

We need an AirBNB for Mentorship--not $35k a year wasted on college - jasonmcalacanis
http://launch.is/blog/l024-spend-your-college-tuition-on-being-mentored-and-starti.html
anyone out there want to build mentormykid.com? dead serious... I will fund it. :-)<p>i meet young adults all day long who are $100-200k in debt after school. makes no sense.
======
jasonfried
This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love
to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how
we can do more of this at 37signals.

~~~
justine
The University of Waterloo Computer Engineering department offers a "Co-Op"
Engineering degree. My understanding is that the students take five years to
graduate, rather than the traditional four, and alternate by semester between
work and school. One semester in classes, the other semester at internship.
The graduating students I've met absolutely dominate technical interviews and
the like.

~~~
enzoaquino
The Rochester Institute of Technology has also has Co-Ops as a graduation
requirement for most technical and engineering degrees. The number of quarters
required depended on the degree. For example, I had to do four quarters for my
computer science degree.

It was a fantastic experience, and every job I've held has come to me in some
way through contacts I made through that program. Plus, it was extremely
valuable to come back after a co-op and connect what you were learning with
the real world.

------
stdbrouw
"Free labor is the exact point of interns! Why else would you waste your time
mentoring someone who is gone in 10 weeks?" How utterly, utterly naive.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html>
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784>

To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid
three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel
samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots."

That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering
nowadays.

The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem
is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching
them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending
interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as
they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means
nothing.

"If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on
your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those
three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I
don’t care what she did there."

... um, yeah, right.

~~~
ksolanki
I agree. That is close to what I argued here -

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734>

------
DanielBMarkham
I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few
months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world
experience working with startups.

"Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4
hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return
they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're
sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research,
and reports. Really don't need much of that."

To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was
planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go
away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their
time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to
consume.

I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not
entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant
training.

We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the
students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I
was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their
participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out
something that would be beneficial to us all.

This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.

~~~
staunch
How is what you're looking for any different from an unpaid internship?

------
tomkarlo
The solution to a broken higher-education system is not to encourage people to
avoid it entirely. It's to fix the problem and make higher education
affordable in the US in the same way it's affordable overseas.

It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers
NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of
mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are
desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college
education and not ending up with marketable skills.

A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition
loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party
making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default.

If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with
fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was
priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new
college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a
photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article)
suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.

~~~
joshkaufman
To do what you suggest would require a massive restructuring of the entire US
university system, and the governmental systems that continuously feed it easy
money. There's a _reason_ why college costs go up as federal educational
dollars increase.

 _Colleges don't care what you major in, as long as the dollars flow._
Colleges have absolutely no incentive to provide educational experiences that
are useful in the working world, since the money is already in the bank
account. They have every incentive to maximize enrollments [1] and keep
students enrolled as long as possible, while reducing costs via cheap graduate
student labor.

Colleges also have every incentive to massage outcomes statistics to keep
federal dollars flowing. When a student defaults on a loan, the college
doesn't bear the brunt of the impact - it's the responsibility of the
government, and therefore, the taxpayer.

"Fixing" the college system, as you suggest, would require eliminating many
administrators and/or substantially reducing their salaries, structuring
departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal
arts), and largely eliminating federal subsidies for academic research,
student loans, and grants.

You can bet that every single individual involved in credentialing as it
presently exists will fight those changes to their dying breath. Since being
"strong on education" gets politicians elected, this faction will find it easy
to maintain political support.

Personally, I think this sentiment sums up the alternative approach:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -
Buckminster Fuller

Employers don't NEED people with college educations. They need employees with
economically valuable skills. They're not the same thing.

[1]
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b41770642...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177064219731.htm)

~~~
tomkarlo
I don't think you have to do a thing to the college system to fix the problem
I'm pointing out. You have to fix how we finance education in the US.

Government guarantees of loans are always a recipe for moral hazard and
inefficiency. Look at housing.

Either the government should directly fund higher education, as in Canada,
Australia and other countries, or it should end guarantees on education loans
from the private sector, so that they can have a more effective market. I'd be
fine with the government subsidizing loan rates (say, paying the first 3% of
the interest rate.) But the overall rate should be determined by market forces
and the risk that a student will not earn enough to pay back their loans.

Borrowing 100K to learn basket-weaving should not have the same implicit risk
as borrowing 100K to learn software development. As long as there is, you're
effectively subsidizing the basket weaving at everyone else's expense.

Also, the solution suggested by the OP doesn't scale. There aren't remotely
enough available internship opportunities to handle the demand if a large
percentage of college students went this route, nor would big companies want
to spend their time attempting to filter what would essentially be high school
graduates looking to work in the corporate space.

------
pavel_lishin
Sweet jesus, please kill this background:
<http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg>

I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a
stain wouldn't come off.

~~~
whimsy
Hah! I guess my screen is pretty dirty; I had to look pretty close to notice,
even whilst scrolling.

------
pnathan
Hi Jason (since you're reading this!)

* I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so.

* Interns at my company get _paid_ , and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship.

I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools".

edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is
working to make all schools expensive.

My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more
than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a
better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.

~~~
whimsy
$20/year? Did you mean 20K? Did you have full-ride scholarships? Did you get
an education outside the US?

Given your TCC, I assume you meant $20K.

~~~
pnathan
Give or take, 20,000 per year. Almost no scholarships. Yes, USA. No, not Ivy
League.

------
ksolanki
_Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder._

The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the
right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education
and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially
big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look
at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-
market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of
interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such
programs would help only in hands of right mentors.

I also tend to disagree on the notion of _35K a year wasted on college_.
College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches
kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends.

Edit: Corrected grammar.

~~~
mgkimsal
"It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends."

I guess I did it wrong. The only friends I have from college are the same ones
I had before college. I have a few facebook acquaintances too, but it would be
a stretch to call them friends.

~~~
pilom
Yes imho you did it very wrong.

~~~
mgkimsal
I possibly did. I worked 3 jobs while _mostly_ putting myself through school.
My parents helped a bit in the first and second year, I took a semester out,
and ended up taking out a student loan the last year (and still had some
credit card debt as well).

I had friends in classes, and we'd hang out sometimes, but this notion of
'lifelong friends made in college' just doesn't seem to feel very real. It
also doesn't seem to be the case for many of the people I know. Yes, they made
friends in college, but for the most part those friendships have about the
same impact as high school friends - typically, not much after you leave the
shared space.

But perhaps I'm just too cynical...

~~~
scott_s
It's not being cynical, it just wasn't the experience you had.

~~~
mgkimsal
good point.

------
Locke1689
Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken
advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they
have been used for discrimination.

Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a
job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who
has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy
parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get
into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They
were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from
continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not
who their parents were.

~~~
qq66
A top law firm could just start a minimum wage internship which would have the
same effect -- with $100,000 or more in law school debt, most people couldn't
afford that either.

There are other ways to help people from outside the "circle" break in, this
in fact the genesis of most diversity programs at white-shoe firms.

~~~
Locke1689
Most people could get by on minimum wage for a little while. Law school debt
usually doesn't have to be paid back immediately.

------
TamDenholm

      A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year.
      People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane!
    

I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents
moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal
education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact
and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference
between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning.

In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm
financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when
i choose to work.

While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always
wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and
education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i
went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too
late for me to find some.

~~~
uptown
The prices he mentions assume that everybody's sending their kids to private
schools prior to college. That's really not the case. In cities, you'll see a
higher percentage of it because city schools tend to be worse environments for
learning and are stretched thinner budget-wise, but the vast majority of
students in small towns and suburbs go to public schools paid for by their
taxes and do not incur the kind of pre-college expense for education that he's
talking about. Sure, the taxpayers are still paying towards their education
... but it's spread across the entire community, whether they have students in
school or not, and not coming directly out of the pockets of individual
students' families.

------
kloncks
Hehe. So typical of Calacanis, yet funny:

 _Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his
prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the
top 10 of tech writers_

------
dangrossman
> These interns are not slaves or indentured servants. They can walk out at
> any time

Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my
internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS
degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University
charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12
months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required
internships).

------
calbear81
Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support
some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services
but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees.

How about an online mentoring matchup where:

\- Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video
bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor
and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help
with.

\- Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and
hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees
are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.

------
foenix
If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem.
All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote
collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen
session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled
around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of
universities not offering a programming course.

The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open
software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command
line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn
programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be
able to improve the application.

Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the
application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic
endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).

------
mdda
One significant problem is the pyramid of management. Everyone would want to
be managed by the top person. But these are in very limited supply, and
they're being rationed one-to-one. In a university, the lecturers are one-to-
many.

How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in
university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of
advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of
life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside).

So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the
reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe
Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of
someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.

------
jasonmcalacanis
it would be amazing if someone wanted to build out mentormykid.com. i would
seriously fund it.

~~~
aik
I've seriously been thinking about starting a site like this for several
months. However, I would like it to function as a free site for all, mentor
and student, instead of a pay-for-the-mentor site. I'm fairly convinced that
there would be plenty of people who would help out as a charity or
philanthropy, but haven't thought of a good way to execute that thought yet.

My motivation, as may be yours, is to disrupt this current increasingly flawed
education system in whatever way I can. Working on a few other projects along
this line at the moment...

~~~
mparr4
"to disrupt" seems to me like a backwards approach. You don't need to disrupt
anything, you just need to create a system that works better, at least for
some, and the old system will fall back. It doesn't need to be defeated or
eliminated.

But yes, mentors outside (as well as inside, perhaps?) of academic
institutions is a rather good idea, i think :-)

------
ChuckFrank
Bruce Mau -- from Massive Change -- created a similar one-off program.
<http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/> . It is unclear how successful
the program was. The main reason seems to be that the demand for mentorships
exceeds the mentor ability to work directly with the interns. Many top
architects actually charge students to participate in the studios as interns.
They use some fancy french term to describe the relationship.

------
arram
It's interesting how 'AirBnB' has become a synonym for 'marketplace'. That's
success.

------
gavanwoolery
It's called the internet. Information is free - if you can't teach yourself
something, you have no chance of survival in a world filled with jobs that
often require you to learn and adapt independently.

~~~
jackvalentine
Having a mentor is a very different thing to going to a library (or the
internet, the greatest library that ever existed) and reading everything.

------
neolefty
What if airbnb had the equivalent of sub-reddits? For now, it just has the
"sleep somewhere" sub, but you can imagine all kinds of user-created ones. A
cross between Meetup and AirBnB?

------
dfischer
I really want to work on this. I bought some domains regarding it. I can work
on something quick over a couple hours and have something going.

------
rokhayakebe
Interesting. How will it scale, though?

------
georgieporgie
I've never understood the obsession with internships. Why be an (unpaid)
intern when you can hold down an entry-level tech job during college? Why
aren't there more summer/break jobs for students?

(I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during
school, full-time during breaks)

~~~
alexsb92
In Canada the system is slightly different. We usually don't have as many
internships as we have coops. The main differences between the two are the
following:

* Coop is usually paid * It's usually technical. * Some universities have programs to support coops.

The biggest coop program is from the University of Waterloo. All engineering
students are required to take part in the program which combines work and
school by alternating between a school semester and work semester. The
university has it's own job posting website, and it actively foes looking to
find more employers to offer jobs. It also makes sure that the student gets to
do real work, not make coffee all day. If a student feels like he's getting
the short end of a stick with a job, he can complain to the university which
will look into it and clear things up.

Disclaimer: I am a student at uWaterloo.

------
mindcrime
Well said, Mr. Calacanis. It'll be interesting to see if somebody actually
picks this idea up and tries to make something happen with it.

Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the
inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that _"some kid
gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich...
waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort
of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era,
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor
get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."_

