Brainstorms: "I can't afford school"

The solution

Nov 25, 2023

In today’s world, education is becoming more and more unaffordable. This is not only a personal problem but an economic and geopolitical problem. In this article, I am going to explain the step-by-step process you should take if you can’t afford a high-level school but still have an insatiable desire to learn.

You could be a young person trying to choose a college or an older person who doesn’t have the financial ability to spend another $50k on a specialized degree. If there is one thing I’ve learned about the readers of this publication, it is that you love to learn.

Big Picture:

Let’s start with the big picture so we can frame the issues, consequences, and potential solutions.

Due to the rising costs of education, there are several consequences people face:

People likely come out of college with higher amounts of debt. Why does this matter? Because people with debt can’t take as much risk. All of us see this every day, someone has a ton of debt and they can’t leave their job because any volatility in their income jeopardizes their ability to meet their student loan payments.
Second, every kid is entering a world where social media, TV, and video games are the norm. If you read a book, you are rare. Information might be easy to access and aggregate with AI, but that doesn’t mean you know how to think through it. Critical and creative thinking skills that can’t be accomplished by AI or code will go for even a higher premium in the future.
Third, 90% of all colleges have failed to educate the youth. They have taught kids skills that don’t translate into the real world or could easily be found by simply reading a book.

Who’s fault is this? Well, we can go into how loans are provided to students without any recourse to colleges or that most professors have minimal real-world experience running a business in their respective fields. However, I am not going to focus on that because at the end of the day, every student signs on the dotted line for a loan and takes responsibility for their education.

I am still shocked at the amount of people who say they go to college because they need the structure and pressure or else they would never do the work on their own. If you are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year because you don’t have the self-discipline to sit in a chair and read some books, college won’t solve any of your problems.

This brings us to how I like to learn :)

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The Process:

The education process is a very simple iterative loop. You take in information, learn how to analyze it, and display the ability to correctly comprehend and use the information.

Sometimes people are involved in this process to speed up things or provide guidance. The majority of the time this takes the form of reading books, thinking critically about them, and writing papers based on a prompt.

This is the same thing all of us do in the markets. We take in information, analyze it, and then respond. Writing is the process by which you are forced to formalize and synthesize your thoughts. This is part of the reason I write out all of my trades. It helps me recognize if my idea is actually really good or just a bias in my head.

Right now, I am in the process of aggregating an educational plan on international relations so that I can increase my ability to analyze the world.

Like I always say:

In the information age, you simply need to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right information to succeed

In order to accomplish this, I assume I need to read AT LEAST 50-100 books. Where would I find these books? There are 3 major ways:

ChatGPT does a pretty good job at this if you know the right prompts to ask.
Identify the top schools in the world teaching the subject you want to learn about, go to their course list for the degree, and simply download all the syllabuses for the courses. Then go through all the syllabuses and read all the books as well as accomplish any of the prompts.
Find all the experts in the field you want to learn about, figure out what they read AND wrote, and then read it. On top of this, you can email them with questions. Many times I will read a book that someone writes and then read a number of the books the author references. Then I will email them very well-thought-out questions and ask for directions. Not everyone will respond but again, questions are free call options.

Where should you start for this? Well here is a list of schools I am using for the educational plan I am putting together. Why not just pick the top schools?!

Harvard: https://extension.harvard.edu/academics/programs/international-relations-graduate-program/

George Town: https://government.georgetown.edu/international-relations/

Princeton: https://spia.princeton.edu/

Yale: https://jackson.yale.edu/iss/

John Hopkins: https://sais.jhu.edu/

LSE: https://www.lse.ac.uk/

Oxford: https://www.ox.ac.uk/

Stanford: https://www.stanford.edu/

Columbia: https://www.columbia.edu/

Cambridge: https://www.cam.ac.uk/

On top of this, you could go to OpenSyllabus which is a website that aggregates the syllabuses of major schools across the world. It doesn’t get any easier than this guys.

https://www.opensyllabus.org/

Qualifications:

Now I know there are going to be some people who come up with excuses with the process I just laid out. I am not here for those people. Should some people go to college? Of course. Should 80% of all the kids in college be there? Meh, I doubt it but hey I’m not an expert.

There is a tension to keep in mind here: If you are not actually going through the class and interacting with the professors then it is easy to potentially miss feedback and correction. This is why having some type of individual with more experience than you providing feedback can be very helpful. At the end of the day, if you are writing out your thoughts and sharing them with people, you will get feedback. Do you think professors who write journal articles have it all figured out? No way. Everyone is just trying to figure it out. The learning process never ends.

The main thing to remember is to be okay with saying “I don’t know” and be biased to withhold judgment. I cannot tell you how many times in my life I tried to have an opinion about something I knew nothing about. These days, I spend a lot of time reading and learning but I withhold judgment on a lot of things simply because I don’t know enough to make proper conclusions.

Finally, remember that there are actually advantages to learning this way. You can skip all the woke garbage, you can go at your own pace and you can tailor your education around a specific problem in the real world that you're trying to solve.

No Excuses:

In today’s world, if you have an internet connection, you don’t have an excuse. All of us are in difficult situations with the deck stacked against us. By nature, life is difficult.

I would challenge you to do the following:

Figure out a specific problem in the world where individuals with specialized knowledge are in demand.
Read 100 books on that field and the knowledge base required to solve those problems.
Write 5-10 well-thought-out papers detailing a unique way to analyze the problem or a way to solve the problem. If you sent those papers along with your resume to 50-100 companies impacted by the problem, I would be shocked if you didn’t get a job.

Conclusion:

Companies will pay tens of millions of dollars for a single dataset that will guide a single decision. Why wouldn’t they pay you for your knowledge if it actually solves a $100m problem they have?

This is the nature of the world we live in. Education is everything and even if the deck is stacked against you, there is always a way.