what you haven't earned? That is a craving that can't be filled. That kind of desire will consume you in the end. You can choose otherwise.
So I say to you, on this brilliant day, in this lovely place, that while you do not deserve to be here, you could, someday. And I hope that if Stanford accomplishes only one thing on your behalf over the next four years, it will be some small assistance in really understanding what that means.
It won't be easy, and some of you won't make it. But I believe—I have to believe—that some of you will.
When you deserve it, come back to us. Share your service with your peers and your children. Then you'll be part of our family. Then you'll truly belong.
Stanford and Harvard, the two best universities on Earth, have enriched our lives with new discoveries, new technology, fantastic innovation, and outstanding ideas. Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com, @Venitis
I regret squandering the most beautiful twenty-two years of my life, from primary school to graduate school, to get a PhD! PhD now is just a toilet paper! 80% of employers consider attitude more important than aptitude, and 70% do not care about college degrees. Nowadays, lazy children go to colleges. Smart children join the real world, getting all information they need from the internet and their employers. All big employers have in-house training programs. The very smart children start their own business as soon as they get some experience.
Free MOOCs (massive open online courses) are replacing colleges. Many students now take the MOOCs of Harvard and Stanford, the two best universities on Earth.
Colleges have a huge negative impact on economy, because they destroy the most productive years of youth, trapping students in concentration camps, denying students experience in the real world, commoditizing their minds, and spreading the cancer of socialism. Colleges also siphon eggheads away from industry, transforming them to lazy vegetables. Donation to colleges is subsidy of your destruction!
Colleges spread the cancer of socialism. Nevertheless, it is the businessmen’s money that supports colleges in the form of voluntary private contributions, donations, endowments, and scholarships. Many billions of euros are donated to colleges by businessmen every year, and the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. Some of the worst socialist propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Studentship and professorship have become sinecures! Scholarships and fellowships are offered to students in order to fill classes, get donations and government money, keep eggheads employed, and lower official unemployment rates. Colleges have become concentration centers for losers and the drones of society, those weak at heart who do not dare to compete in the real world, finding comfortable shelter in ivory towers.
Greece has the worst higher education system in Fourth Reich. The Greek Ministry of Education, George Orwell's Ministry of Truth or Minitrue in Newspeak, harasses all private colleges and their professors. Professors of private colleges are required to submit myriad papers certified by lawyers and pay heavy fees. Visiting Minitrue is a very humiliating experience as the building is open for the public only from 12 to 1:30pm, with infinite queues and wild goose chase from room to room. After a professor submits an application to Minitrue, he might have to wait up to fifty days for an answer!
Fourth Reich(EU) has penalized Greece many times for harassing its private colleges, but Orwellian Greece continues the harassment, because it's a matter of its damned socialistic principles. Minitrue has created a special abusive office, the Bureau of Post-Lyceum Education, whose only function is to harass private colleges! Even though the Greek private colleges are much better than the public colleges, the Grand Brothel on Syntagma Square, passed a law that graduates of public colleges should get higher salaries than the graduates of private colleges!
Greek public colleges are covered with communist graffiti, stray dogs and communists run through buildings, professors pollute minds with socialist propaganda, and students dream of immigrating to Anglosphere. Colleges have been battered by kleptocracy and the cancer of socialism. Buildings aren't heated, schools nest sinecures, and professors hate teaching and cannot publish. It's hard to be hopeful with youth unemployment surpassing 50 percent, communists seizing buildings, and professors spreading socialist nonsense.
The naked truth about colleges is that a college degree is not worth the price of the sheepskin on which it’s printed! College education is waste of time and money. The college bubble will burst soon, tearing down all ivory towers. The college degree payback is very long, an expensive education is not a guarantee to higher real wages, and it is not worth going to debt to finance it. A widespread public skepticism is fueled by poor job prospects. Real wages, that is, what you earned after you subtracted inflation and taxes, entered a freefall in the past two decades. Rather than be out of work, most citizens quietly settled for lower real wages.
A college education has a value relative to future earnings, vocational success, and its ability to lift you above the economic burdens of underemployment and stagnant earnings. Right now, that equation just doesn't measure up. The reward to risk ratio of college education is the lowest of all possible investments.
Peter Thiel, the superstar Silicon Valley investor has famously dismissed college as a waste of time and money, and even offered students cash to drop out. Thiel has argued that the brightest young minds should strike out on their own and start companies rather than take on crushing debt to pursue a college degree.
Colleges are frauds. Many administrators rob the funds, many professors trade grades for bribes and sex, and most students dumb down! Anyone who wants to learn anything can do it much better on the Internet, without retreating to fraudulent concentration camps, called campuses. Allons enfants de la Patrie!
As the importance of faculty research and publication increases, the value of teaching tends to decrease. At research universities, prestige is often measured by how little you teach! This creates an incentive for faculty members to design courses that are closely related to their research. Many courses are based on what the professor wants to teach rather than what the student needs to learn.
Colleges have little value, and their graduates cannot find jobs. They are an embarrassment to education. Sending a child to a university is irresponsible. Total college education, direct and indirect, including bygone salaries, costs around 200,000 euros. That money would bring higher reward-to-risk ratio in any other investment. College years are lost years.
The main effect of government student aid programs is not to transfer wealth from taxpayers to students, but from taxpayers to academic institutions. That's because the rise in student subsidies over the decades appears to have fueled inflation in education costs. Tuition and other college costs have soared as subsidies have risen.
It is matter of supply and demand. More and more citizens have sought a college education, which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers' willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public's budget constraint has been lifted. Federal subsidies are seen by colleges as money that is there for the taking. Tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else can be extracted from parents.
Over the past few decades, a vicious cycle has been perpetuated by college policy. Governments increase subsidies for colleges, inflating students' purchasing power, in turn allowing universities to raise tuition, which ultimately increases the demand for more government subsidies. Not only would an increase in grant funding not break this vicious cycle, but it would also fail to place pressure on colleges to use resources more efficiently. The dysfunctional college market is an arms race where vast resources are targeted toward non-academic purposes such as athletics, building renovations, and administrative overhead costs in order to compete for students.
Most troublesome of all, continuing to increase subsidies for college raises questions of equity. Increasing government subsidies for colleges, whether in the form of grants or student loans, shifts the responsibility of paying for college from the student, who directly benefits from college, to the taxpayer. Transferring the burden of student loan financing from university graduates to the three-quarters of taxpayers who did not attend college is unjust. Kleptocrats should restructure the grant program so that funding goes directly to students, not to universities, and should limit access to grants after four years of undergraduate work.
Dropping out is a smart strategy of cutting losses short! Most top presidents and self-made billionaires dropped out of high school or college! The list includes Bill Gates(Microsoft), Larry Page(Google), Michael Dell(Dell), David Geffen(Geffen Records), Steve Jobs(Apple), Richard Branson(Virgin), Ralph Lauren(Ralph Lauren), Jerry Yang(Yahoo) and Zuckerberg(Facebook). Zuckerberg and Gates went to Harvard.
Page and Yang both attended Stanford. Jobs only completed one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Dell left the University of Texas at 19. Geffen dropped out of three universities before launching his record label. Lauren went to Baruch College in New York City, but left after two years. Branson, a mild dyslexic, never made it out of high school. Han Han, the world's most popular blogger, dropped out of high school in China. Ford Motors founder, Henry Ford, never had any formal education, outside his training as a machinist. Most famous politicians, such as UK Premier Major and EP President Schultz, never went to college.
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