Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Preface
Does This Book Deserve Your Time?
My Story
Good Reasons to Skip College
Five Stories
The ZTC Strategy
Build Self-Knowledge
Give Yourself Assignments
Create and Share Value
Find Support
Market Yourself
Finding My Unschool Adventures
1
3
12
17
19
22
25
27
33
41
43
45
55
57
61
73
78
89
103
107
113
Final Inspiration
Acknowledgements
Index
A Note About the Publishing of This Book
About the Author
127
129
135
143
147
Preface
A few notes on terminology:
s The word college in this book refers to four-year
colleges and universities that lead to a bachelor of arts
(BA) or bachelor of science (BS) degree.
s The phrase Zero Tuition College (ZTC) designates
the method of self-directed learning described in this
book.
s The ZTC online community may be found at www.
ztcollege.com.
College
A Lot of Money
A Lot of Debt
Today, the liberal arts college experience offers many valuable things: exposure to new ideas, analytical skills, social
networks, support, accountability, and the opportunity to live
independently. But these good things come at a high price.
The average family will shell out roughly $20,000 per year for
tuition and living expenses,1 while the average student who
takes out loans will graduate with more than $25,000 of debt.2
Average Undergraduate Tuition and Fees and Room and Board Rates,
National Center for Education Statistics, prepared October 2010, http://nces.
ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_345.asp.
Blake Ellis, Average Student Loan Debt Tops $25,000, CNN Money,
November 3, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/03/pf/student_loan_
debt/index.htm.
And this isnt a recent trend: since the 1950s, college tuition
has risen almost twice as fast as inflation.3
When the price of oil rises, we look more seriously at alternative energy. When a business raises its prices, we consider
different ways that we could obtain the same goods or services. But even though the price of college has skyrocketed,
we flood its gates. Why?
Proposition #2: Higher education and college are not the
same thing.
College
Higher
Education
Give Yourself
Assignments
Create and
Share Value
Find Support
Market Yourself
Higher
Education
Some People
College
Great Idea
Technically, you just need a graduate degree to enter most licensed professions or do PhD-level work. And not all graduate programs require an undergraduate degree.
Gamble
Not Going
to College
Gamble
If you skip or leave college in order to pursue a selfdirected, adventurous, and entrepreneurial higher education,
youre taking a gamble. It might not work out. You may live
with your parents for a while, have trouble making money,
and suffer the embarrassment of trying something different
and failing. You may have to go back to school.
But if you go to college because you believe its a safe path,
because you want to avoid criticism, or even for one of the
aforementioned good reasons, youre also taking a gamble.
It might not work out. You may live with your parents for a
while and have trouble making money. You may have to go
back to school. Butunlike in the self-directed pathyou
may end up with massive amounts of student loan debt at the
time in your life when youre supposed to be most free.
Im not able to tell you which gamble is more appropriate
for you. But Im confident that the first gamblecrafting your
own adventurous and entrepreneurial higher educationwill
teach you things about yourself that the second never could.
Proposition #6: Theres a culture of fear around college,
but its the wrong fear.
No College
Life Failure
Too Much
College
Crazy Debt
10
Why? Because the collateral for a student loan is the students brain. When a
housing market collapses, a lender can reclaim a house. But when a student
defaults on his loan, a lender cant reclaim the knowledge locked inside the
students brain. Or, as my friend R. Brent Mattis explains it:
Imagine you were the loan officer at a bank. A budding entrepreneur comes
into your office and says, Hi, Id like to borrow $100,000 to start a business.
You say, Great, what can you pledge as collateral for the loan?
He says, Nothing.
So you say, How do you plan to use the loan?
He says, Oh, I dont know. Ill probably spend four years broadening my
skill set and learning the attributes necessary to be an excellent businessman.
The loan officers head would probably explode.
11
12
My Story
I dont expect you to be a quick convert to the ideas behind
Zero Tuition College. I wasnt. Until a few important experiences changed my mind, I thought college was the be-all and
end-all of young adulthood. The story starts at my own college, the University of California, Berkeley.
From the day that I stepped onto Berkeleys campus in
2001, college offered salvation from the mind-numbing boredom of high school. Never before had I been surrounded by
a community of people who took ideas seriously. Inspired by
the mysteries of black holes, dark matter, and the Big Bang, I
began as an astrophysics major. But after two years of physics
courses and a stint as an undergraduate research assistant, I
decided that I wasnt serious enough about science to pursue
it as a career.
Around the same time, a friend handed me a book by
former New York City schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto, who
called into question the basic purpose of education.7 Reading
Gattos arguments felt like meeting a soul mate, and I realized
immediately that I wanted to dedicate myself to alternative
education. Forget the distant galaxiesthere were bigger
mysteries to solve here on earth.
To pursue my new calling, I pestered the UC Berkeley
administration until they let me design my own major in
alternative education. What followed was a high-energy, selfdirected, two-year adventure that changed my life. Given free
7
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American
Schooling (Albany: Berkeley Hill Books, 2000).
My Stor y
13
14
My Stor y
15
Good Reasons
to Skip College
19
20
21
22
23
24
you can afford this gamble. If you or your parents can foot the
tuition and living bills without sacrificing sanity and security,
then maybe its okay to experiment with college.
But for everyone elsefor those students and families who
must make large sacrifices or take out very large loans to pay
for collegethe cost of this gamble is high. You dont need to
pay upward of $20,000 per year to find out who you are and
what you do best.
When you gamble on college, you also gamble with a
second resource, one that is more precious than money: your
time. Even if you can afford college, it may not be right for you.
If you go to college and take little away from the experience,
you will lose some of the most precious and opportunityladen years of your life, wasting time that you could have
spent traveling, starting businesses, getting exposed to new
fields, pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and meeting new people. College is not the only place these things can
happen, so if youre going there to answer the all-important
questionWho am I?your time may be better spent elsewhere.
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