In a continuation of my “problems with education” articles, the last of which dealt with the low ROI of an MBA education, today I am going to discuss a topic of a more general nature – the number one problem with university education today, whether of an undergraduate or graduate level. The number one problem with university education today is the lack of utility of the dispensed knowledge in the real world that has resulted from the unforgivably slow reaction of university presidents to revamp and update curriculum that has become severely outdated in a rapidly changing world. Due to the virus lockdowns, I have a few friends that decided to go back to attain MBA degrees at ages higher than the norm, and when some of them showed me their course materials, I almost fell out my chair laughing, as nothing has changed since I graduated with my MBA many moons ago, a fact that is comical given how much technology has radically altered the platforms used to set asset prices today compared to the time when I was enrolled in an MBA program. As someone once said, stuffing your head with a thousand facts does not make one intelligent, and an abundance of intelligence is necessary to survive in today’s radically different world that has spawned a brand new onslaught of obstacles imposed upon us by the parasitic ruling class that millenials simply are ill prepared to tackle. Billions of us around the world, unless you are part of the ruling class, have unnecessarily suffered from absurd economic lockdowns that have permanently shuttered millions of small businesses around the world and resulted in some nations’ political authorities absurdly relegating their law enforcement resources to the menial harassment and intimidation of elderly women as recently occurred in the state of Victoria, Australia. Furthermore, the second coming phase of the global economic meltdown that began in 2008 but will not reach its conclusion until after 2020 will blindside most people due to their absurd media-induced obsession with a non-lethal, non-pandemic mildly threatening virus for the entirety of this year.
The parasitic ruling class used their created 2008 global financial crisis to exert draconian measures that left a wake of destruction that resulted in nearly 10 million Americans losing their homes and left countless millions more around the world to suffer the same fate. This year, the parasitic ruling class has quadrupled down as 40 million Americans may soon lose their homes as a direct consequence of the unconstitutional economic lockdowns (as ruled by a federal judge in the US) that have unlawfully prevented citizens from working and confined them to practices of self-isolation at home to fester in a bottomless abyss of economic suffering, anxiety, depression and suicide. Add to these woes, hundreds of thousands to millions of people around the world that are now homeless not because of devastating illnesses caused by a virus, but because of devastating unconstitutional lockdowns imposed by politicians that shut down the businesses for whom they worked and the recipe for an apocalyptic humanitarian crisis is near complete. In particular, service industry employees like restaurant and tourism workers were devastated by the lockdowns, with many unfortunately now homeless and living out of their cars, as even those with college degrees discovered that their degrees were essentially useless in providing them with income during these lockdowns.
But why should a college or university degree become essentially worthless during an economic crisis, whether real or artificially manufactured, as has been the case with our “pandemic” enforced lockdowns of 2020? Shouldn’t underlying foundations of every educational degree have granted the necessary tools of survival during economic crises to all graduated students? Shouldn’t knowledge of how to start a business, how to hunt, how to grow food, how to navigate by the stars and the sun, i.e. basic survival skills, be an essential part of every basic education? Why should the number one problem of university education be its near complete lack of utility of dispensed university knowledge granted by bestowed degrees in the real world?
During this economic pandemic, I became trapped outside of my home county during a brief and spontaneous travel interlude that was supposed to last a few weeks at most, but has now turned into an unplanned 180+ day trip and counting. During the start of my unplanned period of six months abroad, because I failed to communicate to my bank that I was going to be out of my home country for longer than a few weeks, as this situation only arose due to State leaders flexing their authoritarian egos to shut down international travel, my bank cancelled my ATM card, my only connection to my savings, for my “failure to report my whereabouts to them”, leaving me no access to any cash while stuck indefinitely in a foreign nation. And since this past March, due to the endless covid travel lockdowns extended month after month, I’ve still been unable to return home six months later. As a consequence of these absurd, non-science based economic and travel lockdowns, I found myself with $50 in my pocket, zero access to any cash, and just the clothes on my back as my only resources for survival.
Yet I found a way to survive that required me putting in 14-hour days for 60 consecutive days before taking a single break, with the help of borrowed resources, like computers from locals. Furthermore, as many of you may remember, all around the the world, we were told that the draconian lockdown measures on economies and travel would only last for 15-days before being completely lifted, but as is the M.O. of the parasitic ruling class, once they observe complete compliance and zero resistance to their draconian mandates, they often turn what they verbally promise to be only “temporary” measures into full-blown permanent measures. So for those that think things will return to “normal life” in 2021, I unfortunately am here to inform you that your wish will go sadly unfulfilled if you do not rise up and take back your liberties right now. Once 15-days turned into 1-month, I immediately knew that I had to hunker down for the long haul and that I needed to plan for an unexpected, unplanned, indefinite stay abroad. Consequently, at this point and time, less than a month into my unplanned stay, I depended upon my creativity to launch a plan to deliver financial services through online forums that allowed me to reach hundreds of people that I had never met before. I can unequivocally state that I accomplished this feat on knowledge and skills gained completely outside of every academic classroom in which I had ever spent any time, even though I had graduated from an Ivy League school and possessed two master degrees, including an MBA.
I can undeniably and unequivocally state that my time spent inside classrooms of traditional academia and instruction failed to provide me with any of the prerequisite tools to successfully create a new venture under emergency conditions that has now allowed me to survive for the past 6-months of travel purgatory (or more like travel hell). Even classes I had completed under my MBA degree that one might think should translate to real world application, like entrepreneurship classes, woefully failed to provide me with the real world skills necessary to survive these past 180 days, and this is exactly what is at the heart of everything wrong with traditional academic instruction today. Though many will disagree with my assessment that the majority of information dispensed in school should be applicable in the real world, so much so that it will help anyone enrolled in business programs to apply business principles to survive when under the extreme duress of an emergency, for those that disagree with my vision of education, may I then ask you, What is the value of an academic business degree if it provides one with zero tools for survival during a severe economic crisis?
The Non-Transferability of MBA Knowledge to the Real World
For example, had I taken two weeks to apply Kotler’s SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis that I learned in MBA marketing classes to figure out an opportunity to earn money while in lockdown, taken another month to run focus groups to hash out my target consumer market, and then engaged in a marketing campaign and launch, as I was taught to do in business school, I definitely would have ended up on the streets instead of typing this article 180 days later. Instead, due to my own self-educational pursuits completed outside the confines of traditional academia, I resorted to guerilla, real world business tactics to quickly construct a brand new revenue stream virtually out of nothing within 30 to 45 days. Secondly, one literally could spend about $80 and buy a couple of books to learn exactly what I learned in my entrepreneurship class, so given that the cost per unit (tuiton, room and board) comes out to nearly $10,000 per class at top schools like Wharton business school, spending $10,000 to learn something that could be learned for a cost of $80 is not only an example of extreme wastefulness but an example of an inability to determine the ROI of a traditional business education. Just this past month, someone that attends a top MBA program in Asia at a cost of $3,000 per unit (class) asked me to help her understand her class. After looking at just 30 pages of course material that she had forwarded to me, I literally found four massive mistakes in her coursework that made the $3k per class cost a complete joke, despite it being less than 1/3 the cost of a Wharton business school unit. Of course, the mistakes I found in her coursework were mistakes that are typical and prevalent in nearly every top MBA program in the world, whether the program is offered on American, European, or Asian soil. The problem with her coursework was that it discussed theory as if theory works in the real world. when much of the discussed theory presented in her coursework simply does not transfer to how the real world operates. Again, had I applied these economic principles presented in her coursework, the same ones I was taught at a top US MBA program, my new venture creation would have failed miserably and I likely would have ended up homeless as a consequence of being subjected to an unplanned, unexpected 6-month forced stay outside of my home nation.
Instead, I took the skills I learned from running my first business, and within 24 hours, quickly narrowed down my identified opportunities for creating a recurring revenue stream necessary to support an indefinite and forced stay on foreign soil to two possibilities, chose the better one, and immediately engaged my plan to tide me over to the point in time, somewhere in the near future, when I can finally launch my real venture, my 21-course curriculum of skwealthacademy. As I stated above, this accomplishment required working 14-hours a day for sixty days straight before I felt anywhere at ease with my current “stranded on a desert island with only the clothes on my back” situation, but even so, as I kept grinding and saw very small returns grow into bigger returns, and bigger returns grow into even bigger returns, I maintained supreme confidence in my ability to achieve success in my endeavor for the following two reasons: (1) my life literally depended on my achievement of success; but more importantly (2) having undergone the rigors of launching a previous business, I already had the skills of persistence, discipline and resiliency that granted me the necessary toolkit to achieve success in this endeavor. As my closest friends know, as they’ve heard me state this numerous times within the past few years, you could dump me on the streets of a nation in which I don’t speak the language with only the clothes on my back, and not only will I survive, but eventually, after I undergo the prerequisite period of grinding, adapting and overcoming, I will thrive. And my current situation was the closest real world situation to that hypothetical scenario that I’ve ever experienced.
The Failure of MBA Programs to Even Achieve the Simplest of Missions
That said, MBA programs do not even achieve the singular task that they are supposed to accomplish for its graduates, which is to place them in their dream job upon graduation. When I was still willing to work for someone else, which anyone with entrepreneurial aspirations should never do, as the lessons learned from pursuing one’s own business are essential to eventually launching a successful business, the tools I gained from applying creativity in my job searches that landed me the jobs I eventually desired were never taught to me in the classroom environment of my MBA program. If anything, these lessons, which I also include in my academy courses, should be an essential part of every MBA curriculum instead of being prominently absent from it. For example, most people do not even realize that many of the best jobs in every company are never publicly advertised, as firms’ hiring managers often attempt to fill such positions from the inside. And even then, when I worked at corporations, I discovered that many of the best positions were not advertised on the private, internal corporate intranet bulletin boards either. In fact, the only way to discover such openings was by speaking directly with the hiring recruiters. Consequently, simply scouring job networking sites or hiring a headhunter to look for jobs would be more likely to eliminate, not create, the types of interviews most of us seek in the pursuit of our dream jobs. I actually secured employment once by (1) Researching and deciding that I wanted to work for the highest profit margin office of the highest profit margin division of a certain company; (2) Driving to this office and waiting for hours for the hiring manager to show up; and (3) Handing a CV specifically tailored just for the position I wanted and requesting an interview from the manager, even though my prior research online uncovered zero open positions at this office. And within two weeks, I was hired. Should they teach such tactics at every MBA program in the world? Yes. Do they? Absolutely not. Even today, if I told a Harvard or Oxford MBA graduate that they should deploy this tactic to land their dream job without revealing that I used it to accomplish this very goal, the majority would likely scoff at me and laugh. And there are many more tactics than this one that MBA programs don’t teach their students that are of a hundred times more utility than anything taught to students in the classroom environment today.
We all know from 2008, that great academic achievements offer extremely low to zero utility during such crises and that this low utility must be overcome to avoid being kicked out on the street during great economic crises. Below is the famous photo, though I don’t know if it was ever vetted as real, of someone holding a sign in an American city after the 2008 global financial crisis that stated, “Have PhD, finished three post doctorates, published 6 papers, will work for food.”
Even if that photo was not real and was staged to illustrate the economic misery millions of Americans faced after the 2008 global financial crisis, there likely were people exactly like the man depicted in the photo if not in America, then in other nations around the world during that point and time in history. For example, this year, the news media in Pakistan just reported that 3,000 highly accomplished academics with PhDs will be unemployed. So, obviously the low utility of elite academic degrees continues today.
How skwealthacademy is Different From All Other Schools
For this very reason, during the development of my 21-course skwealthacademy online school, I ensured that every course would specifically dispense only knowledge that is completely lacking in nearly 100% of all MBA/business programs around the world, that is not garbage theory of low utility in the real world but only knowledge that can be applied in the real world to improve one’s life. Furthermore, I ensured that all knowledge contained in all skwealthacademy coursework would be devoid of a time-wasting, low-utility examination platform but instead, would possess high utility exercises to master the utility of the knowledge dispensed. All institutional schooling platforms unfortunately perform a terrible job of developing the personality traits necessary to push through and grind away during bleak times, as I addressed in my article titled “Eleven Rules for Surviving Economic Lockdown.” So, I even ensured that the courses in my academy contain exercises to develop these essential traits as well. Though I had planned to launch my academy this past April, my immediate need to focus on survival once the global travel lockdowns went into effect this past March indefinitely delayed my planned April 2020 launch of my academy. However, even during covid travel lockdown, through borrowing computers and other resources I needed to further the progression of my new business during my lockdown, I’ve been able to finish development of all courses but one, the final one titled “Launching a Business in Under 30-Days Under Extreme Duress, Plus Everything You Need to Know About Launching a Business You Never Learned in Business School”. Regarding this course, I am still writing the final lessons of this course, developing the final exercises for it, and will need to subject all materials to a final edit. But once that course is completed, every course will be ready to launch when I finally exfil from my current travel lockdown situation. As my skwealthacademy patrons are well aware, as sometimes I will send them video messages as early as 4AM and 5AM in the morning from Asia, I have never stopped grinding as hard as I can despite the fact that I know plenty of friends that have completely and unnecessarily (in my opinion) placed their future plans on absolute stoppage due to the covid lockdowns. Whereas I was planning a soft launch of my academy this past April with only 12 of my 21 courses ready for launch at that time, by the time I’ve completed my exfil or discovered a way to launch my academy while still under travel lockdown (which may become necessary), all 21 of my courses should be ready to go. Consequently, not only have I been able to secure a nominal income stream to fund my survival during 6-months of unplanned travel lockdown in an unfamiliar, foreign nation, but I’ve been able to scrape together the necessary resources (as I’m typing on a borrowed computer right now) to keep working on my online skwealthacademy to finish the preparation of the remaining nine courses for launch as well.
All of this was possible not because of my MBA and second master degree or my Ivy League university degree. All three of these degrees were essentially worthless in my campaign to discover creative ways to survive an unplanned 180+ day stay in another country. Lastly, even though I’m one of those people that can’t stand whiners and can’t stand people that always talk about what they are going to do but never do it, I’m also well aware that the wealth building field is not level or remotely equal, a favorite narrative forwarded by the uber wealthy, and that the such a narrative is pure rubbish. This is not opinion but fact. Anyone that truly understands how the fractional reserve, fiat currency global banking system operates is likely well aware that the favorite billionaire narrative of “I pulled myself up by my boostraps so you can too” is complete bunk, simply due to the fact that the creators of our current global banking system have imbedded into this system clear systemic advantages that give the wealthiest people in the world a two-minute head start in a one kilometer race. If you don’t understand this, then you likely sought your education through traditional educational forums, and you may even have an MBA or a PhD in economics, as every piece of business information that has been of high utility to me throughout my lifetime has been knowledge I attained through self-educational pursuits and never in the setting of a traditional business program classroom environment. And that is all you need to know to understand the true utility of a traditional university or collegiate degree. If interested in the full curriculum of my skwealthacademy, you may reference it here (though I must warn you my updated curriculum sits on a hard drive at home, so this curriculum is slightly dated and will be updated the moment I’m allowed to return home).
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