You were thinking for a long time about writing a book about problems regarding access to higher education, the cost of education and the relevance of it, but what finally convinced you to make this book happen?
It’s true. I found a groundswell of students who felt their degree wasn’t giving them the preparation they needed. But what really pushed me over the edge was realizing that I had a bead on some solutions. Working at Fast Company and covering the technology space, I have seen that there is a lot of destructive change happening in a lot of different areas. But in the education space, it’s been increasingly clear that it’s a domain where people are asking this question a lot: Why hasn’t technology transformed education as it has so many other institutions and industries? So why hasn’t it, in your view? I had been delving into education’s 1,000-year history to try to answer that question, and I found that education has been the institution of institutions, particularly as our society started to get more organized in the 20th century. During the post-WW2 era in America, every institution got larger and had a bigger impact in people’s lives — and universities generated the experts that made
