I wanted to share these thoughts to discuss any cool ideas to bridge the gap between an education and effectively increasing opportunity for people as automation take away more and more low-skill jobs
Without additional context, my guess would be that the Uber driver maybe focused on applications of math and statistics to the insurance industry, but maybe focused more on passing actuarial exams and less on using programming in order to implement the models. Some of the actuarial exams cover finance, statistics, and math; it feels like the driver would be suited to do data science work. It would be interesting to hear more about where the driver is located and whether he/she was only targeting the insurance industry or if that person was looking at other jobs in analytics.
EDIT: I started my business on the premise that universities teach a lot of "fundamentals", but that I don't believe higher education does not do as much as they should to teach the practical "day to day" skills (like data visualization or software version control / git) that are needed to get development work done. My thought is that a couple of online courses can quickly help to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
I think the solution might lie in teaching people the process of learning what they don't know on their own. Some people are just naturally "scrappy" or want something so bad they'll go out of their way to figure it out without connections. Maybe if we can deconstruct that into a course it could help people chart their own path rather than rely on other people to tell them what to do.
Dont forget that when colleges didnt exist for everyone, say 200 years ago, most people were farmers.
People are selective when it comes to timeframe, but it's just a mean regression - some periods reach peak, some get back lower, but all in all, we're trending up.
This sentence implies that he didn’t meet “one guy”
Farming on the other hand, especially modern farming, must take a lot longer to learn. There is a lot more to learn about your equipment alone, nevermind your crops, fertilizers, rotating fields, weather patterns, etc.
Do you still miss the time where we were all farmers ?
I agree that we're trending up which should feel AMAZING, but we're human so people's individual stories are what make us feel the most ;)
Also at my high school the metric for our school's success was 99%+ of the graduating class going to college, and it felt like pure vanity because it meant more likely than not tons of people going into debt and getting nothing out of it for the sake of "education"
I feel the problem is not that college is useless even if massively used, but maybe the american pricing of education is not aligned with expected returns, as you pointed out. It's far from mandatory in the countries I know to take a big loan for studies. Usually it's even more everyone else struggling to pay taxes for you to go.
Mind if I ask what in particular you liked? I am interested about certain topics like education + improving access to opportunity + building cool stuff with tech + thinking about economic systems and incentives to drive success, but I also don't to come off as someone who just yells into the void about my opinions.