The Internet is the first technology since the printing press which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students. It could allow American schools to service twice as many students as they do now, and in ways that are both effective and cost-effective.
The Internet will save higher education, but it may kill your alma mater.
I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching.
Traditionally, universities have seen size as potentially dilutive to quality. If you doubled the size of campus and faculty, most would argue that you would make it a less compelling school. However, online schools will be as good as their classroom peers only if they are large enough to afford a substantial and ongoing investment.
I hated being a public company CEO.
When I was a student at Princeton University, I was working part time in a grocery store. I saw an ad for teachers of a prep course. I don't remember what it paid, but it was easily double or triple the minimum wage.
Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.
I am always making sketches of how information should look or mapping out a marketing campaign. When I present my notes, people start responding to them. Desktop publishing makes everything look slick. When you present sketches, it helps start the dialogue and collaboration.
The question was, in a sense, at Princeton Review, how much value was I adding as a public company CEO. I was adding less than other people might've... I think you want to move on when you've given your best work and then feel that you're not going to add as much value moving forward.
The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.
Why do men outperform women on the SAT? The SAT's supposed to predict college grades. Women do better in high school and they do better in college. What's the problem here? Ah, the more you use, the more you start accepting that the SAT's coachable, the more problems you have with it.
You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.
We should get rid of the SAT as fast as we can. Look, there are bigger problems in society. This is not the biggest problem we have. But it's so easy to get rid of it. Right? Just pull the plug.
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't originally a better bookstore than the small shops we mourn, but it is now.
No two children learn in the same way. While we might agree that every American eight-year-old should be able to read and multiply, beyond those basics, there are few reasons to make every student follow the same path.
I played street hockey in Riverside Park when I was a kid. I played goalie. I didn't make the hockey team in college, so I played lacrosse instead. I didn't play hockey again for 20 to 25 years, and then my son became interested in the game. I decided to pick it up again. A friend let me play backup on his team.
Americans have learned to trust free markets. Republican or Democrat, we believe the unimpeded exchange of goods and services will yield better solutions than five-year plans set by even the most well-meaning public servants.
I'd never taken an SAT prep course. They were for weaker students.
I think a good entrepreneur has a very clear grasp of what the goal is, an unwavering sense of the goal, an utterly agile approach of getting there.
Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.
After graduation, I took a job with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in software development. I don't think I was there more than a month.
There shouldn't be one Sal Khan - there should be 100,000 of them.
