I spoke to Virgin Australia Voyeur Magazine about the modern education system, and featured in the article in the February issue, ‘The Self-Taught Graduate: Do You Really Need A Tertiary Education?’

Arguably, one of the biggest news stories of 2011 was the passing of Steve Jobs. The Apple boss, who died of cancer aged 56, was a genius who changed the world as we know it. He was one of the wealthiest ment ever to walk the planet, all of it self-made thanks to his incorrigible motivation and inimitable innovation. Steve Jobs was also a college dropout.

Jobs’s rogue education was an inspiration to many and is one famous example of an increasingly common success scenario: wealthy business people, entrepreneurs, CEOs and innovators who dropped out of university, or never went to it in the first place. While Jobs was not against formal education, he emphasised the importance of creative thinking and the flexbility needed to allow it. “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10.30 at night with a new idea, or because they realised something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem,” he said while addressing thousands of new Stanford University students in 2005.

Jobs’s sentiments are being lived out by many influential people today, those who are not only making their way in the world without degrees, but also encouraging young people to consider tackling life without a university education. It’s not a new dissent, but it’s louder than ever. Jobs’s success, despite only six months of college education, seems to throw a finger up at the idea that university is the key to success. Mark Twai famously said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The American R&B and rock-and-roll pianist Fats Domino similarly opinioned, “A lot of fellows nowadays have a BA, MD, or PhD. Unfortunately, they don’t have a J-O-B.”

While universities have remained proud and strong, their steadfastness has started to falter. In the US especially, but also in the UK and across Asia, university as an institution is suffering a PR crisis of late, with billionaires and academics alike debating the relevance of an institution long held in high esteem. “If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them,” associate professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University in Utah has written, “[they] will be irrelevant by 2020.”

“People are starting to ask, ‘Is it worth it?’” says professor Hamish Coates, who directs higher-education research at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in Melbourne. “They’re realising that rather than doing four years of business or engineering they can go out and put a deposit on a house. People are asking, ‘What am I going to get out of it? What are my alternatives?’”

While university enrolment numbers are still healthy in Australia, the current economic climate seems to have worn holes too big to repair in the US university system. Australian campuses may need to ready themselves for crowds waving placards and hammering tent pegs – partly because Australia is only just starting to feel the trickle-down effect of the global financial crisis, some three years after it began in the US, but also because, as lawyer and educator Delia Browne says: “Once we see that America does it, everyone wants to do it here.”

The good news is that with crisis comes change. Browne, who calls herself a “recovering academic”, is part of a growing breed of diversely educated online-enterprise innovators, who are being labelled the virtual brains of the future. She is a co-founder of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), an online university of sorts – or “grassroots open education project” – that offers a rapidly expanding array of university-style courses free of charge. “When we first started doing this, there was a growing number of Americans who couldn’t afford to go to university. People were writing heartfel letters that they couldn’t even get blue-collar jobs and we got the sense that we really were doing the right thing here,” she explains. In just three years, P2PU has gained educational, legal and financial support from big-name backers such as the University of California, Hewlett Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. The university has even branched into online schools of its very own – there’s a School of Webcraft, another of Education, a School of Social Innovation, and even a burgeoning School of Mathematical Future – and P2PU has upwards of 20,000 ‘students’ from all around the world, including Australia, Brazil and the US.

“There are so many people who will never get the chance to get into Harvard, Oxford, Yale or the University of Sydney,” says Browne. “Where are they going to get the opportunity to change their lives? This could be it. It sounds cultish but this is a really good social movement. We’re trying to build communities.”

P2PU, like others of its kind, is a response to an educational system in crisis but it also has the goal of changing the ways that universities educate. “I believe it’s beyond the capacity of the current system to satisfy the demand [for education],” says Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.

“The only conceivable scenario in which our society manages to fully develop the intellectual potential of a billion young people around the world is if we lean really hard towards a DIY model: producing and releasing all kinds of educational content online for free, training teachers to become facilitators, and building systems and organisations to encourage peer-to-peer and independent learning. Otherwise we’ll keep shutting people out because of cost.”

The move towards DIY degrees is not an attempt to undermine the notion of higher learning. In fact, way back in 2001, the Massachusetts  Institute of Technology agreed to put all its courses online for free, a step followed by several Ivy League universities in the US, as encouraged by the education technology startup Knewton. However, there is a dissenting spirit driving these ventures, which aim to expand access to learning, and the ways in which we engage in it and universities engage with us.

“Students are dropping out because they are bored,” explains Coates, who directed the largest-ever survey of students in Australia for ACER in 2011. “It can be asked, is this the problem of the university or student? It’s probably a bit of both, but universities need to work out what it is that can change this. Universities need to work out how to engage students.”

ACER’s findings clearly confirm the protestations of entrepreneurs such as PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, Peter Thiel, a loud critic of the current university system. In early 2011, he introduced the Thiel Fellowship, offering students with great ideas $100,000 to start their business on one condition: they skip college, “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who dropped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation,” Thiel says. “This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas, either. The Thiel Fellows will change the world and call it a senior thesis.”

In Australia, bestselling author and motivational speaker Jamie McIntyre has devoted his professional life to lighting a fire under the relevance of today’s education system. “School failed me and fails the majority of students for a number of reasons. It fails to prepare students for real-life experiences,” McIntyre says, summarising but a scratch of the indignation that oozes from his book, What I Didn’t Learn At School But Wish I Had, in which he lays out the platform for what he calls a “21st Century education“. “Most Australians are financially illiterate; outside of that, schools fail to teach people emotional intelligence, emotional mastery [and] how to be more fulfilled in life. How do people get access to an education for life? This is a question that I believe schools, universities and governments should be asking. What do students need in order to excel in the 21st century?

Steve Jobs did not drop out of university because he was done with furthering himself or continuing to learn. He just discovered that he could both learn and achieve a lot more out in the world on his own than within the confines of textbooks and rigid curricula.

“Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” he told those eager Stanford students. DIY education is trying to provide a platform for Jobs’s approach to learning – a new way of learning that provides some of the discipline of a university education without all the shackles. “The beauty is that it is defined by the learner,” explains Kamenetz. “Most learning outside school, which means most learning, happens out of love. Read a book on a topic that interests you, join a cooking club, or browse YouTube videos until you can solve a Rubik’s cube blindfolded – this is all DIY learning. DIY learning is a crucial 21st-century literacy. The ability to participate in networks that are sources of new ideas, to read and write and pursue questions that interest you through various rabbit holes, is something we all have to keep doing our whole lives.”

All of this sounds very idyllic but will it help buy the house that all those university-age people are opting for instead of paying for a degree? The answer to this is layered but even more traditional employers these days are becoming open-minded. “The workplace is tougher and more competitive than it ever was. An individual launching themselves without a degree [will be] at a disadvantage,” says Yvonee Howie, chief executive of the CEO Institute in Sydney. “However, would I be willing to hire someone without a degree? Certainly I would and I think other people have the same view. That’s when other factors come into play such as life experience.”

McIntyre claims he looks more closely at everything but a person’s qualification in his hiring process. “It is very important to me to look at what level of education they have invested in, in their own time since university. It shows initiative,” he says. “I would guesstimate that a number of CEOs or managers hiring people would look at whether their prospective employee has invested anything in their own personal development. Most employers and large companies provide additional on-the-job training due to fundamental skill sets not being taught at school.”

Employment is not the overriding incentive, however for these ‘edupunks’ and ‘edupreneurs’. Those at the helm of DIY education are emphatic that finding employment is just the cherry on top. “Getting a good job, and a job for life, was the success formula for past generations,” says McIntyre. “The education system has not changed rapidly enough to excel in the 21st Century effectively. If people have a school or university degree it is not enough to excel in today’s world.”

For the current batch of students, lifestyle has become more of a consideration than linear employment – be it in times of economic crisis when freelance work is often easier to come by than a full-time salaried position or in an era of prosperity in which creativity is as valued as the key to financial success. “If your goal is to get work, not necessarily to get hired, it’s a lot easier,” says Kamenetz.

“I do think in Australia, we are into life-long learning. It’s not just about a job but about adding to ourselves as well as about professional development,” says Browne, whose contemporaries believe that education is revolution – as long as it’s done right.

“Inventing and producing a pedal-powered cell-phone charging station to help Africans stay connected looks better on a resume than straight A’s in college, and takes the same amount of time,” says Michael Vassar, president of the non-profit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. While the world seems to fall ever deeper into chaos, so it seems to inspire what Jobs lived for: innovation. “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” he once said. Edupunks are both – and then some. “I don’t think universities will die but they will change,” says Browne. “We’re not anti… but we are disruptive.”

Original article by Emma Pearse in the February 2012 Issue of Virgin Australia Voyeur Magazine