education | Geographical Perspectives

Top 10 On-line GIS Master’s Degree Programs

Since posting various rankings of Geography graduate programs and GIS graduate programs I’ve received a number of requests to review on-line GIS graduate programs.

First, let me say I’m not a fan of 100% on-line education unless it’s the type of education where you go on-line and teach yourself something for free. To me, the future of formal education involves a huge dose of on-line resources but still also includes face-to-face interaction with a Professor or Learning Coach of some sort. Maybe an 80-20 split with 80% of your time learning from on-line resources and 20% of your time working directly with a knowledgeable person who can both enhance your learning and verify your level of knowledge acquisition. Until such options are more widely available I recommend pursuing the traditional graduate school model, in person, on campus and learning from a Professor who you can have coffee with on a regular basis.

That said, I fully understand the demand for 100% on-line education because, for one thing, there aren’t many hybrid or blended learning options available (hopefully this will change) and the flexibility is essential for working adults (especially parents) who want to further their education and move up the economic food chain.

So, for on-line GIS education, I’ve identified 10 Universities offering a 100% on-line program leading to a Master’s Degree in GIS (or similar). Note: I did not review graduate “certificate” programs and I don’t have plans to do so unless I hear otherwise from readers. Also note that while tuition and time to completion are key elements, I did not take them into consideration for the purposes of ranking. I don’t have a formal methodology for the rankings themselves; rather, this represents a qualitative review of the curriculum and faculty as observed on each program website. So, please take this list for what it’s worth – it represents my opinion and nothing else.

Rank	Program
1	Penn State University
2	University of Southern California
3	University of Denver
4	Johns Hopkins University
5	North Carolina State University
6	Northern Arizona University
7	Northeastern University
8	Northwest Missouri State University
9	University of Central Arkansas
10	Salisbury University

If I’ve omitted a worthy program please let me know in the comment section below.

Geospatial Career Q&A with Undergraduate Part 4 – Long Term Career Planning

In Part 1, I posted a line of questioning I received from a soon-to-graduate geography major. My response is in 3 parts: (1) summer suggestions, (2) hitting the job market next year, and (3) long-term (3-5 years) career positioning. In Part 2 I provided suggestions for what to do this summer. In Part 3 I cover hitting the job market. You’ll want to go back and read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 if you haven’t already. This will be my last post in this series.

Long term career planning can be daunting. Here’s my approach in 4 simple steps.

Step 1. Don’t think beyond 5 years into the future. How can you plan for your entire career with technology and the economy changing so rapidly? You can’t. It’s too hard. Look how much the world has changed in the past 5 years. In 2007 you might have thought that a finance job at Lehman Brothers would fulfill all your dreams. Or perhaps a career as a high-flying mortgage broker sounded attractive. Not so much today. Five years is about right – if you decide to go into medicine then 5 years is a far enough to think through med school and the beginning of residency or something comparable for other medical paths. Same for legal careers, teaching, etc. And the same goes for geospatial careers. Looking beyond 5 years is a waste of time because there are too many contingencies that are unpredictable. By the way, planning for 1, 2, 3 or 4 years out is fine too if that works better for you.

Step 2. Visualize where you want to be in 5 years. Where do you want to live? What do you want to be doing? Who do you want to be spending time with? What will you need to get there? Write it down! More detail is better. Try to paint as complete a picture as possible. And focus on what you will actually do with your time rather than what title you will hold. If you can’t commit to one particular vision then write down multiple possible futures. Dream big! Don’t settle for something that sounds okay. Might as well go for it – you only make the trip once, right?

Step 3. Remind yourself of your vision(s) frequently. Once you have one or more detailed descriptions of your vision for 5 years in the future create an index card with a handful of bullet points that will allow you to conjure the vision in your head. Put it in your sock drawer or on your bathroom mirror or have it appear on your laptop’s desktop or cell phone screen – whatever works for you. The idea here is just to keep your long-term goals fresh in your head.

Step 4. Take action to make your vision a reality. If the vision stays in your head you’ll be able to take small steps, perhaps even unconsciously, to move closer to your long-term goals. The key, as I discussed in Part 3, is to take action. Don’t over-think and suffer from analysis paralysis. Try lots of different stuff and see what sticks, then build on it. Or start over if you need to. It might feel like every decision you make is irreversible and catastrophic if it doesn’t work out perfectly. Wrong! You will make mistakes, lots of them. Embrace it. You won’t get anywhere without making lots of mistakes. Learning to fail frequently is a pretty good strategy. It’s sort of like a multiple-choice test; it’s often better to eliminate some of the choices rather than only searching for the “correct” answer. There are no bad decisions.

Good luck! And let me know if I can help.

Geospatial Career Q&A with Undergraduate Part 2 – Summer Suggestions

In Part 1, I posted a line of questioning I received from a soon-to-graduate geography major. You’ll want to go back and read Part 1 if you haven’t already because otherwise my response may not make sense. My response is in 3 parts: (1) summer suggestions, (2) hitting the job market next year, and (3) long-term (3-5 years) career positioning. In today’s post I’ll cover summer suggestions.

In regards to your original question (“what should I do this summer?”), my advice is to do a little bit of everything, at least until you find something that sticks.

Can you do an independent study class where you learn some database technology like SQL Server (cost of developer license is nominal) or MySQL (free) and also learn some R and work a few hours a week stitching together .shp files?
Do it all if you can manage, but limit the .shp file work – they would most likely just be taking advantage of your need for experience in exchange for grunt work. Maybe 10 hours a week or something so you can still list it as a legit internship but don’t have to slave doing advanced data entry all summer.
For the database piece try to come up with a real-world project that would be interesting to you that will force you to learn a few things about being a geospatial database administrator.
Same thing for the R piece – can you find a relatively simple project that will give you a taste for the spatial statistician route and use R to conduct the data analysis?
You should probably combine the two to get more bang for your buck. I might be able to come up with an idea for a project. If you’re interested, leave a comment and I’ll get in touch.
Keep it simple and FINISH. The project doesn’t have to be fancy, just something involving real data, some basic analysis and a presentation of the results (with maps and data graphics). The key is to finish the project and create something for a portfolio.

Try to find a professor who knows something about a bunch of these technologies. If that’s not possible, try to find an open minded professor who is willing to supervise an exploratory independent study so you can earn a few credits. If you don’t need credits, then just go out and do the best you can. Use your time to be creative so you have something to show people in September. Let me know if I can provide assistance – I can probably point you in the right direction and provide a bit of guidance but I don’t have time to become your tutor.

[By the way, there’s a new open source statistical package that purports to be just like SPSS. It’s called PSPP and you can download it here. Maybe try that if you don’t like R. I’m guessing it would be easier to learn and, like R, it’s free. I haven’t tried it yet but I plan to check it out soon. Yes, geographers are allowed to use “regular” statistics (as long as you remain wary of spatial autocorrelation). Not everything requires an ESRI product. GeoDa is another program worth exploring. There are many others that I should probably list but I’ll leave that for another blog post.]

My analogy for career clarity and discovery, and I’ll expand a bit in my next post, is to treat it like you might approach a visit to a new microbrewery. It’s often best to start by ordering a sampler rather than going straight for a full pint. If you don’t try a taste of everything you won’t know what you’re missing ….or your senses will be dull by the time you get through the entire menu (btw, I arrived at this analogy after many years of laborious market research).

In follow up posts I’ll cover (2) hitting the job market and (3) long term career positioning. Have a great summer!

Geospatial Career Q&A with Undergraduate

I recently received the following email from a student nearing graduation with a bachelor’s degree and seeking geospatial career advice.

Mr. Holman,

You’re obviously a busy guy, so I’ll try not to make this too protracted. I just wanted to say “thank you” for writing your blog.The perspective you have as someone versed in both academic geography and business is not something we students get access to everyday–it has proved extremely helpful and left me extremely hopeful that academia isn’t the only option for us geographers.

I’m a soon-to-be-graduating senior geography student. Though I have a formal concentration in GIS, undergrad students here are required to take a wide range of classes (both physical and human geography) in addition to this concentration. This is fine with me–a varied perspective’s sort of necessary to navigate life–but it’s left me as a jack of all trades and master of none. The only really *specific* thing I have going for me is independent research experience. This, I feel, has really improved some of my so-called “soft skills,” even if it hasn’t been particularly valuable in other ways.

My main concern is over how to spend this summer. I have to take just a single geography course in order to graduate, but I want to take a few others to gain some additional skills (and maybe accumulate a little knowledge in the process…).

My main interests are in cartography, statistics, and data visualization–much of this rolls over from my original major, graphic design and illustration. I’m hopelessly addicted to beautiful graphics and the information they can tell us.

So as an either/or proposition, would you recommend an independent study in database management–to help organize all those spatial datasets– or a (possibly unpaid) internship stitching together shapefiles? While this internship would perhaps be a little dull, it does constitute real-world experience using GIS. Alternately, I could register for independent study to learn how to program in R.

In conjunction with one of these “courses” I plan to take trigonometry to set the foundation for calculus. Calculus, at a minimum, seems to be required for almost every graduate program in computer science or statistics, and would certainly be helpful for those in geography.

Thank you for your time. I understand if you’re not able to answer these questions in depth; I’m just looking for a little perspective.

In response, I asked the following question: if you could do anything, anything at all, what would it be and where would it take you in the next 5 years? Focus on what you would be doing day-to-day rather than on job titles, organizations, etc.

Hmmm. That’s a tough question. I’ve thought about it before, but never gave myself a really solid response.

After much deliberation:

Starting something and then growing it into something substantial is something that’s really been on my mind, whether it be a business, a non-profit, a school, a website, etc. I like the idea of making something from nothing, and I relish working hard. Bonus points for the autonomy and flexibility that seem to be inherent to this approach. However, while I think I’ve taken a relatively entrepreneurial approach to my education, I haven’t exactly broken new ground in the “real world.”

Specifically on a day-to-day basis though, I’d like to spend time communicating with people. It doesn’t have to be in the traditional, face-to-face sense either. One of my strengths is finding and synthesizing a lot of information, and then writing about it as I understand it. On the flipside, I really enjoy doing the same thing with graphics–condensing a lot of data into a very small, detailed blurb of information.

Hope that helps.

This is great. Now, any subject areas of particular interest? You mentioned climate. Are you big into climate change? Is there a topic for you that generates the most enthusiasm?

Here’s another way to approach the same question. Imagine you have been sentenced to life in prison with no access to computers or pen/paper or any material that would allow you to be creative. But, you had a 3-month window in which to produce one final masterpiece data graphic. Your only chance to make an impact before a life of confinement. What story would it tell?

I know – you’re probably thinking “this guy is nuts”. Might be true but please just try to answer the question as best you can. There are no right or wrong answers.

Justin,Wow, my only chance to make an impact before a life of confinement! Could you have picked a tougher question?While [specific area of research, kept hidden to protect anonymity] has been good to (and for) me, it was a happy accident; it’s not really where my chief interests lie. I’m more interested in medicine and medical research, but it’s tricky to figure out what can be done in this field sans a bio/chem degree. Medical mapping/epidemiology is one of the more traditional routes people in my position sometimes take. I’d like to find a way to gather more and better data, or find some better way to use existing health/illness data. The solutions don’t have to be technical–it could be something like increasing transparency and providing better access to information.My “masterpiece” data graphic is only tangentially related to what I described above, but I think it’d make for a cool presentation:List some of the most successful people in science, the humanities, sports, and entertainment and then chart the number of rejections each one received early on in his/her career on the way to success. Rejection in this case could mean failing to receive funding, failing to sell a book, or even losing a job.I don’t know how many young people get the feeling that they can’t do anything substantial, but it seems that it’s easily more than half. This graphic would put into perspective the failures of others so they could see that its okay to fail themselves. Hopefully it would give some of the more naturally timid people a reason not to quit. You’re usually on the right path, its just hard to have perspective when you’re on it.In short, there’s always those apocryphal stories floating around about how so-and-so had to go to 100 different publishers before they received an advance. I want to track down all these stories, confirm them, and then make a visual that presents the data in an elegant way.Just a final thought:Sure, I’d love to have an aptitude for engineering and build something tangible that makes others’ lives easier, or be a doctor and heal the sick directly. But in some ways, being a geographer at the intersection of technology, society, and the environment is a far more interesting prospect. It might just require a bit of creativity and imagination to do something important.Good luck piecing all this stuff into a cohesive blog post!Here are links to my 3-part response:

Summer Ideas for the Young and Broke

For college students or recent graduates who are reading my blog posts on Spatial Careers and trying to figure out how to use their summer months productively, I would recommend reading the advice below from James Altucher. This is quoted from a recent blog post with several different questions that he received during his regular Thursday afternoon Twitter Q&A session. This is terrific stuff, even if you aren’t young and/or broke, and his blog is definitely worth checking out for a refreshing perspective on a variety of topics.

So, with full credit to James Altucher, here’s a great way to spend your summer vacation.

IDEAS FOR SOMEONE BROKE

Question: Cool summer ideas for a broke 22 y/o who just graduated?

ANSWER:

Broke, 22 years old, just graduated.

Man, you are watching the sun rise right now. It’s got every color in the spectrum and a few others that, as you get older, you will no longer be able to see.

Let’s summarize what you’ve just finished. From the age of 6 to 22, for 16 years, you’ve been chained to desks. You’ve listened to 6 hour a day of boring lectures. You’ve had to work hard every night at work that might’ve seemed meaningless to you. You’ve had to take tests that made you feel either better or worse about your self-worth. You’ve had all your hormones erupt all at the same time in every direction, an explosion, a frenzy of adulthood that burst you open and sliced through your heart.

You survived.

Now you’re 22. You’re broke. But you’re rich. Because for the first time you can taste a little freedom. You won’t be force fed the words and mythologies of our ancestors who passed those words down through our decaying standardized school system. You’re free.

You’re watching the sun rise. And you’ve got all the colors at your disposal.

Devote every day this summer to art. To ART. I don’t necessarily mean painting, or writing, or sculpting. I mean ART.

Wake up and say, “i’m going to create today.” What is creation? Who knows?

Do something you never did before. Explore somewhere you’ve never been. Take a camera and photograph. Take a pad and draw. Take a journal and write. Make a crank call and splice it with a popular song. Write a letter to the President. Make a time capsule to your grandchildren.

Ignite the fire.

The fire that has been stifled while you’ve been chained to the desk for 16 year.

Meet people you never would’ve dreamed of meeting.

But make every day a day of Art. Say it: “I’m going to create art today.”

How do you ignite so that art flows through you, so that value flows through you and creation flows through you. So that it becomes a reflex instead of a hard-to-use out of shape muscle? You exercise it. You stay health. Use tdp.me to track your practice (pre-release, but the site created to track The Daily Practice).

Use it to track you as your transform your life from static and standard to a flowing work of Art.

Please, please, please paint with the colors that I’m too old to see. And then show me.

Spatial Career Guide – Cartography and Visualization Specialist

This is my third post in the Spatial Career series. I’ve covered GIS Software Developer and Geospatial Analyst and in this post I will provide guidance to the aspiring cartographer and/or visualization specialist. Of the six paths that I set out to cover in this series this might be the one that I know the least about. So, you can take these suggestions with a grain of salt but hopefully I will provide a few useful nuggets.

Traditional cartographers, those who produce maps for printed material, still exist but not in large numbers and my suggestions probably won’t help if you want to go down the traditional route. Some of the legends in this arena, including Bill Loy, Stuart Allen, David Imus and probably several others that deserve to be mentioned are connected to the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon where I studied. You can probably earn a decent living this way if you’re really dedicated and find a mentor who can teach you the craft. But, I can’t help. Instead, I will focus on the more modern computer-enabled cartographic visualization, interactive map design and data graphics production side of things. I see a lot of opportunity here but it requires a new combination of skills that don’t always go together: programming and visual creativity.

The cutting edge in cartographic visualization involves developing web and mobile interfaces. So, in a sense, this path involves training similar to the GIS Software Developer career. The major difference is that you will need to become an expert in user interface design. You still need to be able to write code but you don’t have to be an algorithm guru. So, while in college, I would recommend the following.

Hopefully this is pretty obvious but take every course on Cartography that is available. Yes, take some GIS courses as well. They probably get taught together. Don’t worry about becoming an ArcGIS master. Not that it would hurt. But it’s probably just as important or more so to master Adobe Illustrator and/or other graphics software. Also, study a bit of cartography’s rich history.

Perhaps most importantly, find an opportunity to work on cartography-related projects. At the University of Oregon all the best cartography students worked in the InfoGraphics Lab and learned a ton from Director Jim Meacham and his staff of cartography and visualization experts. Ideally, you would find a similar lab at your college/university and get involved in any way possible – volunteer, get a work-study job, whatever it takes to get exposure to the people who work there.

Take a combination of Human and Physical Geography. See my post on becoming a Geospatial Analyst for more details on this.

Read everything you can on data visualization. You’ll want to read everything written by Edward Tufte. You should also check out some of the older work by authors like William Clevelandalong with some of the newer, more cutting edge ideas by new practitioners like Yau (note: I haven’t read Flowing Data by Nathan Yao but it’s on my list and even if it’s not a timeless classic you need to expose yourself to contemporary perspectives).

Learn something about remote sensing and other major sources of geographic data. Again, see my post on becoming a Geospatial Analyst for more details on this.

Also, read what I wrote about problem solving, writing/communication and teamwork (bullets 2, 3 and 4) in the GIS Software Developer post. In particular, I would highly recommend that you study as much statistics as you can. Visualization is within the domain of statistics, perhaps even more so than it is within geography. You need to be able to speak with statisticians in their language; even if you can’t do so fluently, at least pick up the basics. If you like statistics and would like to do some self-study, I would recommend learning R. It’s freely available open source software available for download from r-project.org. Aside from being free, it’s really powerful especially with all the add-on packages. Only problem may be that it’s a bit more challenging to learn than other more point-and-click oriented stats packages. There are a number of books on R programmingwith how-to guides. Find one that works for you and give it a try.

Study graphic design in the art school. You need to learn the basics of good design. This can be via university coursework, self-study or you might find good courses at the local community college with better hands-on learning opportunities. You should also pick up skills in the Adobe Creative Suite or something comparable.

Study User Interface Design. I don’t know how readily available classes on this topic would be – I think it probably varies quite a bit from campus to campus. You probably have lots of good ideas on this already because, unless you’re my age or older, you’ve been interacting with software your entire life. But, it’s not a bad idea to read about standard protocols and other people’s ideas on what makes for good interface design. Don’t be afraid to ignore the gospel according to some self-proclaimed authority. You want to cultivate your own unique style. The most successful designs seem to take simplicity to a new level. Beware the temptation to offer more options and powerful features. History has shown time and again that users prefer ease-of-use over just about anything else. I haven’t read this book by Steve Krug
but it looks like a winner and you can explore similar resources from there.

The best bet on this path, in my opinion, is to blend this with the GIS Software Developer route. The successful cartographer types that I see have taken up web development tools like Adobe Flash (although this technology may be headed for the dustbin). Maybe you’ll want to become an HTML5 expert – combining programming skills with user interface design artistry to create the next generation of cartography for mobile devices and whatever comes next.

I think the future here is very bright indeed. I believe that cartographic visualization will play a central role in addressing Big Data challenges.

Spatial Career Guide – How to Become a Geospatial Analyst

In my last post I proposed 5 skills to develop during college that should help you become a successful GIS Software Developer as part of my series of blog posts on Spatial Careers. In this post I’m writing about the Geospatial Analyst career track. This one is more challenging because the path isn’t well defined.

The job title Geospatial Analyst means almost nothing unless you know what industry, government agency or sector of the economy you’ll be working in. There are several sub-sectors here and you almost have to choose one to target before you start outlining the courses you plan to take in college or the extra study you might pursue during your spare time. Here are a few categories of employer types and industry types:

Military – Geospatial Intelligence Agency, CIA, other DoD
Environmental – EPA, Nature Conservancy, other non-profits, environmental consulting firms
Retail/Commercial Real Estate – Large retailers, consulting firms, technology firms developing relevant applications for real estate decisions and real estate professionals
Municipal/County/State Government Agencies – Maintaining a GIS back-office for local government agencies to assist with tax collection, utilities, etc.
Urban Planning – Similar to local government but focused on planning and design.
Geohealth – CDC, NIH, hospitals, public health agencies.
Other commercial/business uses.
Other government agencies, e.g., Census

You can’t really prepare for all of these simultaneously. For example, if you work in the environmental sector you better know how to handle raster data and remote sensing imagery with software like ERDAS Imagine, maybe ENVI, and a few others. But, you’ll never touch any of that stuff in Retail/Commercial where you probably want to know some economic geography along with some spatial analysis, statistics, cartography and GIS (actually MapInfo Pro is more common in this sector than ArcGIS and a new software offering called Alteryx is now a big deal). If you work for the Geospatial Intelligence Agency they will teach you all the tools you need to know. I don’t know if this is still true but for some time their geospatial analysis applications all worked with an obscure data format called VPF. Anyway, hopefully you get the idea. Each sector has its own skill set.

So if you know you want to be a geospatial analyst but you don’t know what area of application most interests you I guess I would recommend that you start trying to find out. Contact people in various fields and ask them questions about how they spend their time. Do something that you’ll find fun and interesting on a day-to-day basis rather than worrying about which sector pays the best. Everything changes too fast for you to accurately forecast the future of a professional niche but you can predict how you’ll like various tasks, topics and application areas with some degree of certainty if you know yourself. And, if you’re doing something you enjoy you’ll be more successful.

If you just don’t know and want to be prepared for anything I would suggest the following:

Take a combination of Human and Physical Geography. Not just the intro level classes. On the Human side, take political, urban, economic and cultural geography course offerings. Don’t just go through the motions, read some of the big thinkers. Take a look at Yi Fu Tuan’s work on perceptions of place/space. See what Sack has to say about territoriality. Read Carl Sauer’s work on cultural landscapes. Study Christaller’s theory of central place. Think about these ideas and how they apply to modern problems. On the Physical side, take classes in climatology, biogeography and geomorphology. Pick up recent copies of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (they will be in the library, on every faculty bookshelf and probably strewn about the department office) and browse through some of the articles on environmental issues. Take an individual study course with a professor you like and dig into a topic – maybe offer to do some research for a paper that they want to publish. Don’t get hung up on the particulars – just be sure you’re somewhat fluent in both Human and Physical geography so you know what you’re looking at when you start staring at maps 8 hours a day.

Take the standard set of Cartography and GIS courses but don’t worry about depth of knowledge with any one technology unless it’s within the context of a cool project where you’re also thinking about a real problem. Don’t forget to take cartography classes as well. GIS is not the same as cartography. You should understand how to design information graphics. Read Tufte’s work on data visualization(but don’t worship him) and develop an eye for what makes an effective graphic.

Learn something about remote sensing and other major sources of geographic data – again, ideally within the context of a project. Don’t spend months stitching together images for a cornfield in Iowa unless you have a project (and preferably a paycheck) to justify the time. Instead, just get some ideas about remotely sensed imagery and how it can be used to solve problems. Figure out how the images are processed into analyzable data. Think about the different resolutions of data available and what scales are appropriate for different types of problems. Learn about other data sources as well. NOAA and the NCDC have good stuff. Census has data coming out their ears – know the difference between a block group a census tract and a CBSA. Same with NIH, National Cancer Institute, CDC, etc. Poke around.

Also, read what I wrote about problem solving, writing/communication and teamwork (bullets 2, 3 and 4) in the GIS Software Developer post.

That’s about it. When you look to join the workforce be sure that you angle for jobs where you’ll be doing *analysis* rather than data management. Some GIS technician jobs may be titled GIS Analyst or Geospatial Analyst. But if you’re just digitizing or editing .shp files you are definitely not analyzing anything and your GIS software user skills will decline in value. If you get a job as an analyst where you are responsible for analyzing a variety of data sources and making strategic recommendations you’ll have a bright future.

If this all sounds a bit too amorphous then becoming a Geospatial Analyst may not be for you. Part of being an analyst is taking a big pile of seemingly unrelated data elements and synthesizing them into something that can guide a decision framework. If you’re not comfortable with this you might prefer a career as a GIS Software Developer or one of the other spatial paths.

Schools are Teaching our Children to be Sedentary and Obese

I recently read an interesting article in the New York Times entitled “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity“? While I was reading the article it occurred to me that most schools are rewarding the most sedentary children and punishing children whose bodies are doing everything they can to get the exercise they need.

My son is one of those “wiggly” kids. He’s a 2nd grade student, “all boy”, and he has always struggled in school to “keep still” and “sit quietly”. Things are better this year because we enrolled him in a Montessori school where he has more freedom to move around but it’s still an issue. In the public school he attended for Kindergarten and 1st grade we were always hearing from his teachers, even his gym teacher, that he needs to exercise better self control in class – meaning he has trouble sitting still and listening to them lecture. Wouldn’t it be ironic if his “problem behavior” was actually a much healthier way to conduct himself?

The Higher Education Bubble, the Uncollege Movement and My Current Plan for Educating Three Children

A few years ago it occurred to me that college tuition had reached bubble territory. Why would anyone pay $50,000 per year plus living expenses only to find themselves waiting tables or working as a barista at Starbucks after graduation? And I don’t mean to imply that there’s something wrong with these jobs – there’s not. In fact, being a waiter can be a great experience because it teaches sales, customer service, communication and team work. But why spend 4+ years and $200,000 when the payoff might be a job that pays less than $10 per hour? At some point tuition reaches heights that forces you to re-evaluate the equation. I think we reached that point sometime in the past 5-10 years. When student debt is higher than credit card debt, when almost no one objects to the notion that a college degree is a good pursuit at any price and when it’s too easy to borrow money for college I think we have all the ingredients of a bubble. Parallels with housing – huge debt to equity ratios, everyone thinks owning a house is the only way to go and banks make it too easy to get a mortgage.

James Altucher does a great job of describing the problems with the current education system and what he considers to be better alternatives – 8 ideas here and 10 more ideas here. I asked him recently via Twitter if he thought that Community Colleges still represented a good bargain but he replied that community college is a waste of time as well and recommended that I take a look at Uncollege.org. James is a very smart guy and I can’t disagree with his analysis but something about telling my kids to completely skip college worries me. James might say that it’s the cultural brainwashing that has taken place over the course of my lifetime. But what if one of my children wants to become a college professor? Or what if her dream is be a veterinarian? What then? Then she has to go to college, right? Not everyone can pull off a Zuckerberg, Dell, Gates, or Jobs rise to glory. What if she doesn’t come to this realization until her mid 20s and by steering her away from college I’ve limited her options or cost her a ton of time?

My oldest is about to turn 12 years old so I have a little time to ponder the options but it will go by in a hurry. In the meantime I need to figure out how to prepare her for life in a time where Twitter trumps the telephone and I need to be prepared to provide decent guidance when she’s old enough to make her own decisions. It’s not an easy puzzle to solve but here’s my plan.