Startup CEO says college education not necessary
I would like to close nine out of 10 universities and convert them into elementary and middle schools. I would like them to make their facilities available to students to conduct experiments, have access to more spaces specialized in more areas, talk to the faculty, etc., because university campuses are wonderfully overbuilt facilities which are now being underutilized,” said David Lee, Korean-Canadian CEO of Shakr Media, a video creation platform based in Seoul.
“I think most of high school is a colossal waste of time, too much time spent on SAT preparation and the equivalent in Korea. That’s encouraging people to compete in an environment of artificial scarcity. Allocate those resources towards really making a difference,” he said during an interview on Monday with The Korea Times. Shakr offers tools that facilitate small to large businesses in creating their own marketing videos.
All of this may sound radical to those fond of the existing education system, or who idolize diplomas from top universities. But university diplomas have nothing to do with work performance and happiness in life, according to Lee, who himself has no college diploma, let alone a high school diploma.
Lee co-founded a company at age 13 and sold it to a Nasdaq-affiliated company five years later. He dropped out of high school a year before college and has since pursued a business career in many fields of work. He worked for a startup that sold Blackberry security software, another one building augmented reality applications — creating the first mobile AR video game — before founding Shakr in 2010 which was valued at 22 million dollars as of last year. His company is fast-growing, marking a 216 percent increase in revenue from a year ago and establishing a presence in New York. The company’s investors include NHN, Walden International, Posco Capital and 500 Startups.
He enrolled into the University of Toronto later, however, at the age of 21, only to find himself in the wrong place and leave for good.
Describing the experience as “just not right for me,” he said he has never regretted not completing university or dropping out of high school.
“I’ve been blessed with a lifetime of incredible experiences, incredible people working alongside me. I think education certainly had not held me back. I managed to let the curiosity not get shaken out of me. I’ve got a wide range of interests.”
Interestingly, a majority of his employees at Shakr don’t have college degrees, some because they never went, but others because they never finished.
“A lot of the young people I work with, their parents’ expectations are something they’ve embraced for much of their lives and it’s only recent that they bought into the idea of not graduating from universities and instead working on things that would increase their professional capabilities and accomplishments at a very young age,” he said.
To address this sensitive topic, Lee decided to write a book encouraging people not to go to college. He has written a couple of chapters to be pitched to publishers.
“Motivation for writing this came partly from the people I work with. They have parents that have raised them for a different world, just like all of our parents have raised us for a world they imagined. So there’s a disconnect from what we need and what our parents expect of us.
“Creating more awareness around this in a well-thought-out and public forum, I think, could be one of the catalysts for making it more socially acceptable, (and have) less social resistance from the parents’ generation making life a little bit easier for the people I work with.”
He himself embraced a departure from his parents at a very young age and says he was a difficult child to raise.
“There was no end to my questions, no end to my curiosity. For an immigrant working-class family where both parents are working, there’s a financial cost to setting aside a parent’s active time to answering a kid’s questions. It’s expensive, it takes time,” he said.
“That’s where schools really need to step in. I don’t want our schools to be doing MAP, SAT testing, but keep that curiosity alive and provide them with the tools and platforms to keep going. If we do that, we’re going to get to a point where we have middle school kids that are impacting the world in a positive way, no matter how small, and high school kids making a difference in the lives of millions of people. When they’ve done that, that is worth so much more than a top SAT score.”
If we do this well, students won’t need to be in school by the time they’re in their 20s, he says.
“The way we’ve conceived university education until now is doing not much else beyond slowing them down. Students have let go of that idea of becoming exceptional or phenomenal — we’ve shaken that out of them from that age,” Lee said.
“We’ve really streamlined delivery of the fundamentals, but where education is falling in Korea is in the slightly higher levels where the kids are being asked to even be dishonest in pursuit of getting into universities, hence the SAT scandals. All the time that goes into preparation for college really should be spent helping the kids learn something, accomplish something. We’re placing overwhelming emphasis on these kids getting into universities, thinking it’s a golden ticket to life. But it’s not. How many Ivy League graduates are there that aren’t living fulfilling lives? How many university gradu- ates are unemployed? How many people with top SAT scores are socially broken?
“I contend we continue our excellence in delivering the fundamentals to children at a young age but also provide them with the unlimited ability to ask questions, fulfill their curiosities, and build curriculum around their interests — because kids are interesting.”
But he agrees college education may be necessary in some fields that require special equipment or knowhow that hasn’t been distributed to large audiences and may only be acquired at certain universities. “If the work you’re pursuing requires access to those facilities, then having affiliation with one of those institutions becomes a requirement,” Lee said.
But he believes creating “more awareness, discussion around university education could make the choice to go down this path more palatable,” which is why he is adamant about writing the book.