He makes the claim: "Well educated people think about education as an investment." He later says: "The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment."
Put together he is claiming that middle class people are not, on average, well educated. There is also an implication that lower class people are not well educated either.
We are left, by inference, with the claim that it is only the upper class who is well educated. Perhaps we should define what it means to be well educated before proceeding or accepting any further claims in the article.
When you're talking about the size of markets you make generalizations. Inferring that the lower and middle classes of America are not well educated is not to say that none are. However, if you're willing to accept that "smart" and "well educated" are two different things, it would be pretty hard to argue that the poor or middle classes of America are well educated, in general.
I would argue that being well educated is not about the name of the institution, but the breadth and depth of knowledge. A master's degree in CS from a top school does not make you well educated without the insight of how to apply it. That insight comes from more broad study in humanities and the arts.
No, in my experience it's mostly about the competence of your peers and the expectations of your professors. Decent schools teach you about operating systems. Great schools make you write an operating system and don't care when you bitch that it's "too hard" and takes 20 hours a week for that one class.
For me being well-educated is about expanding one's scope of knowledge beyond a myopic mastery of a particular niche to an understanding of the power and potential of their craft, in the context of current society as well as history.
How can I use what I know to improve things, and what have others tried before? What knowledge can I borrow from other fields to be more effective?
Thanks for the feedback. The post wasn't intended to make a subtle distinction with or without the "well" qualifier. To make sure there is no confusion, I edited the post, prepending the well qualifier to each instance of educated. I made no other edits. This way we can consider the points as they are without concern for whether the qualifier is present.
Interesting question. I know quite a few Reed graduates, they all fit my personal definition of extremely well educated. I'd say the same for graduates of St. John's Colleges as well. In both cases though it seems the well educated part happened before they even arrived at either school. It's more their temperament and their depth and breadth of true knowledge not just trivia, and their interest in developing themselves and assisting those around them. Can't say the same for Yale graduates I've met, most who contribute little to society and are for the most part ignorant. Again we are left with addressing what does it mean to be educated. I might argue that ignorant people are not educated. But what does it mean to be ignorant? There's a lot to such a question and sometimes it's easier to say I know it when I see it.
I think davidw was referring to Steve Jobs, who was registered for just one semester at Reed in the 70s and then hung around for a few more semesters sitting in on whatever classes interested him (including a course on typefaces, which came back into his life when he was working on the Macintosh). He talks about it in the Stanford 2005 graduation address:
Also, your comment Can't say the same for Yale graduates I've met, most who contribute little to society and are for the most part ignorant seems unnecessarily harsh.
The point is I only know a limited number of people from any particular university, as does anyone. From what I have read of Mr. Spolsky, a Yale graduate, he is well educated, but I haven't met him so can't speak too much to that.
It seems it is of intrinsically questionable validity to make sweeping generalizations about whether graduates, attendees, and those merely accepted by any given university are well educated.
Again we end up asking what it means to be educated in the first place. Different people may have different opinions of this as well. Clearly there will be some who believe it has to do with whether one has been to the same class of university as themselves, regardless of what they gained from it. This seems like specious reasoning though.
Put together he is claiming that middle class people are not, on average, well educated. There is also an implication that lower class people are not well educated either.
We are left, by inference, with the claim that it is only the upper class who is well educated. Perhaps we should define what it means to be well educated before proceeding or accepting any further claims in the article.