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Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will Paperback – March 5, 2013
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There is—and Dale Stephens is proof of that. In Hacking Your Education, Stephens speaks to a new culture of “hackademics” who think college diplomas are antiquated. Stephens shows how he and dozens of others have hacked their education, and how you can, too. You don’t need to be a genius or especially motivated to succeed outside school. The real requirements are much simpler: curiosity, confidence, and grit.
Hacking Your Education offers valuable advice to current students as well as those who decided to skip college. Stephens teaches you to create opportunities for yourself and design your curriculum—inside or outside the classroom. Whether your dream is to travel the world, build a startup, or climb the corporate ladder, Stephens proves you can do it now, rather than waiting for life to start after “graduation” day.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTarcherPerigee
- Publication dateMarch 5, 2013
- Dimensions5.48 x 0.53 x 7.49 inches
- ISBN-100399159967
- ISBN-13978-0399159961
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- Publisher : TarcherPerigee (March 5, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399159967
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399159961
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 0.53 x 7.49 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,435,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,375 in Adult & Continuing Education (Books)
- #15,708 in Success Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
At 20, Dale Stephens founded UnCollege.org because we're paying too much for college and learning too little. It's no secret that college doesn't prepare students for the real world. Student loan debt recently eclipsed credit card debt for the first time in history and now tops 1 trillion dollars. And the throngs of unemployed graduates chasing the same jobs makes us wonder whether there's a better way to "make it" in today's marketplace.
Stephens is a sought-after education expert appearing on major news networks including CNN, ABC, NPR, CBS, Fox, and TechCrunch. His work has been covered by the New York Times and New York Magazine to Fast Company and Forbes.
Stephens' interest in education comes from his background in unschooling, the self-directed form of homeschooling with which he was raised. He left school at age eleven and self-educated instead of going to middle and high school.
He has spoken around the world at high-profile events, from debating Vivek Wadhwa onstage at TED 2012 to lecturing at the New York Times to speaking to C-level executives at NBC Universal. He works frequently with universities who realize their model of education must change to survive in the 21st century.
In May 2011 Stephens was selected out of hundreds of individuals around the world as a Thiel Fellow, a program recognizing the top twenty-four entrepreneurs around the world under the age of twenty. In addition to leading UnCollege, Stephens advises education and technology companies.
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Dale Stephens talks about education like someone treading lightly through a mine field gingerly avoiding the financial education trap. He says that "there is a bubble in education and it is on the brink of bursting." I agree. He says that "Universities do not train you for the real world: they exist to make money"; that an "MBA program is worthless"; that "schools can only teach what is settled"; that it "takes years for knowledge to become a part of formal curriculum." And by then the expiration date on your education is stale.
Stephens offers a path for the upcoming generation to get an education that is relevant, and not stale, and debt free, or at least less so that of those recent graduates who've spent a fortune on their masters degree, and work in the service industry when they graduate. He calls it "UnSchooling or UnCollege." "UnSchooling is an educational philosophy that values learning over schooling. He says you need to "stop giving a s*** about grades and start building things." He says " Project-based learning is a style teaching in which students define problems they are interested in and then solve them with guidance from their teacher." He talks about collaborative work groups instead of competition, creating a website and a personal portfolio, and networking with people who are interested in the same things you are interested in. He says make something. He say "hiring managers want to see experience. He says business has changed but education hasn't kept up. He wants college age people to take their life into their own hands rather than handing it over to an institution that is trying it's best to keep up in a fast moving century.
Stephens persuaded his parents to allow him to drop out of school in the fifth grade to school himself. It seems to have worked. He dropped into college then dropped out, again, forming a group to school himself. He founded UnCollege for non-traditional higher education. Stephens says he "agreed to write a book, never having written more than twelve pages." The book is well-written. It's more than readable, it's enjoyable. If it had a shortcoming it is that the book is ahead of it's time. Degrees are still the currency that is valued, too often. The educational system is in flux. This might be the last decade for traditional education, but it is, yet, here. And, yes, Universities are a business first, but some are there to teach, to put the maker ideas into the curriculum.
Stephens probably had more financial and family resources available than a lot students heading for college, but he talks about strategies that work whether a learner has resources or not. He's ingenious in his own life, and wants to teach others how to be ingenious. He asks for help from a friend or relative who works at Google, and gets a foot in a door he's after. Too many will not have an uncle or friend of a friend at Google, or network connection in a high profile firm, but even that might surprise the ingenious student who buys 52 cups of coffee.
He is a very logical thinker and makes very clear just how simple it is to connect with other people, exposing the power of conversation and friendliness at its best.
All in all, there are plenty of great ideas within this book, but really, its just nice because he throws around different websites and other resources that we can all use.
In a direct, open, and endearing style, Dale clearly analyzes what is wrong with the current system of education and how to go beyond its limitations. I've had the privilege of meeting Dale as one of his mentors at the Thiel Foundation, and it was immediately clear how focused, driven and accomplished he was. It has been a fascinating process to observe, as he applied the lessons that he describes in his book to the process of researching, writing and promoting the book itself. What better testimonial for such a book, outstanding in its value among other weaker examples in the self-help category, than to see the author thriving through the use of the tools that he describes and recommends!
The social contract that dictated that you only needed to put in the effort of taking a college degree and you had a guarantee of a better job for life is clearly broken. Especially in the US the ROI of higher education for students has been negative for over 10 years. The dogmatic approach that lacks self-analysis and does not incorporate the feedback of measurable outcomes is being swept aside by the revolutionary changes that we are observing in educational markets.
Too often education is something that others do to you, rather than the self-directed, empowering and accelerating process of learning. "Hacking Your Education" is really for everybody, because it must be clear that the need and thirst for learning is not confined to do young but is shared amongst all age groups. It should be compulsory reading for kids in their last year of high school, as well as for their parents, but it is also an extremely useful tool for anybody who finds herself in a challenging situation realizing that the skills so diligently acquired in the past 10 years of professional specialization are becoming less and less valuable as time goes by.
The Uncollege movement, additionally, that Dale started while writing the book is an extremely fertile ground for innovative analyses of the challenges of preparing for today's world, and job market. Applying the lessons of the book concretely, and giving a platform for people aggregating around the same ideas of empowerment, and smart learning, it is going to be an endless source of fascination for those like me, who believe that we can understand and solve our problems.