How to Get a Real Education

Under this promising heading, Scott Adams offers some valuable advice to future entrepreneurs. Since he is the creator of Dilbert, I expected to find in his column some really, truly subversive insights. Alas, all it offers is a string of tired clichés. He says the part of his education (nominally, at a traditional liberal arts college) which prepared him best for a lifetime of bold entrepreneurship was a string of business-like extracurricular activities. Involvement in those taught him some invaluable lessons worth volumes of business literature: how to pitch a student business project involving the immediate redundancy of the whole staff of an inefficiently operated campus café; how to get a friend, an obviously incompetent bartender at that café, elected CEO of the whole operation; how to exploit loopholes in campus regulations by registering shell student clubs with himself as president; how to manipulate gullible fellow budding entrepreneurs into embracing his ideas as if those were their own; etc. Now Adams wants to join Peter Thiel in his crusade aimed at convincing ambitions students that a traditional college education is a waste of time, energy and money which rarely pays off. As I went down the list of pragmatic recommendations for career success Admas give, I initially cringed a bit. But I was quickly able to overcome this initial reaction and see the larger wisdom in his approach to what really matters in education. Once the line separating many forms of investing and entrepreneurship from what has traditionally been seen as white-collar crime become razor-thin, maybe this is precisely the no-nonsense acumen prospective business leaders need in order to get ahead. In any case, the old idea of education as a bookish quest involving a marathon of reading and writing doesn’t seem to quite cut it any longer.