Posts by root

Here’s a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can’t be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.  Now, here’s a trickier one: how do you fix this mess when the solution threatens a multibillion-dollar industry? This isn’t just a theoretical exercise.  It’s the reality we’re living in.  The U.S. student […]

High school students are increasingly founding nonprofits. And it’s not because teenagers have suddenly become more altruistic. It’s because they’ve identified a loophole in the college admissions game. The numbers tell a revealing story.  According to The Harvard Crimson, 70.3% of Harvard’s Class of 2027 participated in community service as a high school extracurricular activity.  […]

Our schools today look strikingly similar to those of 1940 because we’ve never stopped to ask the most important question: What is the actual goal of education? We pour billions of dollars into education every year.  We send our kids through it for over a decade. And yet, ask a parent, teacher or administrator “what’s […]

Once upon a time, there was a massive ladder that stretched so high into the sky that its top was hidden by the clouds. The village elders told every child that climbing this ladder was the only path to happiness. “Take one step at a time,” they said, “and eventually, you’ll reach the top, where […]

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time business partner, famously advocated for “inversion” as a mental model: “Invert, always invert,” he would say, borrowing from the mathematician Carl Jacobi.  His advice on avoiding catastrophe was genius and equally blunt: “Tell me where I’m going to die so I won’t go there.“ This wisdom applies perfectly to choosing […]

Harvard’s own dean of undergraduate education recently made a startling admission in the New York Times: “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.“ This isn’t just about grade inflation—it’s a tacit acknowledgment that even at America’s most prestigious university, the classroom has become secondary.  […]

Imagine a drug company selling a pill that promises to make you smarter and more capable. It costs $200,000, requires four years of regular doses, and is usually bought with borrowed money.  The catch?  If it doesn’t work – if you end up no smarter or more capable – you still have to pay back […]

Teaching kids financial literacy without real money is like teaching swimming with PowerPoint slides. And we all know how that ends. We’re making the same mistake with money that we once made with abstinence-only sex education: pretending that pure knowledge will triumph over emotion, peer pressure, and real-world temptations. Spoiler alert: it won’t. But there’s […]

Sending your kid to college is a $300,000 bet that four years of lectures will prepare them for a world that cares more about what you can build than what you can recite. For a long time, it felt like the only option.  But it’s not. The School of Entrepreneuring will offer graduates $200,000 to […]

In 2011, two professors at the University of Virginia, Saras Sarasvathy and Sankaran Venkataraman, penned a research paper entitled Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future, and in it, they made an argument that should have been a turning point. “There exists an ‘entrepreneurial method’ analogous to the scientific method spelled out by […]