Of course they cheated (E)

0:00Management and leadership are not the same thing. Management is done with power and authority, compelling others to do what we need them to do when we need them to do it. Leadership, on the other hand, always involves voluntary compliance. It always involves people eagerly following the leader. And the same dichotomy is true about learning and education. Education is often done to us. It is mandatory. People show up and say, you will learn this and there will be a test. That's different than learning. Learning is a process we choose to go through. Learning needs to happen more and more. There are more learning opportunities than ever before.

0:52And yet, too many people are hung up on the education industrial complex, and some of them are about to go to jail. Hey, it's Abril Hernandez, and this is a special archive episode of Akembo.

1:10We haven't done one of our live Q &A podcasts in over a year, so I thought it was time to do it again. Here it is from March 2019, a conversation about learning, about education, about the college admission scandal, about the false sorting for meritocracy, and most of all, about how each of us, whether we are students, and we're students our whole lives, or parents, can make a difference in how we choose. to level up. Let's go to the tape. Hey, it's Seth. Thank you for checking this out. 41 years ago, two things happened to me that I still remember as if they were yesterday. First thing that happened was I applied to Brown University early decision.

1:58I knew a little bit about game theory and odds making even at the age of 18. Early decision would increase my chances of getting into my first choice school. I applied. I got a letter back fairly promptly that said, no, no, you can't come to Brown University. We don't want you to come here. We don't even want to use our option to defer you to the next cycle. No. And that really hurt because why wouldn't they want the free option of deciding later to say no? And then a couple months later, I got into the university. That was my backup choice. And suddenly I felt better. Well, today, the end of March, is when hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people around the country are getting the final notices, the final letters from famous colleges far and wide, telling people whether or not they got in, whether or not they got picked.

2:59I think it's fair to say that most people, when they think of their college career, remember that day. And what's the other day we remember about college? The other day is the last day, graduation, which says a lot about how we're spending four years of our life and a quarter of a million dollars. We're spending it for a piece of paper, for a certificate that proves that we know how to comply, that we got picked. We don't remember using our free time on campus to start an organization that still exists 30 years later. We don't remember spending the extra hours with a professor who won a Nobel Prize in physics, suddenly discovering something that we always wanted to know.

3:49We don't remember all of the opportunities we had to learn to actually transform ourselves because we've built a system all around the idea that what we're actually paying for is the label. And for a really long time in an industrial economy, that label was priceless. It was a big sort. It separated winners from losers. You got hired to work at Goldman Sachs, or you got picked to be on the writing crew at Saturday Night Live. Because almost all the people for many years who wrote for Saturday Night Live worked on the Harvard Lampoon. The Harvard Lampoon, literary magazine at Harvard that you can only work on if you got picked to go into Harvard, double pick, triple pick.

4:35What label do you have? And labels still matter. They matter way too much. What we look like, who our parents were, whether we won the birthday lottery or not. But, and it's a huge but at some point, things get out of hand. What happened at Harvard through the last hundred years, what happened at the Ivy League was they became the self-appointed gatekeepers. Who gets in? Who doesn't? What gets you on the fast track to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt? And in the 1920s, and you can get more details about this on the show notes for my podcast, akimbo.link. In the 1920s, the number of non-Harvard people who were applying to Harvard kept going up because immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, but others who thought that Harvard was the place to go to be a brainiac kept showing up and applying, which belied Harvard's point that they were the place for brainiacs.

5:37They weren't really. They were the finishing school for people who had gone to prep school, who were going to be anointed to go on this track, which leads to this scandal that we're dealing with now, which was inevitable. Because what we've got is this thing you could buy for money, because money was one of the forms of currency that got you in. What's the other one? Sports. What does fencing have to do with your ability to change the culture, to make a difference. And yet, if the Harvard fencing coach puts your name down, you are way more likely to get into Harvard than if he doesn't. And so we have this problem.

6:20We have this problem, several layers, that parents believe that if they want to do the best for their kids, they got to get them into a famous college. Second problem, with income inequality and access getting more and more unfair, parents are becoming more helicopter-ish because there's more at stake in their mind. And third, the people who are adjudicating and arbitrating who gets in and who doesn't have all these false measures, the SAT, which measures nothing in particular, and can be gamed by paying more money to go to a test prep school, and the idea that you can find other ways to work your way into the system.

7:04So that was my rant. And the rant continues in this, which I've never talked about before. Stop Stealing Dreams. You can get online for free, stopstealingdreams.com. If you are too busy to spend the time it takes to read something about this important, you can watch the TED Talk. It's at the same site, stopstealingdreams.com. And in a minute, we're going to do your questions. Just post a comment and ask them. But the purpose of this rant is coordinated with the fact that we just talked about the workshops that we've given a new name to, akimbo.com, and that today is the final deadline for applying for the next session of the Alt-MBA.

7:43The Alt-MBA, you have to apply to get in. And the question is, how do you buy your way in? How are you sure you're going to get picked? how do you demonstrate that you have financial resources or that you're good at sports or that you had a grandfather who was through the alt-nba before the answer is none of those things because we're not interested at all in false indicators we're not interested at all in the fact that there's this uh unknown unproven relationship between who you're related to or what you look like and how you're going to do in a learning environment. The way that Sam and her team choose who gets into the Alt-MBA is pretty simple.

8:25It begins by applying and showing that you're the kind of person that wants to transform. Not because you're going to get a piece of paper, not because getting in is as important as going, but because you care enough to enroll in the journey. And the Alt-MBA has had this extraordinary run. I'm super proud of the 3 ,300 people in 74 countries that have been through it. It really is a game changer. And that's why we keep doing it because there's lots of things we could do, but we feel obligated to continue this journey. And then we've expanded it to the Akimbo workshops, which are significantly less expensive, which don't have synchronized Zoom calls, which don't have lots of coaches holding you accountable, keeping you in small groups.

9:15They're much more like a buffet. There are more videos in the Akimbo workshops. But what they are doing is helping people find the others. And that's what college does at its best. Because what we know is that you can look at every single course at MIT for free now online. that if you want to, go find a fancy college near your house and just show up for class. No one's going to throw you out. You can learn now in lots of places, but it's finding the others, the people who see you, who you see, the people who are willing to share what they know. That is irresistible. So I don't know if you can tell that I'm excited about all of this, but I am because what we've discovered is that books are great.

10:00Books can make a difference, but it's these communities, these communities of learning and forward motion and connection and encouragement where cohorts are formed, where mastermind groups are spun off. That is where we are seeking real change. And so the links just to go over them one more time, then we'll go to Q &A because I've talked for way too long. Kimbo.com shows you all of our workshops. altmba.com to apply today for the next session of the Alt MBA and akimbo.link, A-K-I-M-B-O.L-I-N-K to listen to the last 55 episodes of my podcast and to see my rant about false merit appearing real. All right, we have some questions.

10:49This one's from Vesna. What does the college scandal say about current parenting? What does the college scandal say about current parenting? Well, I know a lot of parents and there is not that big a difference between the parents who have huge resources and the ones who don't in the sense that they both, they all want to figure out how to open doors for their kids. Some parents go way too far in actually carrying their kids over the finish line, but I've never met a parent who didn't want to open doors for their kids. And I think what it really says is this, that as our economy, our culture has become ever more bifurcated, when there are people who could drop$500 on the ground and it wouldn't be worth their time to pick it up, when people start becoming disconnected from the privilege and don't actually feel like they have to work for the contribution they get to make, they lose sense of their compass.

11:52And my friends, Brian and David, their show Billions, which premiered again last week, is all about that. What happens to people who are keeping score the wrong thing? People who feel like a loser because instead of having$800 million, they only have$700 million. That's when things start to get completely out of whack. And I'm hoping that this is just a little bit of a wake-up call. Because aside from the whole miasma that is college admissions, we also have a problem in our society, which is that the brazen pursuit of whatever I can buy with whatever money I have, because therefore it's okay, that's not who we are.

12:30That's not us at our best. When people talk about great examples of heroism and leadership and contribution in our culture, they almost never talk about people who spend money like water. That's not the point. So there you go. All right. This question is from Jack. It's not unusual for low performing students to gain acceptance into a college and then ask to pay full tuition to make up for their low scores. Do you think this norm perpetuates the idea that money can buy attendance? So here's the dilemma. The dilemma for a college is if they believe that they have a truly scarce number of seats and they believe that they have an obligation to help make the culture better, to open doors for people who wouldn't have the choice.

13:23There are a lot of things that they need to do upstream and downstream to make a difference. For example, I know of an organization that works really hard to get kids, underserved kids to actually take the SAT because there are plenty of kids who are growing up in neighborhoods where the culture is you're not going to go to college because you need to stay home and pay for the family. You need, you're not the kind of kid who's going to go to college. If that kid doesn't take the SAT, Princeton can never even find them. That's part of it. Part of it, as Malcolm Gladwell has covered a couple of years ago in his episode, his podcast episode about Bowdoin, is that many of these colleges, let's pick Harvard again as an example, have enough money in the bank for it to be free for every student for the next 50 years.

14:14So if you're going to charge a lot of tuition, why are you charging a lot of tuition? Many schools that are expensive aren't charging most of the students the full price. So what's actually happening is the same thing that happens on an airplane. The first class passengers are subsidizing the price of the coach ticket so that you've got two different prices, right? People who want to pay extra sit at the front of the plane. They're getting there just as soon as the people who are sitting in the back of the plane. People in the back of the plane are choosing to pay less because the people in front of the plane paid extra.

14:51Well, the same thing happens at Princeton. The same thing happens at Bowdoin. The question is, A, is that okay? Or should this be an example of a place that's truly a meritocracy? But if it's truly a meritocracy, based on what? And so if we don't know what to base it on, Is it morally wrong to say, we're going to let this person pay a lot extra so these three people can come for free? That's part of it. I don't know the answer to that. And the other part of it is, is there a difference between a student who didn't test well and a student who can't handle it? What does it mean to not handle being able to go through Tufts or Haverford, right?

15:32We've created this whole mythology that famous schools are harder. Famous schools aren't actually harder. Famous schools simply have more demand, which is what made them famous. And the question we need to ask is, how far upstream are we willing to go to undo the cultural bias that people are absorbing in their head? So when I just read about Stuyvesant and the appallingly small number of kids who aren't white who get in to Stuyvesant, like seven black kids got in, I think, this year. The way to solve that problem is to start with kids when they're three. That if we started with kids when they were three and started teaching them what they need to know, and more important, believing that they're the kind of kid who could go to Stuyvesant, the problem would be completely solved in 13 years.

16:27But if we keep trying for the short-term solution, it's going to get harder and harder. because what we've done is brainwashed people. We brainwashed privileged people to think they belong there and we brainwashed unprivileged people to think that they don't. And so culturally, we have lots of things to undo and it begins with asking what school is for in the first place. And I think what it's for, in addition to solving interesting problems and teaching kids to lead, is being this common compass for the culture where we all live that says you are capable of this. You are capable of raising your hand, of speaking up, of making a contribution because you can.

17:07And one of the things that the internet's doing when it's doing its job is saying, if you've got a keyboard, you can learn it. And that idea that learning is open, that's brand new. 500 years ago, you didn't have access to books. 60 years ago, you didn't have access to the lecture hall. Now the access is there if you want it. But if we've brainwashed you that you don't deserve it, then we failed. All right, this question is from David, and I really like it. If you were president, how would you restructure education in general? Well, the thing is, I'm not going to be president, and the president doesn't really get to restructure education anyway.

17:48but I am a real believer that there's only one culture for all of us. Even if you live in the fanciest high rise and travel around in a private jet, you still are interacting with the culture. And all boats rising makes a lot more sense than a few boats rising to me. And so a couple decisions got made a few hundred years ago. And one of them is that people of means can opt out of the common system of education. I think it would be really interesting to see what happens if that went away. And that countries that have great public school systems, where people don't opt out of those public school systems, have a culture of more possibility.

18:36And if we want great schools, let's figure out how to make great schools for everyone, not just great schools for parents. who were born on the right day. Okay, so this is from Larry. How does accreditation... Accreditation. It's a tough word. There are too many letters in that word. Add to the problem. How does accreditation add to the problem? So accreditation was a really good idea for a long time. And what it said is there's a canon. There's a corpus of stuff we need to learn. You did it. You didn't. I'm going to give you a label. That label then translated into the placement office having more companies applying.

19:17That label translated into the school being more quote valuable. And so it got rid of a lot of fly-by-night actors. And what we're seeing now in the race to privatize various sorts of higher education is a bunch of unaccredited schools ripping people off, putting them into huge amounts of debt, getting in no trouble for doing so. That's a bad problem. And so some level of accreditation for certain kinds of institutions, it has to happen. I don't want to have surgery at an unaccredited hospital. Thank you very much. But there's a difference between I complied for four years and got this piece of paper that's credited versus I learned how to weld.

20:02I learned how to make a sales call. I learned how to draw. These are tasks where your change is proof that you did it. And in those cases, it's not associated with accreditation. It's associated with your action. So the trail that you leave behind, your portfolio, the people who are vouching for you, the wake of your boat as you zoom through the culture, that is your reputation. And that's going to become more and more common. And that a third rate accredited institution that cost you a lot of money, but all you did was high school, but with more binge drinking, I think that that's a trap. And we're going to discover very soon that a lot of those institutions are going to go bankrupt because parents are going to say, I'm not going to be able to go into that much debt to get that kind of piece of paper for my kid.

20:58And so you should buy accreditation when you need it, but you shouldn't be swayed by accreditation if you don't. All right, two more. Okay. We're on a roll. All right, so Mandy wants to know, you talk about false merit and the college scandal is an example, but is it really false if when you graduate, you actually get better jobs and make more money? Okay, so is a Princeton degree worth more than a degree from Duluth University? I made that up. I hope there isn't really a Duluth University. Of course it is. Of course it is. Not because you're better, but because someone else thinks you're better, for sure.

21:42that my argument about false merit is let's measure the right things when we're making important decisions. So if you're the admissions office at Princeton, how are you deciding? Why do soccer players get an advantage when applying to Princeton? That question hasn't been asked yet in this scandal, as far as I can tell. Why? How does that make Princeton better? They just invented this metric because it was a way of filtering for a certain kind of person. And then the metric sort of got skewed over time, but it hasn't been reexamined. And if you're hiring people and you can't get enough Princeton grads or the Princeton grads you're hiring aren't giving you what you need, well, maybe that signal is the problem.

22:33So yeah, today in the job market, that Ivy League degree probably gets you more starting salary, more doors opened, and a better lifetime value, for sure. But I can tell you in my experience, hiring people based on what color that piece of paper was has never paid off. Last question from Ted. In the real world, if getting a degree isn't going to give you merit or the level of achievement that you were promised, what will? So in the real world, what's the alternative? Thank you. This is a great question to wrap us up with Ted.

23:11Do work that matters for people who care. Connect and lead. Make a difference over and over and over again. At big companies, fine. At little companies, fine. At the organization you start yourself, fine. Start a nonprofit when you're still in your 20s. Fantastic. When you show up in the room, does the room get better? Does the average go up? Do you like solving interesting problems? How many interesting problems have you solved? That we talk about how internship is unfair on both sides because the intern works for free when that's against the law. The company doesn't teach the intern anything.

23:51And only privileged kids can afford to work for free. In many cases, it's true. On the other hand, if you turned off Facebook, you turned off YouTube, and you turned off Netflix and you had 10 hours a week to do an actual internship that actually changed something and added it to your history and your reputation, that is worth way more than sitting in English class and checking Instagram all day. Because I've seen the kids at NYU sitting in class, checking their social all day. What's the point? That class costs, what does NYU cost? $200 per hour per class, something like that. And you're going to spend the$200 of your debt or your parents' money checking your social media.

24:34You didn't learn anything. There are so many things to do with our time, whether or not we're in that institution, that what we get to do is choose to level up. And I've been a teacher for 30 years. Since that day, I started down the journey when I got rejected at Brown. And I'm really glad I didn't go to Brown. I met some very special people when I did go to college. But more important than that, the lesson I learned is this. It's what I did with my spare time in school and what I did in those engagements I had with the professors I sought out, not my GPA, not the fact that I went to graduate school after that, not important.

25:16What was important is I developed a practice. And the practice is find the others. See what other people are doing. Engage with them. Figure out how to help them on your way to leveling up. And this moment in time isn't going to be here very long. This moment when we have the resources to actually learn stuff, the ability to connect with the others, and to make things better. So that's what I'm hoping I can help you do. And every day I am inspired by you. And that's why I keep doing it. So thank you for making your ruckus. And thank you for tuning into my rant today. We'll see you soon. Hey Seth, it's Maria.

25:55Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. There were two great questions about the rules and norms episode. We would love to hear questions about this or any other episode you've heard so far. Just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button.

26:37There are also show notes for each of the previous episodes. Before I dive in with the two answers, two corrections about our Apollo 11 episode. The first one was that Alan Shepard did a sub-orbital flight just as brave, just as heroic. He didn't fully orbit the Earth. And second, Sergei Korolev was not a German, was not a Nazi, did not fight on the side of the Germans in World War II. That's my error and my apologies. Thank you. Hi, Seth. This is Dustin. I've been listening to your podcast about rules and norms, and something keeps bothering me. If something is a norm, then a thoughtful person will tend to hesitate before violating that norm.

27:21And it seems as though it's easier for somebody who's a narcissist or maybe even a sociopath or just simply a jerk to ignore those norms, which, at least in the short term, could be to their advantage. So I'm wondering if this is an area where nice guys finish last, so to say. In other words, if we're too nice, then we won't violate any norms. And then in the end, we'll fail to make any significant changes to culture. And then the selfish people will be the only ones who actually make significant changes to culture. And the rest of us finish last. So my question is, how do people with good intentions manage these sensitivities so they can actually make change happen without having to be a jerk?

28:12It seems like that might be a worthwhile skill to develop. Thank you. You're exactly right. What makes a sociopath a sociopath is that he or she violates the norms or even the rules without a care. Those behaviors, the behaviors of that jerk are not what we are talking about. What makes a norm violation successful, that leads to it ultimately changing the rules, that leads to other people following in the footsteps of the person who violated the norm might be selfish or mob behavior. But almost always, if it's going to be productive, it's because it's done with generosity. It's that person who speaks up, who solves a problem in an interesting way, who contributes in a way that no one expected.

29:06It's that artist who uses a new format, a new approach, who puts themselves on the line. When we take responsibility for those acts, and those acts benefit those around us, they begin to change the norms. That is how culture evolves. There's always been a problem in culture of people who are selfish, who are narcissists, who are looking for a shortcut that will ultimately destroy everything. But culture is often smart enough to withstand those. The real culture change comes from people who say, follow me. Hi, Seth. This is Mariah from Durham, North Carolina. I just listened to your episode about art changing the norms, and I'm an artist.

29:58One of the things I've noticed as an artist is that a lot of the other artists pride themselves on having an education and studying other artists in Europe. I haven't done that. And I know how you feel about education from popular large colleges. My question for you is this. How, as an artist, can we change the concept of education to go from large universities and studying under large artists in foreign countries to something more homegrown and something that comes from the soul? Thanks for everything you do, Seth. I love this question. And there are two parts to what's going on here. The first one is you need to know the canon.

30:49You need to know what came before. You need to know the norms of what the culture has before you can work to change them. Today it is easier than ever to learn those things without spending years of your life in an expensive institution. We have more exposure to them in every field of interest because they're a click away, because we can find the others, because we can organize around them to learn what has come before. If you haven't done the reading, it's really difficult to show up and say, I can make things better because we'll ask you better than what. But the second half of it, that's the real challenge.

31:34Because the reason that some people are lording over you where they trained or how they trained comes down to the hierarchy, to status roles, to a scarcity mindset, to this belief that they have to keep the others out. that you are too young or too inexperienced or too undertrained to possibly show up next to these folks who have paid so much in time and money to get the education they've received. And all I can propose to you is to ignore those people. I understand where they are coming from. They did something. They invested in something. It might even feel like a mistake to them. But what they get out of it is the ability in their mind to keep the competition down.

32:25You don't need to stand next to them. You can go directly to the people you seek to serve, to make the magic you want to make, and to own that magic. So yeah, I am in favor of doing the reading. Do your homework. See what has come before. Understand it. And then leapfrog it. Leapfrog it in the service of those you seek to change, but shun the non-believers. They're not there for you. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.