Last night, I watched the livestream of the first half of the TEDx presentations at Arizona State (sorry, second half, but it was dinner time with my wife, which clearly has primacy). It was fascinating. The topic was of vital importance and very personal to me: Disrupting Higher Education.

Liz Dwyer gave a succinct summary of many of the exciting developments in education within the past two years or so, which was helpful in terms of the Big Picture: things are changing. Education is becoming decentralized and the advent of the Internet is lowering costs and pedagogical techniques really are, finally, being dragged into the 21st century; hands-on learning (at least in terms of computer programming) is finally scalable and students are freer now than ever before to customize their education and get what they need out of the myriad choices now available. We're making progress.

What really struck me, though, was Dale Stephens' talk. He mentioned the huge disconnect between the university experience and, well, everything else. I tweeted: Fellow former Hendrixer @dalejstephens points out the righteous disconnect b/t college and real life. Great talk, Dale. #TedX #ashokaux. I meant "righteous" in the Bill and Ted sense of scale, rather than "righteous" in the sense that the disconnect is correct or virtuous.

As I mentioned, Dale and I went to the same college. He dropped out in his second semester and qualified for a Thiel grant, then started UnCollege. I got my degree in Psychology--the most common major--and went about things in what I guess is considered The Usual Way.

I did really well in college: I got top grades, graduated with honors, and got a phenomenal score on my Comprehensive Exams. I was in Student Senate and was an editor for the school newspaper.

And when I got out into the world I was completely and utterly lost.

I spent three years doing meaningless office work. It had no point whatsoever, in the way that only government work can be pointless. I hated everything about it but never once saw a way out. Work is only part of your life, I told myself. It was a way to finance your *real* life, which took place in your off hours. How heartbreakingly disingenuous. What an awful, horrible, hurtful lie.

Finally, happily, I was hired for a weekend anchor position at a radio station. It was a complete revelation--a career didn't have to be a commitment to a lifetime of awful drudgery. I found the seed of what would become my life's work. Communicating information to people was rewarding, and I pursued it at the radio station, then at a newspaper, and finally at a scholarly journal where I found that education, especially on technical subjects at an advanced level, was what I could devote my whole being to.

I stumbled on what made me happy, and I'm thankful every day for it, but I have to wonder about those three meaningless years I spent; how did I go from extremely successful college student to underpaid cog?

The answer lies in the disconnect. I was amazing at college and utterly unprepared for life. The only thing about college that helped me professionally was working at the student newspaper, which was so tangential to my education that I didn't even think to try to apply it to my life. The emphasis was all wrong.

Keep in mind here that I've got the most common major in America and I was a top notch student at a fairly prestigious school.

Maybe this is an argument about the use of liberal arts in an increasingly specialized professional world, but I think it's an argument about whether education is actually achieving its end goal. My education at Hendrix was amazing and enlightening and I am quite literally a better human being for it (knowing about the Fundamental Attribution Error will change your life for the better and help you forgive and give you an enormously improved ability to know and love your fellow man despite his faults) but I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that writing papers and taking tests primarily prepares you for writing more papers and taking more tests.

At TEDx, Desh Deshparde and Michael Crow echoed this sentiment: the value of an education should be its impact on the world. The substance of education should be impacting the world. You learn to do things by doing them. Your curriculum should revolve around doing stuff. That's why I needed another bachelors-degree-granting chunk of time to get adjusted to being out of school.

The economic incentives of going to college are too great to ignore for now; employers rely too heavily on a degree as a filter. But with MITx on the horizon, along with current efforts from Khan Academy, the Saylor Foundation, Udacity, and some of the material from Stanford, that will hopefully change. We'll get an education customized to our passions without burying ourselves in mountains of debt, and the proof of an education will finally be in the pudding of what you do.

Disrupting Higher Education--and educating employers about the new educational landscape--can't come soon enough. My thanks go to Arizona State and Ashoka for an extremely thought-provoking program.