Learn On Your Own

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in August 2015. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

I'm going to make a few people mad with this one. But that's ok. Sometimes a little controversy is good for us all. I have come to believe college as the Great American Religion is B.S.

Let's take the fact that some of us work in college sports and throw that aside. The College Football Playoff level athletic programs could theoretically exist without their institution anyhow. The power conferences have their own TV networks and digital networks and may even exist without the NCAA one day as the semi-pro leagues they nearly are.

What I'm referring to is the great college promise that is instilled into us as soon as we start elementary school: work hard, get good grades, go to college, get a degree and you will get a good job and be successful. There is a major problem with this thinking. School as we know it is built on the industrial revolution — teaching people to do repetitive things and get along with others so that we can all one day go work for someone else in a steel mill, small-town factory, coal mine or some other industrial job.

That may have worked years ago but times have changed with blue collar industries being outsourced overseas and the strategic thinking tech sector being prominent in today's job market. Technology moves at a very fast pace. The colleges have gotten so big and full of bureaucracies that even community colleges have a hard time implementing new curriculums in short periods of time. We know how fast the Internet changes from day-to-day so you could be heading to a university learning best practices and methods that are up to 4 years old. Google what the web looked like 4 years ago. Seriously, huge difference. To learn in today's society, you have to be agile.

Now I'm not saying that all people that work for colleges, go to college or believe in going to college are uninformed or simply not innovative. There are certainly forward-thinking folks working in higher education battling the bureaucracies and fighting up-hill battles to make things better and future-proof like my pal Diane Gibbs, a design professor at the University of South Alabama, studio owner and podcaster. Or my buddy and fellow EKU alumnus Chuckie Campbell, a hip-hop artist, writer, Ph.D. Engish professor and basketball coach in Buffalo, NY.

But relying on a lifetime educator — someone who went to college, then went right into teaching in college with no experience in the real world — is not a good method to invest your life's work into. How many people do you know around you that went to college but are content with what they learned then, not inspired to continue learning? They are working some white collar job, complaining every once in a while about not moving up the corporate ladder but not actually taking time outside of work to read business books, go to conferences or do personal projects to better themselves at their crafts?

College can be useful if you use it to learn how to learn. The things you learn themselves become dated quickly, however learning to experiment, fail and challenge superiors is where the real value is. The U.S. primary school system is not built on challenging teachers with new methods of thinking. It's built on remembering things and reciting them. What good is this when Google is a part of our every day lives now? I can go there and find out about the Constitution or the beginning of the Civil War, I don't need to remember it. I do however need to be able to problem-solve, to innovate and find new methods of thinking. Speaking of Google, they no longer require a degree to work for them. What they acknowledge and require is that are you smart, passionate, do side projects to experiment with out-of-the-box thinking and are constantly willing to better yourself.

More than half of the unemployed in the U.S. have an undergraduate degree. Student debt is facing a potential bubble and the selling salary to undergraduates is usually not attractive or just flat out not enough money to pay off the debts. Undergraduate degrees seem to be a dime a dozen nowadays and research-based institutions just keep assuming the money will continue flowing as students will continue showing up paying bloated tuitions to fund their research. Mark Cuban believes we will see the fall of the university in the near future. Potentially, just as the U.S. Post Office closed smaller offices for larger regional offices, we may see the smaller public universities go by the wayside for the large regional (known to us mostly as the BCS) universities. I've heard straight from a public university president's mouth that government money is not the future of funding education so they are looking for new ways to fundraise.

If your goal is to work in technology, design or the startup industry; even if you have a degree in another field, you should probably re-evaluate whether investing tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life into a piece of paper that most likely no one will ask you about is worth it before you decide to take that plunge.

The good news is there are great alternatives for working in tech. Specialized schools such as Huge Inc.'s UX school, Hyper Island or 30 Weeks are great alternatives to the traditional university; all using real working professionals and quickly changing, agile programs. Other alternatives for just learning about software and not necessarily methodologies are places such as Treehouse or Lynda.com. Individual educators who are experts in their craft are also eager to teach. I'm a fan of places such as GreyscaleGorilla for 3d tutorials or Video Copilot for motion.

If you teach yourself about programming from a place like Code Academy, you might even consider applying to a startup accelerator, such as the Dodgers Accelerator which is specific to sports.

The point is, if you don't have the money to head to college, are feeling the urge to change fields, or even did go to university, you should be learning on your own by reading books, blogs, audiobooks, podcasts or doing side projects; anything that can help you get better at what you do and apply lessons taught by those "who have done it" to your work. Listening to Makers of Sport is one area you are already doing that.

Keep learning, for life. If not, you will quickly get left behind by those of us that do.