Ben Buckman.net

The outline of this post came to me last week late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I jotted the bullet points in my phone and promptly fell asleep. Otherwise, since I graduated two years ago, this is apropos of nothing.

I majored in philosophy, which was mostly useless for practical wisdom (particularly Ethics). One thing that stuck was a metaphor a professor used for Aristotle’s virtue of Magnanimity: “Don’t run to catch a bus.” (Nassim Taleb makes the same point regarding trains (paraphrased from first person): “Snub your destiny... be in control of your time, your schedule, and your life.”) College itself is in many ways an expensive bus we all run after.

Economics was one of the most beneficial departments for my thinking. I was no good with the graphs, but some concepts stuck:

• Opportunity cost: the cost of doing some activity including the lost potential gain of the alternatives. Essentially a measure of tradeoffs (which, also learned in Econ 101, everything is).
• Externalities: all the things we do that have costs or benefits not “internal” to our own balance sheet. This is the premise behind most good public policy, and is key to understanding policies for the environment, education, and health care.
• Sunk costs: What’s already spent is gone, and therefore irrelevant to future planning. If doubling down on a bad bet won’t bring positive returns, move on.
• Diminishing returns: illustrated by a college degree, which might have immediate value (first job salary) but then matters less and less as past work experience becomes more important.

One other lesson I particularly remember from political philosophy was John Stuart Mill’s argument for women’s equality. Writing around the 1860s against the common wisdom that women were inferior (and therefore could not work or participate in politics), he made an out-of-the-box, almost counter-intuitive argument that no one could refute: even if women, on average, were worse than men at some activity, there was no way the best women were worse than the worst men, and the latter were not excluded. Ka-pow. (I liked the classes where my brain “clicked” often.)

Grad school reading is a sham. Every grad student I spoke to said they were given hundreds of books to read in a semester, and by necessity could only skim them. They had mastered techniques to figure out what an author said without reading the words. This fed the textbook industry, itself a scam, with thick tracts written by academics for academics that were re-released every year with the page numbers shuffled just enough to require new copies. The whole scenario smells of fraud, and anyway, no one can retain so much information when it’s consumed that way.

History was a string of accidents. The United States conquered the Philippines in 1898 - a turning point in American imperialism - because the message saying the war was over took too long to reach the fleet. (This fascinated me so much that I wrote a paper studying the history of naval communication.)

Calculus is rarely, if ever, taught well.

There is more truth in great fiction - which requires hypothetical thought experiments - than most nonfiction. The best class I took consisted of reading science fiction novels about utopia and dystopia, which generated far more deep thinking and insights than the thick treatises in other classes.

If you’re paying for college (or will be later with student loan debt), you might as well get your money’s worth. That means participate, ask questions, do the work, get good grades, join the clubs, use the free gym. Your grades will hardly matter after you graduate (and won’t matter at all after your first job), and you don’t need to have a 4.0 GPA to get your money’s worth (the cost/benefit is probably not worth it) - but barely graduating with a C average just seems like a waste of time and money. Put differently: if your goal in college is to focus on something else, like starting a business, and the degree is a nice side benefit, then save the money, put 110% into what you really want to do, and you’ll come out far ahead.

Skills matter far more than studies. Millions of students are graduating from college in this recession with liberal arts degrees and no marketable skills and can’t find work. Basic skills like learning how to communicate in an office, how to present a plan, how to network, are learned from experience (and academic classes don’t teach them), and more advanced skills like computer programming can open huge doors. So get a job in college even if you don’t need the money, as interesting as you can find but not necessarily along your imaginary long-term career path. Also, find a niche if you can, but build a diverse skillset. Knowing a little about a lot opens more doors later (and doesn’t preclude knowing a lot about a little in addition). Your CV doesn’t need to have a 1-10 proficiency scale next to each skill, it just needs to have more skills than the next person’s.

A corollary of the skills point is that you don’t need to know what you want to “do with your life.” You just need to be positioned to find and grab opportunities. Long-term plans can inhibit you as much as they motivate (if they prevent you from going on tangents that are actually more valuable). Unless you really have your heart set on a particular field or career (and most of the students I knew did not, and still don’t), skills and positioning are more important than planning.

Management theory is bullshit. In a Management 101 class I signed up for one summer, we did a case study involving some problem in a factory. The professor’s (a former factory manager himself) guidelines were to never do the work yourself, but rather instruct other people to do it. To my mind, that mindset is the root of the management-labor struggles of the last two centuries, and fundamentally flawed. (I dropped the class and worked instead.)

Take time off. I took a semester off in my junior year (after getting a semester ahead with summer classes) and it was more enlightening than the 3.5 years in class combined. Taking summer classes, incidentally, does not need to diminish the enjoyment of summer (especially if the summer term is divided into two semesters). If you don’t have good memories from college after you’re all done, then you wasted your time.

Looking back, I doubt my degree from BU was worth the cost. My work now evolved from the work I did to pay room and board in college, not the degree I happened to be getting at the same time. Friends who went to much cheaper state or community colleges seem to have gotten the same long-term value, especially if they are entrepreneurial. And students graduate every year with an expensive piece of paper and do nothing interesting (particularly ironic for business school graduates). Of course, it’s mostly a sunk cost and therefore irrelevant, except that I’ll be paying the price for another twenty years (to SallieMae), so it doesn’t feel sunk.

So my two cents of advice if anyone wants it, is take the money (real or imaginary) you’d spend on a private college and save it for something else. If you have $200,000 in a college savings fund, buy real estate, start a business, or put 75% in an IRA and travel the world for a year with the rest - and then be the most well-rounded student at a state college. If you don’t have the cash (and would have to take out loans), be cognizant that long-term debt (with no appreciable asset to balance it - a degree has diminishing returns) is a chain around your neck.

(Of course if you want to be a doctor or lawyer, then a BA is a prerequisite, though the benefit of one school vs another is still questionable. Your cost calculation is also different then - if your starting salary out of law school is $180,000 a year, you can pay off your debts pretty quickly. So this advice isn’t for you.)

Finally, read Seth Godin’s post on “the coming meltdown in higher education.” Something has to give eventually (the ROI can’t keep dropping forever), but in the meantime, we can be smart and avoid playing an overpriced game.