Steven Watkins

Your aim is spot on. Colleges and universities prioritize recruitment and retention because it fills their coffers with borrowed money—funds that students are ultimately responsible for repaying. It’s a Ponzi scheme of sorts. A key problem, often overlooked, is that institutions of higher education should primarily be places for scholarly pursuits. They aren’t well-suited for career training. Many of the skill sets taught on campus could be learned more effectively on the job or in trade schools (with some exceptions, of course). Unfortunately, society has been conned into placing excessive value and self-worth on college degrees while devaluing skilled work that doesn’t require one. Why does this persist? We’ve been led to believe that going to college is a guaranteed path to success. University recruitment events love to trot out that outdated statistic. What is guaranteed is this: if colleges had to reimburse students for failing to deliver on career outcomes, they’d quickly rethink their promises and become far more discriminating about whom they recruit. Sorry for the long post, but my point is that what we’re told repeatedly—that college is for everyone—is the opposite of what the student in this story experienced. We all know education has been hijacked by charlatans, yet parents and students continue to buy the empty promises. That said, the student made poor choices and will pay a painful price for years. Maybe, just maybe, more stories like hers will wake society up, spark real education reform, and finally put an end to the lie.

A Stanford PhD student was simultaneously juggling coursework, a teaching assistant position, consulting work, and building the side project that eventually became his company. He didn't write a productivity book about it. He wrote a single blog post that quietly became one of the most referenced pieces of student advice on the internet. I read it carefully, and the framework inside it is completely different from what productivity influencers sell. Here is what a Stanford engineering PhD actually figured out about managing impossible workloads. The first insight was one I had never heard framed this way before. He said to think about your education like a building and think about tests like earthquakes. A building with a weak foundation collapses at even small earthquakes. Most students build the building specifically to survive one particular earthquake, which means they study only what is relevant for the specific test. He called this both unsustainable and dangerous, because there were multiple times during his PhD where he had forgotten how to solve a problem and had to derive the answer from foundational understanding alone. That only works if the foundation is actually there. The second insight was about where your attention goes during a test, and it changed how I think about any high-stakes situation with limited time. He said the professors who want to exhaustively test students deliberately create tests that are never meant to be finished. So the students who do best are not the ones who work fastest they are the ones who read every problem first, identify which ones have the highest return on invested time, and do those first. He called it managing your resource to value ratio, and he scored well on genuinely hard tests precisely because of this. The third insight was the one buried at the end that most people skim past. He said the worst thing you can do on a daily basis is use your active brain to think about small irrelevant things. Every unwritten task sitting in your head is consuming a portion of your mental bandwidth even when you are not working on it. Writing everything down is not just an organizational tactic it is how you give your brain permission to focus on the thing in front of you instead of the twenty things behind it. The fourth was the most counterintuitive one coming from someone managing that many competing demands. He said do not study all the time, because it does not work. Overloading yourself with information past a certain point produces diminishing returns, and the relationships and experiences you skip in the process of grinding are often more valuable to your long-term trajectory than the extra hours of studying ever will be. He was doing a PhD, a consulting practice, a teaching role, and building a company at the same time. And his productivity system fit in a single blog post. The people who are actually doing the most are almost never the ones with the most complicated systems.

Did you know Germany has a ridiculous number of universities? 422+ higher education institutions (109 full unis + 209 applied sciences) for ~84 million people — ~5 per million. Decentralized federalism gone wild. But here’s the catch: “free” tuition (for everyone, including internationals) funded by taxpayers has led to massive overcrowding. Lecture halls packed with hundreds, PhD students doing the teaching, strained resources, and quality suffering in many places. Taxpayers foot the bill while dropout rates linger and infrastructure groans. Is spreading thin really “accessibility,” or just unsustainable populism that dilutes excellence? Compare to more selective systems — maybe fewer, better-funded unis would serve students (and the economy) better than this bloated network.

California will be bankrupt by 2030. If you’re expecting a state pension, it is at risk. If you don’t believe it, check Grok or Gemini and explore how California politicians changed the reporting rules on your pension so they could hide how underwater it is. The middle class citizens of California will soon be asked to pay a huge price to bail out the state. Why them? Because that is where most of the wealth of California resides. It’s easy to single out “billionaires” but there aren’t many of them and they can and will all leave before the bottom falls out. They are leaving in droves already. The mismanagement in California is biblical - and the scale is huge because it’s the world’s 4th largest economy. California politicians and their henchmen are now entering the coverup phase where they can no longer hide their financial incompetence so they are taking from average California residents to try and hide what they’ve done: You will soon see ballot initiatives with fancy tiles like “billionaire tax”. But those are lies. They are mechanisms to tax everything, every way: Excise taxes Wealth taxes Private property confiscation It’s all happening now. If you want to preserve California, you will need to stand up because California has become a kleptocracy.

Teachers vs Professors This has been on my mind since I first encountered it almost 15 years ago. When I was in high school, I had a few teachers in the humanities/social sciences who were really, really good: deep, serious thinkers, with lots of interesting views synthesized over decades of globetrotting experiences. As teachers, even at a nice private school, they were not real “winners” in the sense of climbing a prestigious career ladder, and neither did they publish academic papers. You could call them very advanced amateurs, and as dabblers they got to toy with lots of interesting ideas, kind of randomly assembled, without outside judgment. When I got to the University of Chicago, known for its life of the mind in the humanities, I didn't really find anybody who seemed to be as deep or as interesting a thinker as these teachers I encountered in high school. I always wondered why. Partially, it's because I got lucky with my teachers. They were the best we had. Maybe I didn't get so lucky with my professors. But today I may have figured it out: I think the actual reason is that my professors at UChicago were, in a sense, winners on an academic career ladder. It’s an extremely competitive environment, and they had somehow made it to the top. By definition, this is a tremendously powerful filter. And I think this had actually filtered against a whole group of people whom I consider interesting. This has become especially clear over the last few years, as a lot of traditional academia has been losing prestige rapidly: people are trusting the kind of professorial expert class less and less and less. It turned out that professors of ethics and sociology are just as unethical and susceptible to groupthink as the general public. And the general conformity of ideology and thought in academia is now well-known. These professional humanities academics may publish papers that are respected or even highly esteemed within their own niche communities, but this particular value system has long since been removed from what I consider interesting, or, in many cases, even related to the pursuit of truth. Reflecting on it, the heart of the matter is that those teachers in high school were unconstrained by convention and had been allowed to fully lean into their interests — kind of like the platonic dream of academia — whereas the professors I encountered in university, even when very successful, had been conformed by the academia-industry pressure cooker and their work sanitized, professionalized, and ultimately made uninteresting under the constraints.