Education – Brooke Allen

Is Cheating by Colleges Just Another Clever Marketing Ploy?

Cheating

by Brooke Allen

Should “caveat emptor” be the operative philosophy when colleges market to students, or should they hold themselves to a higher standard than, say, a drug dealer?

Emory University confessed that for 11 years it has been fudging data it sent in for U. S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges rankings. The publisher said that, “Our preliminary calculations show that the misreported data would not have changed the school’s ranking in the past two years (No. 20) and would likely have had a small to negligible effect in the several years prior.” (Read the article here.)

This second confession by U. S. News only serves to prove that their ranking methodology is deeply flawed. Since integrity is such a major part of character, confessed cheating should drop you to Dead Last in the rankings, and a cover-up should get you barred altogether pending review by the accrediting authorities.

Of course, despicable behavior by colleges may be just another clever marketing ploy intended to send a message to the vast pool of students who embrace cheating: “Come here; you are our kind of people.”

Continue reading “Is Cheating by Colleges Just Another Clever Marketing Ploy?”

To get a job, write your story instead of a resume

by Brooke Allen

I am 61 years old and I have been doing paid work since I was 16. I’ve been a grocery clerk, camp counselor, film projectionist, sound man, light man, cameraman, freight loader, computer programmer, teacher, operations research analyst, manager, salesman, writer, consultant, and for the last 30 years I’ve been a securities trader and hedge fund manager.

Yet I have only once gotten work by answering an ad. Even then I was turned down at first, but it led to a different job six months later after I established a relationship with the hiring manager who had first said no. And I’ve never been asked for a resume until after I received an offer, and then only because HR always needs something to put in their files. I haven’t needed a resume to get work because my resume doesn’t reveal my work. I am my work, and to know my work you need to know me.

Here are some things I’ve discovered about finding worthwhile work that have helped me, and that might help you.

Lead a thoughtful life

The secret of a well-written cover letter is to learn to write well. The secret of an interesting resume is to have done interesting things. So do interesting things and learn to write about them. Ben Franklin said, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” You might do one or the other but it is better to do both; that’s what Franklin did.

Learn to think. Reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser is a good place to start. He says, “Writing is thinking on paper.” In order to think deep mathematical thoughts you must write formulas, and similarly you cannot think deeply about much else without writing words. Learn to think mathematically because otherwise you cannot say you know how to think any more than you can say you can drive a car but can’t turn left. Likewise, saying you can think without knowing how to write is like saying you can’t turn right. If you live long enough and you only go straight ahead, then eventually you’ll drive off a cliff.

Get your story straight

Resumes are your life in bullet-point form. The story of your life is more interesting than can possibly be expressed with a list of sentence fragments. Skip the resume and write the story.

Good stories also have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In your case, you are in the middle. Continue reading “To get a job, write your story instead of a resume”

Why business schools charge so much and pay their teachers so little

College diploma with rip-off seal

by Brooke Allen

You and I know why business schools charge so much for an MBA.

Because they can.

But why do they pay so little to everyone except their superstars?

It’s not just because they can. I think the real reason is much more sinister than that.

Once upon a time—before starting my MBA at NYU in the early 1980s—I thought that there was something wrong with extracting the most from someone while giving the least in return. That was back before my first finance professor said, “The sole objective of the professional manager is to maximize the net present value of the wealth of the owners.”

I had an ethics class where the explicit message was, “Crime doesn’t pay.” But the implicit message was, “It isn’t a crime if it is merely immoral and not strictly against the law.”

At no time during my MBA did I learn how to make a product—any product. But that was OK. I was already a pretty good programmer and I didn’t need NYU to teach me how to make things. However, I was only a part-time student and freelanced full time to pay for school. I needed to learn how to get clients. Continue reading “Why business schools charge so much and pay their teachers so little”

The Problem with Talking About Intellectual Virtues

By: Brooke Allen

This piece is a response to Colleges Should Teach Intellectual Virtues by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe.

The problem with talking about Intellectual Virtues is that it can give intellectuals the feeling they are virtuous when they are just talking.

Colleges might not think of themselves as being in the business of teaching virtues (like honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, wisdom, and love of the truth) but the fact is they can reinforce or squash good instincts. For example, a student I know wrote a college admissions essay that began with a graphic description of the earth under attack by aliens when he, as super-hero, arrived to save the day. His essay concluded by saying he wanted to go to college to save the world.

Three years into college I introduced the student to the Heroic Imagination Project (www.HeroicImagination.org). Its founder, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, wrote to the student asking how they might work together to change the world. The student wrote to me, “I’d rather not change the course of history than risk changing it for the worse.” I cannot tell you how imagined courage become timidity but I can tell you when and where it happened.

Question: How can the people at colleges do a better job teaching courage? Continue reading “The Problem with Talking About Intellectual Virtues”

Want passion? Look for something that makes you angry.

WomanWithHair

Whenever I speak at colleges I begin by asking, “Why are you here?”

This catches the students off guard and after batting the question around for a bit someone says, “To find my passion.” The rest agree and they imagine they are done with the topic.

But I am not done with them.

I ask them to define “passion” because if you cannot say what a word means then you are shooting the shit rather than answering a question.

So they discuss that for a while longer and eventually settle on some variant of, “I don’t know what passion is but I’ll know when I have passion for my work because I won’t have to motivate myself to do it.”

“Really?” I say, “Where I come from we have a word for that, and it is ‘like’ as in ‘I like my job.’ But I know I am passionate when I do something even though I hate every second.”

“Why would anyone do a job they hate?” someone asks.

I want to say, “It might be because you have bills to pay and you don’t want to live off your parents or the state.”

But, instead I say, “I don’t know. Why did my dad lie about his age so he could enlist a year earlier than allowed by law to become a paratrooper and jump out of airplanes while the Japanese shot at him? That was something he hated to do, but he did it anyway, and he did it because of something called passion.”

At this point the class looks flummoxed but intrigued. Continue reading “Want passion? Look for something that makes you angry.”

How to write if you cannot concentrate.

RieurIFM-1024x716LevelAdjusted

Jack Rieur was the most wonderful teacher I ever had and perhaps the best teacher anywhere on the planet and for all time. I first met him in 1963 when he was my 6^th grade teacher and we have kept in touch ever since.

Sure, he covered the state mandated syllabus, but what he really taught was that the world was something we go out and live in and not read about in the classroom. And learning was fun; the most fun you can ever have. And if you pay attention you can learn from life itself and the point wasn’t that there was a test at the end of the semester but later in life you had to teach others because the human race is not a race to the finish but a relay race where near the finish line we must pass the baton.

For example, he taught geography not from the book but from the slides he took personally when he visited all the places in the book. Here is a picture I took of him back when he was a spry 89-year-old in front of the 79,662 slides he used in practicing his craft and that have since been digitized and stored by the Archives at the Consortium Library. I have been to more than 40 countries so far and have set up housekeeping in a few (and I’m no where near done). Had I not had him I might have run the risk of having gone to Canada once and seen a few other countries for a few hours each on a cruise.

He died this last August but his spirit lives on in me. For example he came to my rescue just now when I was stuck writing one thing and I got unstuck by writing something else.

Mr. Rieur’s other name was Jack but he insisted his sixth grader’s call him Mr. Rieur. It was not a matter of respect for age but of class. You only got to call him Jack if you became a teacher too. Well I have approached raising my children and managing my businesses and all my writing as a teacher, and so I think I have earned the right to call him Jack posthumously. However if you have done none of those things then please call him Mr. Rieur out of respect.

How to write if you cannot concentrate.

People tell me that they cannot concentrate long enough to write anything coherent that isn’t trite or a cut-and-paste job of things off the web, which doesn’t count anyway.

I say, “So?” Continue reading “How to write if you cannot concentrate.”

URGENT: Help Make Work More Fun

Over Super Bowl Weekend (Feb 1-2) some friends and I will be attending an Education Start-UP Weekend to develop tools that will help people bring more fun to work.

WE NEED YOUR HELP.

Here is how you can help us:

1) Tell us your stories: How did you or someone you know make an onerous task more fun? How do you teach others to do the same thing?

2) Tell us your needs: How could your work be more fun?

3) Tell us your ideas: How could employers make work more fun? How can employees do the same? How can job hunting be more fun?

4) Tell us how to help you: Our goal is to create something you can use whether you are doing work, looking for it, or managing others. Tell us how we can contact you when we have something to give you.

WHY THE URGENCY?

At Start-UP Weekend events you are only given from Friday night at 6:30 until early morning on Sunday to come up with an idea, implement it, and launch it into the world. Early afternoon on Sunday we will need to present our project to a panel of judges.

Although we appreciate your ideas no matter when you submit them, if you can get them to us by 6PM on Saturday, Feb 1, 2014 then we can include them in our project.

WRITE TO ME NOW

Please write to me with your ideas right away: Brooke@BrookeAllen.com

Bad Owners

Shareholders have a problem – themselves.

My friend asked me when his mutual funds would rebound, and I asked him why he cares. He said, “Because if they are not going to rebound, I am going to sell.”

I asked him what he would do if he found a fly in his soup. “I’d want to talk to the waiter.” And if the waiter said it wasn’t his problem? “Then I would want to speak to the chef.” And if the chef said he couldn’t do anything about it? “I’d demand to speak to the manager.” And if the manager did nothing? “I’d want to speak to the owner.”

My friend would want to talk to the owner about the fly, but I would want to talk to the owner about what it means to be an owner.

Over the decades, as a trader and market maker, I’ve been the shareholder of record for billions of shares of common stock, and I have started a few corporations under my own name. While legally, the two forms of ownership are the same, there is a world of difference.

As owner, I know that the customer is a king who can fire me for any reason or no reason, yet my creditors and vendors must still be paid and the taxman must get his due. My employees must keep the customers happy, and my managers must keep the employees happy. I must not only keep an eye on the till, I must save for the rainy day. And when it pours, I will need to dip into those savings to keep the operation running while the customers stay at home. If I want everyone to be loyal to me during good times, I must be loyal to them all the time. I had better believe in my product, or I shall find all this hard to do and sleep soundly, too.

As owner, I must put the interests of all those with claims senior to mine ahead of my own, and only afterward will I receive what is left over. I must bear risk when it needs to be borne, and I can’t bail just because I don’t like watching my net worth decline. I must be responsible and not self-centered. (And, if I have deep pockets, I can afford to be.) After all this, a sane market might reward me for being responsible, fearless, and not greedy, but only if I actually am. Still, there are no guarantees, for time and chance happeneth to us all.

I asked my friend why he owns stocks, and he said, “Because, in the long run, stocks perform best so that is where I keep my retirement savings.” I’ve been to business school too, and I’ve heard this claim before, but for the life of me, I can’t think of a reason it must be true. Besides, stocks represent ownership, and an investment in ownership is different from saving. Savings are what the owner liquidates to keep the company going during hard times. If the owner liquidates his firm to protect his savings, the business is in trouble.

I asked my friend if he is an owner of General Motors and, upon reflection, he realized that he is through his various funds. I asked if he drives a GM car, and he said he thought their products were terrible.

Imagine my friend complains about the fly to the restaurant manager, who researches the situation, and announces that, in fact, my friend is one of the owners; apparently my friend’s broker had purchased stock in the restaurant. When asked what he will do, my friend says, “I will sell my ownership immediately.” If my friend, who only cares about return on his investment, sells to someone with a passion for good food, and a respect for the customer, then that restaurant may one day be a place where you and I would like to eat. Until then, we best stay away. Likewise, we best avoid GM cars until its owners care more about their products (and us) than their portfolio.

You might want to test the thesis that a diversified portfolio of common shares does, in fact, perform well in the long run, in which case you should buy, hold, and see what happens. But, be aware that market prices are determined by the fear and greed of your fellow shareholders, and little else.

But, if you want to be rewarded for being an owner in more than name only, you must be in a position to act like one: be fearless and put the interests of the customers above your own.

Don’t assume I’m talking about others. If you have money in the stock market, I’m talking about you, my friend.

Your Education is Your Most Valuable Asset, not Your Schooling

My mother was born in West Virginia and that made her an American citizen by birth. Her father was a naturalized German-American, and her mother was a native Italian. Her parents decided to raise her in Florence, Italy.

When it became clear that the Fascists were going down a path of no return, my mother and her father decided they had to get out of Italy. They flew to Lisbon on the last airplane to leave Rome before the airport was shut, and they crossed the Atlantic on the last passenger ship before German U-Boats began sinking them. They arrived in New York with little more than their clothes. My grandmother stayed behind in Florence, and she never saw her husband again.

A few days before I left for college, my father told me, “Your education is your most valuable asset.” I was seventeen, and I thought everything my father said was stupid, so I challenged him, “How can that be?”

He said, “Because your education is the only thing they can’t take from you at the border.”

You see, besides her clothes, my mother brought something else with her when she arrived in New York. She was fluent in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English. She was good enough at math and science to enter university as a Physics major.

She was educated – and the Fascists could not take that away.

Your Education is Your Most Valuable Asset.

Mr. Rieur

RieurIFM-1024x716LevelAdjusted — Mr. Rieur in 2007 at 89 in front of some of the 79,662 photos that he took on his world-wide travels that are now archived at the Consortium Library Library in Anchorage, Alaska.

You most want to be like the person you most admire. That is why, ever since 1963 when I had Mr. Rieur for the sixth grade I have wanted to be a teacher.

His classroom was unlike any other I’d seen before; across the inner wall were terrariums and fish tanks. In the back was a cabinet with his lab equipment and chemical supplies. The ledge by the window was lined with books.

He taught geography with slides and stories of his adventures visiting the places in our syllabus. We saw him standing at the Parthenon as it appeared in our book and then he showed us what Athens looked like from that spot. He taught how to live in the world and love its inhabitants.

We constructed the various types of fire extinguishers described in our science text. Then we used them to put out the fires we would set in the trash can behind the school. Our English assignment was to write a report about the experience.

It seemed like everything was connected to everything else and learning how things worked was fun; about the most fun you could imagine.

Since that time I’ve felt I couldn’t just live a life but I also had to pay attention; not because in the end there will be a test but because someday I’ll be called upon to teach others.

Those who can do, please teach.

P. S. On September 29, 2007, Mr. Rieur celebrates his 90^th birthday. Please wish him well.