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June 19, 2011

Colleges should stop imitating Harvard

Clay Christensen:

(CNN) -- Is college an invaluable waste of time? You bet. But it's about to get even more valuable.

It's great to see capable people debating the value of higher education. Earlier this month, Dale Stephens, a 19-year-old entrepreneur who has won a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, wrote that "College is a waste of time." One can argue that Dale is too young -- and too extraordinarily intelligent -- to be a good judge of the value of college to the average person. But if students like Dale, the kind that the best schools want to attract, are dissatisfied, that can't be good. Anyhow, Dale's description of college as a place of conformity, competition and regurgitation strikes an uneasy chord with some of us older, more-ordinary folk.

Two more smart people responded to Dale's argument. One of them, Brian Forde, is a successful entrepreneur who went back to school for an MBA degree because he found gaps in the knowledge he needed to lead his company. Brian described his higher education as "invaluable." Joseph Aoun, whose Northeastern University runs one of the best cooperative education programs anywhere, argued that "College is your best bet." He shared sobering data on the price of not having a college degree in difficult economic times such as these.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 19, 2011 4:32 AM
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