No. 29: Know your knowledge buckets, income-share tuition experiments ending, and higher-ed plans shifting
How your success depends on how you play in two of these three knowledge buckets
Welcome to Future You where we cover stories and resources to help young people navigate the future of work.
First, some numbers:
$661 - Parents are expected to spend an average of $661 on back-to-school supplies this fall.
$900 billion - Investors poured almost $900 billion into equity markets in 2021. More than the past 19 years combined.
800 - A darling stock during the pandemic lock-down, Peloton, laid off 800 employees on Friday. Adding to the 2,800 people laid off in February.
A great CEO [student] knows their knowledge falls into three buckets.
This excerpt is taking from the Category Pirates newsletter that helps product leaders create new categories for their businesses.
Replace CEO with “student” as you read, and you will see its relevance.
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Things they know they know
Things they know they don’t know
Things they don’t know they don’t know
But the difference between a good CEO and a great CEO is how willing they are to embrace weird hypotheses and how disciplined they can be in testing them with new data. And they also know the best way to prove/disprove a hypothesis is by taking action. But specifically by measuring the results across a wider array of factors beyond their company and category to ensure it covers what they know they don’t know, and what they don’t know they don’t know
A great CEO embraces the weird because it is the best way to shed light on #3 (things they don’t know they don’t know). Which illuminates and educates them on #2 (things they know they don’t know).
A bad CEO spends all his/her time, energy, and money focusing on #1 (things they know), in an effort to make themselves look smart.
Read the non-subscriber preview of the full post at Category Pirates
Colleges Are Already Ditching Income-Share Agreements
In 2016, Purdue University announced an income-share agreement program as a guinea pig experiment in which students could get money for college in exchange for a cut of their future earnings. “Back a Boiler,” it was called, in a nod to the school’s Boilermaker nickname. University president Mitch Daniels talked up the idea in testimony to Congress.
Intrigued, other university leaders wanted in. “We’re looking at what Purdue University is doing now, and we are thinking about it,” said Sheila Bair, then president of Washington College. In subsequent years, Purdue’s program won a think tank’s award for most innovative public policy proposal, and at least 14 other colleges or universities launched similar initiatives.
So Purdue’s announcement in June that it was suspending the Back a Boiler program came as a thunderclap in the world of income-share agreements, or ISAs, and could signal the beginning of the end of experiments involving college students splitting their future paychecks with investors.
Read the full article on Wired
Teens have changed their higher ed plans
Each of the nearly 4 million students who graduated high school this spring faces major decisions this summer. Do they want to pursue further education? If so, what do they want to study and where? How will they afford it? Will they begin working immediately? If so, are they moving out of their family home? Are they prepared for the hassles of adulthood?
According to a recent survey we at EdChoice conducted in conjunction with Morning Consult, teenagers are embracing their agency in an increasingly broad array of choices. What they told us might worry institutions of higher education — because the next generation appears less interested in the traditional college pipeline.
Plans to enroll in a four-year college sustained the biggest blow, with a 14% drop in teens saying they currently planned to enroll at a four-year university compared to before the pandemic.
Read the full article at The74
Till next time…
As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.
- Michelle Obama, Becoming
Image: Amritanshu Sikdar