Recently entrepreneur and educator Vivek Wadhwa took on PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s premise that students would be better off starting businesses without finishing or even starting college. By framing the argument in terms of cost of education versus long-term earnings, both overlooked one of the most important factors in the decision -- the connection between higher education and happiness.
A few years back Richard Easterlin, an early economist in the econometrics of "happiness" published a surprising study. After looking at many things that correlate to happiness, including economic success and having kids, which surprisingly did not correlate, he found three correlations: health, marriage, and education.
The first two stuck out as consistent with what people most often answer as important factors. The third correlation, education, was a surprise. What he found was that education was related to making a better living in that those with more education tended to have higher incomes. However, as a person's income rose over time, their happiness did not. Yet, the bump up in happiness that began early in life for those with more than a high school education persisted throughout their lives. In essence, Easterlin dispelled any lingering notion of the old stereotype of "dumb and happy.” In fact, people with more education were happier than those with less.
Although Easterlin’s study statistically proves a connection between more education and happiness, it tells us less about why. For this, insight can be gained from biology as well as history. Even lowly amoebas show evidence that boredom and unhappiness occur when subjected to repeated stimuli without new ‘learning.’
More to the point for humans, Socrates asserted in the 4th Century BC that the purest form of happiness was sharing with someone else something you have learned. In some sense, Thiel with his Academy of Fellows is intuitively responding to a basic human desire by attempting to share directly with a group of bright young minds what he learned to be of value to him. Even so, Thiel and Socrates are both brilliant contrarians. Socrates argued (unsuccessfully) that his students shouldn’t learn to write and that doing so would give them a crutch that would harm their ability to think. (We know he said this, amusingly enough, because his student Plato wrote it down). Similarly, Thiel has argued that if he had gone to Harvard, what they would have taught him would have led him astray. In reality, the gap between the form of “higher education” that Thiel is offering to his select fellows and what is taking place at leading colleges is actually narrowing.
Many schools now offer undergraduate programs in entrepreneurship to complement those at graduate schools in business and engineering. At the University of Miami, entrepreneurship mentoring is tied to the career services office. At Duke, a new undergraduate pathway is rolling out in the Fall that includes a three-course sequence in innovation, Prototype and Design and Entrepreneurship, coupled with mentoring, internships, a Duke in Silicon Valley program (think semester abroad but in Menlo Park instead of Madrid), and an Idea Fund to seed fund the very best ideas. Much of this program is not unlike what Thiel is offering.