Communications - January 2013

an integral part of its students’ experience. By graduation, a typical Waterloo grad will have spent six internships lasting a combined 24 months at major companies—often American. The typical U.S. college graduate will have spent about 36 months in lecture halls and a mere three to six months in internships.

This past winter—not summer—all of the interns at the Khan Academy, and probably most of the interns in Silicon Valley, were from Waterloo because it is the only school that views internships as an integral part of students’ development outside of the summer. While the students at most colleges are taking notes in lecture halls and cramming for winter exams, the Waterloo students are pushing themselves intellectually by working on real projects with experienced professionals. They are also getting valuable time with employers and pretty much guaranteeing several job offers once they graduate. On top of that, some are earning enough money during their multiple high-paying internships to pay for their tuition (which is about 1/6th to 1/3rd the cost of a comparable American school) and then some. So Waterloo students graduate with valuable skills, broad intellectual development, high-paying jobs, and potential savings after four or five years.

Compare this to the typical American college grad with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, no guarantee of an intellectually challenging job, and not much actual experience with which to get a job.

Waterloo has already proven that the division between the intellectual and the useful is artificial; I challenge anyone to argue that Waterloo co-op students are in any way less intellectual or broad thinking than the political science or history majors from other elite universities. If anything, based on my experience with Waterloo students, they tend to have a more expansive worldview and are more mature than typical new college graduates— arguably due to their broad and deep experience base.

So let us imagine optimizing the model that schools like Waterloo have already begun. Imagine a new university in Silicon Valley—it does not have to be there but it will help to make things

What is completely
different is where
and how the students
spend their days.

concrete. I am a big believer that inspiring physical spaces and rich community really does elevate and develop one’s thinking. So we will put in dormitories, nicely manicured outdoor spaces, and as many areas that facilitate interaction and collaboration as possible. Students would be encouraged to start clubs and organize intellectual events. So far, this is not so different from the typical residential college.

What is completely different is where and how the students spend their days. Rather than taking notes in lectures halls, these students will be actively learning through real-world, intellectual projects. A student could spend five months at Google optimizing a search algorithm. She might spend another six months at Microsoft working on human speech recognition. The next four months could be spent apprenticing under a designer at Apple, followed by a year of building her own mobile applications. Six months could be spent doing bio-medical research at a startup or even at another university like Stanford. Another four months could be spent prototyping and patenting an invention. Students could also apprentice with venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs, eventually leading to attempts to start their own businesses. One of the primary roles of the college itself would be ensure the internships are challenging and intellectual; that they truly do support a student’s development. The college will also provide a scaffold of shared, physical experiences, but they will not be passive lectures. They will be active interactions between faculty and students.

All of this will be tied together
with a self-paced academic scaffold
through something like EdX (Harvard,
MIT, and Berkeley’s “MOOC”) or Khan
Academy. Students will also still be
expected to have a broad background
in the arts and deep proficiency in the
sciences; it will just be done in a more
natural way. They will be motivated
to formally learn about linear algebra
when working on a computer graphics
apprenticeship at Pixar or Electronic
Arts. They will want to learn account-
ing when working under the CFO of a
publicly traded company. Ungraded
seminars will be held regularly during
nights and weekends when students
can enjoy and discuss great works of
literature and art. If the students de-
cide they want to prove their academic
ability within a domain—like algo-
rithms or French history—they can
sign up for rigorous assessments lead-
ing to microcredentials that are valued
by employers and graduate schools.