The world’s top-ranked junior tennis players can earn tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize-money. They perform at a high enough level that watching them play is a form of entertainment that people will pay to watch.
The world’s top-ranked management consultants (if God-forbid, there was ever to be such a publicly available ranking table), certainly command a meaningful income.
In both cases, these young athletes and recent college graduates are essentially students. The Junior Analyst at McKinsey, the Associate Consultant at Bain, and the top junior tennis players are constantly learning. They are 18 to 25 year olds learning from their Senior Consultants and Engagement Managers, from their coaches and from their competition. They may be performing at a high-level, but much of their daily activity is structured to sharpen their skills and provide them with professional development opportunities.
But the fact that they are learning doesn’t prevent them from earning an income while they learn. Clients and sports fans are more than willing to pay for the services and skills of these talented young people and their willingness to pay is completely compatible with the fact that their payment is facilitating structured learning opportunities.
This willingness to pay for the skills and services of highly talented young people that still need coaching and a structured approach to learning is a severely under-utilized market.
If it is possible for the most talented learners to create value-add that people and organizations are willing to pay for, then top-ranked students in the U.S. and around the world should be getting paid to learn.
There are far too few instances where bright young people are paid to go to university. The university business model isn’t structured to allow students to provide immediately value-add.
This is wholly unnecessary.
There should be a pathway that provides students an opportunity to create value-add while learning. A university degree in accounting should more than fund itself, and the practical accounting experience that top-students would get contributing to EY or KPMG would make them significantly more qualified upon graduation. Similarly, Computer Science students shouldn’t be forced to choose between paying to learn theory to receive a degree and forgoing their degree to get practical experience.
It isn’t just a matter of completing internships, or even having a Co-op program similar to what Northeastern University does. Why do we need to build the majority-share of a 4 year learning experience so that none of the skills of bright young people are creating something valuable to other individuals or companies?
We know that top-students at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. can create tremendous value-add, we’ve seen successful drop-outs, and more recently successful opt-outs in the likes of the Thiel Fellowship. But nearly all of these “rebels” are confined to the entrepreneurship space. There are still no mainstream opportunities in which companies hire university age students and pay them to do valuable work for the company while providing them with opportunities that will increase their value add.
There are a lot of pre-conceived notions about which types of training and education are suitable for which types of people. It is time to give up the false binary between vocational and liberal arts training.
If it is true that the singularly most talented 18-22 year olds in the world are capable of creating value while learning outside of the realm of entrepreneurship, companies should create programs that accomplish those goals. It is good business. I suspect this industry will take-off quite soon and join the growing list of forces that are disrupting traditional higher education. I’m looking forward to it.
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