It’s a fact. And it’s not about to change.

The question, then, isn’t whether they’re on the internet, but when and how they’re on there, and what they’re going to do while they’re online.

This might be unfamiliar territory for grown-ups — especially when we don’t manage our own online interactions as well as we might like.

How can we open an intergenerational conversation about mindfulness, attention and time management, and using the power of the net as the world’s greatest pen-pal network rather than a nonstop demand on energy, attention, and money?

Everyone’s learning the new rules as we go. We might as well try to learn (and create) them together.

Of course you shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal. And yes, outright plagiarism is cheating and stealing.

There’s a whole other interesting conversation to be had about what it means to be original — and Austin Kleon has already had most of it for us — but I think we can all agree that submitting an essay you didn’t write for a grade is wrong.

But that’s not really what I want to focus on now. Instead, I want to take another swing at the systemic effects of 20-plus years of inculcating 21st-century students with an industrial-age version of academic integrity, especially when nearly all of them won’t turn pro as academics.

The message schools are trying to send is, “Don’t cheat.” But the way it’s usually taught is, “Don’t collaborate.” And that sets everyone up for a much more difficult path to adulthood than necessary.

Be original by all means. But don’t think you have to do it alone.

I’ll admit it: I’m hopelessly biased on this one.

Georgetown got to me early enough with the ideas of “contemplation in action” and “living with one foot raised” that I’ve been looking for ways to enact them ever since.

With time, however, I’ve found that contemplation in action is a lofty standard toward which to strive.

In the meantime, contemplation and action is a good substitute — especially if you can progressively increase the refresh rate between the two. Some people are pure contemplatives or actives, but I’ve found that most professionals benefit from an action–reflection–action cycle: make a mess, analyze, and move forward to make a new mess beyond the last one.

And that’s the thing about living with one foot raised: every so often, you have to plant that foot and lift the other. Detachment to the point of indecision doesn’t make things better. Having the courage (born of reflection) to take a step and then prepare for another in a yet-unknown direction is the way to make the long walk toward progress.

Phil Zelikow just nailed it in the Texas National Security Review.

Writing about “the software of American public problem-solving,” he finally frames the issues in a sensible way:

• During WWII and for a generation after, U.S. policymakers’ unfair advantage was brilliant staff work, built on traditions envied, copied, and innovated from the British. That advantage has been lost.
• That advantage wasn’t academic, in the sense that “it neither came out of the academy nor migrated back into it.”
• Nevertheless, it can be taught — just as engineers are taught principles of effective problem-solving.

And it’s that framing — the learnable, teachable, practical-intelligence skills of problem-solving rather than policy analysis — that’s so fresh and necessary. (Zelikow being a historian with a government resume spanning a handful of administrations, it’s really back to the future: my favorite kind of “fresh” perspective.)

With all that we now know about the managerial history of WWII, about design thinking (which Zelikow references approvingly), and about the trends we’re referring to when we talk about “the future of work,” how could we now prepare people to problem-solve in the public interest without simply building ever-bigger bureaucracies?

Now that universities are self-congratulatingly embracing their slick new 21st century identities as businesses, they have a marketing challenge: if they are indeed businesses, what exactly are they producing?

One common option is news. From web stories on the stupendous feats of undergrads to the endless events that are the last best idea in the industry of ideas, universities are churning out breaking news.

Another option is output. Specifically, research output — the “new knowledge” that has long been pearl of highest price within and among academics themselves.

And a third option is graduates. Universities like to think in terms of students, but — in business terms — their role in society is mostly to prepare students for life and work as graduates. Universities’ outputs (graduates) are societies’ and companies’ inputs.

Consider for a moment who’s actually responsible for which output:

• News is the product of communications shops (usually including some recent graduates), who are trying to win at Google. (What’s that for? Either you’re Harvard or you’re not.)
• Research is really the product of scholars. Universities might still be a good answer to the question of where scholars should go to work, but so are football teams a good answer to the question of where wide receivers should go to work.
• Graduates are the true products of universities. Except for PhDs — the tiny minority of students who turn pro as students — graduates are the products of multiple professors, departments, and disciplines.

It’s time we all agreed — faculty, students, administrators, and employers — that if universities are in business, they are in the business of producing graduates.

We don’t need more events, and we certainly don’t need more breaking news. We do need more research, but that’s really a business within a business. (And it’s mostly hidden from the world behind paywalls, anyway. If a university really wanted to make a splash with research, they could reallocate their communications budget to publishing research for free. That might be the most optimal search engine strategy of all.)

What we most need, though, are graduates. Graduates who are prepared to stand up and lead. Graduates equipped with the tools to make things better. Graduates who understood — with the guidance of teachers who understand — that the purpose of school is not to mulittask through 16 or 32 individual research projects, but to craft a cohesive narrative and portfolio that will allow them to teach the rest of us a better way.

Everyone’s talking about the future of work.

Not so many people are talking about the future of the future of work, which is the present in schools.

As long as corporations are still hiring people, they will have to deal with attraction, development, and retention.

And that means that the baseline matters. What’s the cost of teaching graduates what they actually need to know to succeed in the future of work? What’s the cost of getting people who’ve long since given up on school to care about learning their roles?

Companies will bear that cost for some time, because they have to. But there’s no reason to believe they will wish or need to bear it forever.

Which company will be first to take responsibility for all post-secondary education?

And which college will be the first to ask to be measured on how much their graduates save companies in (re)training costs?

It’s the epitome of scarcity mindset.

If there are only so many jobs at the State Department or Goldman or GE or wherever, then of course it’s worth having a back room somewhere to introduce enterprising young ring-knockers to the hale fellows of yesteryear.

But, in a long-tail world, where you can make a difference without going to Foggy Bottom and make a fortune without going to Goldman, do we still need the clubroom?

If the goal is to get more of “our” people into a limited number of positions, sure.

But if instead the goal is to build the best possible teams to do work that matters, limiting your search to one network is clearly a self-limiting strategy.

At age 18, you go to college.

That’s become the near-universal message of our culture and our economy.

But it follows that, if you stay on track, you graduate at age 22 or so.

Think about that for a moment: age 22.

Who were you at 22? Where were you? How were you?

At graduation day, how well prepared did you feel to face the world — for the rest of your life?

And how much do you feel the world has changed since then?

Our culture sells college as though it holds the answers to life. But for most students — especially those for whom going to college is a Hail-Mary play, or the last time they’ll ever crack a book — what answers does it really hold?

I graduated college in 2012. I had just bought my first smartphone (after my high school-era flip phone caught a raindrop and died), “selfie” was hardly a word, and if I wanted to get hail a car from my phone, I called a taxicab.

Though I’m deeply grateful for the classically informed liberal education I received in college, I’ve probably had to learn nearly as much again simply to try to keep pace with changes in the economy and my interests. And I have no reason to believe I’ve learned everything I’ll need to know 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

All of which begs the question, why do we sell this capstone educational experience to 18–22-year-olds? And why on earth do we act as if a degree is the end of the story?

As plenty of corporations and “thought leaders” have figured out, the lifetime value of leading other people’s thoughts is pretty high.

We can keep borrowing hundreds of thousands at age 18 and starting our lives overconfident and in debt at age 22, or we can look for ways to stay current for decades at a few thousand dollars a year.

(And, if we’re feeling creative, we can build a continuing education enterprise. A few thousand dollars a course times a few hundred people times a few decades turns out to be be a pretty attractive proposition.)

Who are they? Where are they? How can you learn from them?

As a college professor of mine (a classicist, naturally) liked to point out, the greatest minds and the greatest teachers do not necessarily live in our own time.

The classics, in Thucydides’s famous self-appraisal, are possessions for all time. (And not just the Greco-Roman classics, it should be added: the greatest minds are not limited to our own cultural or linguistic traditions, either.)

And then there are the modern classics: the greatest living professors, captured on video and accessible to all. This was the great insight of TED and the MOOC.

In another category are the great teachers who do not give traditional lectures, as exemplified by Khan Academy or +Acumen.

In still another category are the bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and other influencers who have harnessed the cultural power of the internet to build learning communities (for better or worse).

There are surely other categories, but you get the point: with so many options available, and so many of those for free, shouldn’t that be reason to reevaluate how we choose schools, teachers, and credit-bearing courses?

That’s ever more the rule in the rest of the economy.

Not so much on college campuses — but you have to wonder: for how much longer?

What if students rated lectures like they rate ride-share drivers?

What if employers demanded more precise predictors of future success than a good GPA from a famous college?

At this point, we can all agree that the famous ratings are fundamentally flawed and actively unhelpful.

Though I think we ought to be careful what we wish for here, someone is going to figure out a better way sooner or later.

And if I were a professor, an administrator, a student, or an employer, I’d be thinking hard about what kind of metrics I’d be looking for — for myself and others in the system.