Sports scouts descend on US high school campuses or the slums of Brazil to find kids who show talent in basketball or soccer. These kids are then brought into specific colleges or cities and they’re trained for many years till they reach their potential. Some of them become the greatest athletes in the world. The stakes are high in sports, therefore, we are searching for athletic talent. Star athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady, and Lebron James earn millions of dollars.
The same saga started in education. Some companies started doing the same and they are looking for smart students. In the United States the richest country in the world we have gifted programs on a limited basis for every hundred dollars that we spend on education in the United States. In 2014 the US spent $3B in STEM education.
The US spends ~2.5 cents on gifted programs this means that for a small number of students there are guided and supported and for everybody else, their potential suffers. The richest country in the world, an $18 trillion dollar economy is so stingy when it comes down to STEM. As a result, the interest in STEM is low. According to the U.S. Department of Education, only 16% of high school students are interested in a STEM career.
Let’s see what happens all over the world. The top 25% of India’s student population with the highest scores is greater than the entire student population of the United States. This means that there are more honor students in India than there are students in the US.
Finding these students and developing them would have a massive impact on the economy and on society. But let’s see at the status quo, how do we go about it now. Intellectual measurement of high school students depends mostly on 1 national exam. Students spend years of their lives improving their test taking skills for this exam. Even when they go to college they continue to be measured by rote learning skills that are totally irrelevant to the work that they will ultimately do.
There is a mismatch between the skills we should be developing in our top students and the ones that they are spending time on. Case studies that have flourished as a teaching method in US colleges are still completely absent from most high school curriculums. There were some attempts to make them be a part of it, most notably by the University of Buffalo and StageLearn in 2014, but teachers did not embrace the concept.
Teachers not only need to be trained but they need to be motivated. How can this happen when the best paid teachers in America today, like Harvard Business School professors, make around $150K per year? Teachers in high schools earn low salaries too. They are overworked and underappreciated. At the same time, athletes or movie stars make millions per year. Why is that? There are 4 reasons for this:
- Necessity of product
- Transparency of product efficacy
- Scarcity of labor
- Distributability of product
The Internet has brought a similar shift in education. Increased transparency has improved learning materials. Just look at EdModo and Teachers pay Teachers. These marketplaces flourish. There will also be an increased focus on the talent in education: teachers.
Not every teacher will choose to teach online. But every amazing educator who does will make the value of teaching more apparent to larger-than-ever audiences, audiences they could not reach before due to the geographical barrier that the Internet has eliminated.
Not every teacher will see better pay. Some teachers will become online superstars and make millions of dollars. A Korean tutor makes $4M a year. Most will make more but it won’t be universal. Online education will inevitably do what politicians have long promised, and failed, to do: increase the average salary of teachers and respect for the profession.
But case studies and teachers will not suffice on their own. We need to motivate smart students too. How can this be done? We need to:
- Appreciate them
- Challenge them
- Allow them to meet other like-minded students online (same interests and talents)
We need a platform that caters to these needs. The platform should have a community feel where:
- Problem solving must be created
- The process, and not the solution, is what matters most
The problem sets on the platform should:
- Go deeper and be more advanced than what is typically covered in school
- Require creativity and critical thinking
- Not be straightforward and require conceptual and analytic ability
- Be created by like-minded students. It takes one to figure out the other one!
These are the kinds of skills that are relevant in today’s world and by tracking them and putting them on display. Our goal for these students is to create the conditions in which there are opportunities to succeed has to have less to do with chance and more to do with their individual drive. Students who want an intellectual peer group are everywhere. They will use a search engine to find a site that challenges them.
By 2025 there will be 100M students in a rapidly growing top quartile of students ages 12 through 22 who are enrolled in school and have Internet access These students have the potential to be the most innovative and productive people in the world but only if they don’t fall through the cracks. The world moves forward when people can reach their potential and there’s high demand for gifted people, especially in STEM fields.
Today 60% of the top 5 jobs employers are filling are in STEM related fields. If you look at these jobs you will see that they are highly technical and the job requirements are ever changing. The way that students are being prepared doesn’t match what they’ll be expected to do in order to solve real problems.
Organizations can benefit from this too. They can search for bright people based on signals of aptitude. The one who will gain the most is the country that will embrace such endeavors. Investing in education is the wisest investment. Investment is not necessarily larger buildings, higher salaries or other risky experiments. Investment in education means a thorough study of unbiased research, careful implementation of accountability and transparency.
