Michael Strong argues that traditional schooling doesn't prepare kids for startup jobs, where they'd work as coders, designers, or marketers in remote teams. High grades don't guarantee these "new-collar" skills. His program, Expanse Online, puts kids as young as ten on real project teams to build portfolios and learn ownership.
Hello, I'm Michael Strong, founder of expanseonline.co. I'm going to talk about startup culture and how conventional schooling is just not remotely preparing students to be successful participants in startup culture. First, what do I mean by startup culture? I've spent much of my life as an adult in the Austin and San Francisco Bay areas, both hotbeds of startups. Entrepreneurship, kind of new, new kind of culture more broadly. And most of the young people I know, say people in their 20s, are involved in startup culture in some ways. They— many of them don't have jobs. Some of them do. Sometimes they get hired by a funded startup and they have a job. Some of them are members of a startup team and may or may not be getting paid in the early days. They may just be sweat equity, trying to make it happen. Sometimes they're the lead entrepreneur themselves. In other cases, maybe they're contributing as a contract worker for various different organizations, doing a video over there, writing some code over there, doing some UX design over here. In other cases, maybe they're working for nonprofits that are startups, and similarly, they're just involved in projects. So they're, in some way, creative and entrepreneurial. They have some skill set— coding, video production, UX/UI design, digital marketing— something that's useful. And sometimes it's project management, sometimes they're finance, lots of different options, but there's some kind of a contributor to this team. Above all, they're a great communicator and they're very entrepreneurial and creative in their orientation. This is actually a great life pathway. Most of these people I know have a lot of fun. They have incredible freedom. Some of them can work from anywhere around the world, especially now. Others may be geographically located, but they have lots of different project options that are cool and fun. Sometimes they don't make money for a while, you know, they kind of get by, live cheaply, and sometimes later they do make money. Sometimes they make a lot of money, uh, but really they're doing what they love, and they've got so many degrees of freedom, and They are creative participants and actually building something, and that gives them a lot of passion and enthusiasm, and it's an exciting world to be in. Now, the reason I talk about this world is because I see schooling to be mostly orthogonal to that whole world. If a student gets an A in high school chemistry or high school English, That can be done without developing any of the key skills needed in startup culture. So earlier, we're talking about, on the one hand, great communication interpersonal skills, the other entrepreneurial and creative thinking, and then finally, I'll call them a new collar job skill, like coding, uh, UX/UI design, video production, digital marketing, project management. They get good grades in school by taking what a teacher, so quote, teaches them, doing well on tests and homework, and then having feedback from the teacher in the form of grade. I think the discrepancy between schooling and startup world is so great that a student could be a valedictorian in a conventional school and have essentially no valuable skills for the real world, in this case startup culture. And what I'm seeing increasingly is that people from families and communities and networks that are plugged into startup culture, they're set, their lives are fabulous, almost regardless of the quality of schooling they've gotten. Conversely, people who may be good at school but are outside these networks and they're not developing these skills and relationships Sadly, they may struggle. Just to focus on college a bit, right now there's some evidence that outside of STEM and degrees which require a license, such as nurse or doctor, most college majors no longer provide a positive return on investment. And so if a student is a straight-A student, say valedictorian of, say, school, and she goes on and gets a degree in communications or marketing at a state university, again straight A's, maybe valedictorian of her class, but she's never been in an environment where she's making things, creating things, building things, doing all sorts of activity and real deadline, and she has no new collar job skills, she may not be able to get a job or only a mediocre job for a few years after graduation. In some ways, young people who do not have access to this skill set are losing perhaps a decade of their lives in wasted classroom academic activity. For me, this is a catastrophic loss for them and for society. So I'll let you look at my other videos on expanseonline.co, but the kind of thing we immerse children in young people, adolescents, in is highly interactive and creating and making things. We're thinking, talking about ideas all the time. We're involved in projects where we're doing things, making things, building things. We give students a lot of ownership and leadership. So in some ways, as a student at our school, in some ways they're part of a startup team already at the age of 10 or 11. We want to empower young people so that they are immersed in the kind of environment that leads to the most exciting, fun, cool, meaningful lifelong careers in the 21st century. So if you want your child to be part of startup culture when they're 10 or 11 and start learning the skills that actually matter now, contact us at expanseonline.co. And for those of you who care about meeting the needs of underprivileged children, We are looking at ways to make this program much more widely available in various states across the US. So thank you. I'm Michael Strong, founder of expanseonline.co.
