Reimagining College With Bitcoin Education – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Peter Conley, a Product Champion at Vercel.
Education is free.
It has been for many years now.
In my self-directed quest to understand Bitcoin, I have forced myself to learn more than at any other time in my life. More than any previous job, more than all my undergraduate experience and more than my full stack web development program at Bloomtech.
Essentially, I learned more from “Bitcoin College” than from “real college.”
With the Student Loan Debt Relief Plan at the forefront of everyone’s mind, it brings many good questions to the surface:
- Is $80,000 for the material you can get for free on the internet worth the price of the credentials it gives you?
- Aren’t most teaching experiences just four-year filler vacations that don’t teach you relevant job skills?
- Why are these business professors who don’t own a business teaching students about business?
- Why the hell is Keynesian economics still the norm?
- Is there a better way?
To answer the last question: Yes, I think so.
Before I lay out a vision for a specialized college option centered around Bitcoin, let’s unpack the current college product suite.
Institutions will claim that “you get so much more than an education!” This may be true, but let’s explore what that “more” actually is and how it can be offered à la carte.
Standard College product package
Information and knowledge
The vast majority of the knowledge you get in college is from professors who haven’t participated in the free market for years. The textbooks you read have no incentive to provide honest feedback or editing because colleges require students to buy them regardless of the accuracy of the content.
The cold, hard truth is that information has been alerted and has been wrapped in ones and zeroes on permissionless servers you can access at will; it’s actually free on the internet.
Furthermore, I can argue well that the knowledge you learn at university, by its design and incentive model, cannot compete with the information on the internet.
Social life and personal development
A typical college student has terrible sleep hygiene, eats processed foods, drinks to get drunk, and lives for the weekend. As a student, you unconsciously pick up lessons about nutrition, dating and lifestyle from “adults” who are four to seven years away from having fully formed brains.
And they call this a higher education environment?
The only thing I learned in college was how to suppress my emotions with alcohol. Yes, there are responsible students, but they are not the majority.
Environment
Many dormitories were built in the 1960s and could be mistaken for prison barracks. Plus you pay for all the facilities, amenities and infrastructure you never use and don’t care about. It’s all a big bundle. Take it or leave it.
Of course, some campuses are beautiful, and some top-tier schools have nice housing facilities, but they are the minority. Worst of all, they are stuck where they are built; there are no options. You have to suffer four Boston winters to join the MIT alumni network.
Alumni network
Alumni networking can certainly be a game changer for your career. The problem is that they follow a Pareto distribution, that is, the vast majority of the spoils go to the top, ie the Ivy Leagues, Stanford, MIT, etc.
The return on investment of paying $200,000 to be a Kenyon or Oberlin alumnus diminishes every year. The value of a proper following on social media is increasing all the time.
I don’t know about you, but I’m 100x more likely to help and connect with someone I admire on Twitter than someone I have zero connection with who happened to graduate from my alma mater (SUNY Geneseo).
I am of course the minority – for now, but people like to help and work with people who share their interests. The sad truth is that I rarely shared common interests with the 5,000 students I shared the university campus with.
How to make a better college package – for bitcoiners
What if we could build a better package? Cheaper, more niche and students are learning about the most important resource of this century: bitcoin. Also, the essays and content they create while learning will not be stored behind gated learning platforms.
Students write to build an online audience—a more valuable network than any other alma mater—and to gain valuable feedback to improve their skills.
Here is my vision:
Knowledge and information
All information will be free. If a student wants to read “The Bitcoin Standard”, I bet if we ask Dr. Saifedean Ammous, he will donate as many as we need.
We don’t tell students specifically what to learn, they follow their natural curiosity – as long as it’s Bitcoin content – but to really learn it and integrate it, they have to produce their own content. They must write about what they have learned and share it publicly, or podcast about it or create a YouTube channel. Get feedback from the market and improve your communication skills.
No more writing college essays that never see the light of day.
Social life and personal development
You will cook meat, you will not sleep in a pod and you will be angry that Modern Monetary Theory is still a thing.
In all seriousness, you can create a culture and structure for your students, centered around healthy habits instead of destroying your brain and gut.
Of course, some 18-year-olds will choose Penn State over Bitcoin College to drink themselves into oblivion, but there will be a small market for a true personal development environment. This will most likely weed out the lazy and attract those who want to grow and learn.
How do you do this? You create a marketplace where like-minded students can connect, and you make arrangements to provide them with a physical environment in which to study.
Environment
Network effects also work for learning subjects. Don’t you think that if you’re trying to learn French, you’d be more successful if all your roommates only spoke French? You will only see programs in French or with French subtitles. You will at least increase the pace of your learning. The same will be true with learning about Bitcoin.
In terms of physical space, you don’t need to build anything. You can just rent it – or there can be a vacant space.
Let me paint the picture for you.
Option A – Rental
Find a student housing aggregator such as Unilodgers or even a dormitory that has excess capacity. You and your fellow Bitcoin students also become roommates.
Option B – Local learning pods
Maybe there are enough Bitcoiners in the same city and all they need to do is create an “educational podcast”, as so many did during COVID-19.
The pod could be in the basement of one of the student’s homes, or even in a public library. It’s all about connecting with like-minded, eager students.
How do you create this physical network? With a marketplace for a customized college experience, which is why I’m building Unbundl.ed. It’s actually the Airbnb of college options.
Alumni network
This might be the best part. You will be entering one of the richest alumni networks imaginable.
Additionally, Bitcoiners is the most passionate and forward-thinking network on the planet.
If a young person approaches me and says they went to their alma mater, I really don’t care, but if they tell me 50% of their net worth is in bitcoin, I will run through walls to help them.
Make it a reality
Is this possible or is this just a blog post?
It is certainly possible.
This community could do that.
It’s time to take back the world from the overly educated and grossly undereducated.
This is a guest post by Peter Conley. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
