More on education

You’d think, with all of the time that I’ve spent in college classrooms, I would have figured out what parts of education lead to success and what is a waste of time and money. I’m guessing that you’d think that, because I know that I do.
I can identify a half dozen great teachers, professors who knew their material very well and were able to engage me so that I became excited about learning what they knew. Most of the others are deservedly unmemorable.
So, how come an academic career in the liberal arts led to a career in high tech? Until the time that it happened (and for long while afterwards), no one would have predicted it.
Recently, our thinking about the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease was upended. Researchers verified that raising HDL (good cholesterol) levels made no difference in the progression of heart disease in patients who started out with low HDL levels. People with low HDL typically are more likely to have heart disease, but raising their HDL doesn’t help them much.
We can correlate a factor with a condition, but changing that factor doesn’t affect the outcome of the condition.
Data suggest antidepressants score slightly ahead of placebos, A doctor prescribes antidepressants, but only one patient in eight will do better with the medication than with a placebo. And, theplacebos are getting stronger.
Our ability to predict who will benefit from something is slightly better than doing nothing, but telling them we’re doing something. For example, psychologist Ellen Langer showed that telling people that they were living a healthy lifestyle could result in the people acting that way. 
It’s long been a given that people with more education tend to be happier, wealthier, and healthier. (Your mileage, of course, will vary.)  It appears that we can get more people to college by expanding opportunities at community colleges, graduate programs, and for-profit institutions. And what happens?

• Law students have discovered that their new law degrees will leave them with massive amounts of nondischargeable debt. On that realization, they are suing a law school for leading them to believe that law school was a good deal. It almost amounts to Promissory estoppel, inducing someone to do something based on implication.
• New federal regulations will require that for-profit educational programs yield “gainful employment.’’  
• Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel recently awarded two dozen $100K grants to students who chose to leave college to do real work.

It appears that we’ve identified many factors to happiness, wealth, and happiness. Some of the factors, such as race, gender, family size, and birth order are, once set, pretty much immutable. Others can change by individual effort and societal support, such as education, physical appearance, opportunity for work, and on-going support. Still others are governed by luck, good or bad, at certain times.
Even if we can identify the factors for success, our efforts don’t have success that rise much above chance outcomes.
Personally, I’m surprisingly at peace with this. Most of the stuff that I predicted for my life didn’t come true; most of the time it’s been better than I’d expected. The things that went wrong, well, some came with valuable life lessons, and some were just wrong and have stayed broken. More on that another time.