Zach Sims argues that education should be evaluated by return on investment, a claim that drew backlash from someone who called him an intellectual terrorist. He says solutions to college graduates lacking job skills depend on which problem you're actually trying to solve.
Questions this video answers
It depends on the problem you're trying to solve; we need to evaluate the ROI of education, which is often overlooked.
You made the point that people are graduating college without the skills to really be able to get a job. And, you know, I'm curious, from your perspective, can we fix the education system?
I think it really depends on the problem you're trying to solve. And as much as I remember when we met in January in Davos, I mentioned something on a panel where I said that like education, we're not evaluating the ROI of education. And someone stood up and threw something at me and then called me an intellectual terrorist.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, it's actually fine, yeah. So there are definitely people out there who— and then he came up to me later, by the That was really scary. So there are definitely people out there who think that you shouldn't tie education to ROI. And so for those people, maybe the education system is not broken. But I think whenever you introduce money into the education system, when you have to pay for a good, you should evaluate its effectiveness. And so I think we're getting— the problem with education reform is there's a couple different tracks, right? There's the K through 12 system. There's the college system. There's lifelong education. Our perspective has always been it's best to fix the system from the outside in. What that means for us is we launch a consumer product. We didn't do partnerships with schools. Turns out a lot of people use it. Now what happens is that the same schools we would have had to sell on even looking at the product use it without us having sold directly to them. For instance, again, when we started the company, everyone said, "How will you sell to schools and get this product in schools?" Our take was people just use it on their own in their free time, and it's lifelong learning. And now, 3 years later, we've kind of come back full circle where we work with governments who implement nationwide programs to teach their students to program. So starting in September, every student in the United Kingdom in primary and secondary school will learn to program, most of them hopefully with Codecademy. That was something that was just unfathomable a couple of years ago.
