“What ails the American economy?”
This is the leading question of a new Harvard Business School (HBS) survey released Wednesday. The answer, according to the survey’s nearly 10,000 HBS alumni respondents, is this: Just about everything.
Professors are better at teaching the cut-and-dried academic science—physics and chemistry, theoretical models, and diagnosis/treatment decision trees—than the messy but critical subjective parts of medicine: When is it worth subjecting a patient to additional testing or treatment? What would motivate a particular patient to eat broccoli instead of bacon cheeseburgers?
What happens when a lizard slips just before leaping into the air? Does the tail go up or down? And what on earth does it have to do with emergency first responders and retaining students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields?
The answers start with a study by scientists at the University of California Berkeley.
Gernot Wagner is the author of But Will the Planet Notice? How Smart Economics Can Save the World. He teaches at Columbia University and is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Five years ago, top Harvard College graduates flooded Wall Street. They were small cogs in a race-car engine, except the car was speeding over a cliff. It’s no wonder that today’s graduates are reconsidering their career choices.
They should start with economics.
Do you think colleges should be required to prominently post a College Report Card on their Web site?
Dear Peter: I want to congratulate you and political scientist and author Charles Murray on winning the debate in Chicago Wednesday against Northwestern University President Emeritus and Rasmussen College Chairman Henry Bienen and me on whether too many Americans go to college. I should not have been surprised considering Washington Post readers declared you the winners even before the debate had started.
What surprised me was how much we agreed on.
The Washington Post’s Vivek Wadhwa will debate PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel Wednesday evening regarding a subject the two have disagreed on for some time: Whether America’s youth should attend traditional colleges? Wadhwa argues that America’s next generation cannot afford to abandon the nation’s colleges and universities for customized, self-directed education. Thiel, who has offered 20 individuals $100,000 to drop out of college, argues that college has become overly expensive while providing students with few — if any — of the tools they need to become entrepreneurs.
But what do you think? Is it time to do away with the traditional college experience? Or, as countries such as India and China begin to see rapid expansion, is it time to push harder for more widespread, traditional schooling?
