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.
Salman Khan ( skhan@khanacademy.org) is the founder
and executive director of the Khan academy in Mountain
View, Ca.
this Viewpoint is adapted from s. Khan, The One World
Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. Hachette book
Group, 2012.
Copyright held by author.