If I look back on my blog, I can see that each year there were one or two ideas that just blew me away and ended up dominating my thinking. For example, 2011 my year to be obsessed with school –  homeschooling and higher ed, 2010 was my year for disillusionment with happiness research, 2009 was when I started writing honestly about how unglamorousstartup life really is.

1. Nature vs. nurture
An important book came out at the end of 2011 that got very little play in the media: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan The title of the book is just awful. Which is probably why it has been roundly ignored. The title should have been Why Nothing You Do As a Parent Matters. That title would have gotten a lot of media coverage, but who would have purchased the book?

No one. Because as parents we are invested in the idea that what we do matters. But it turns out that what parents do doesn’t matter very much. This book is a compendium of evidence from a wide range of university studies that show that once basic needs of a child are met, parents do not really affect how their kids turn out.

Here’s an example of the reach of this evidence: The age that boys first have sex is determined genetically. You cannot influence it by talking to the kid, or preaching to the kid, or whatever. The evidence is astounding. But also disheartening. Because then what does it matter what are parents doing?

One thing is that they can affect how much kids appreciate them as adults. This is influenced by the parents completely. So as this research gains public attention, the shift we will see in spending will be toward things that parents and kids experience together. We don’t need to spend money on shaping the child when the child is already in the shape he or she will be. We can focus on spending money to help the child connect with the parent in a meaningful way that will last their whole lives. That’s all we can influence, as much as we wish it to be otherwise.

2. Lean startup thinking
At this point, the idea of the lean startup is not that new. That's the method for launching a startup where you continually ask questions and refine as opposed to setting up a goal and driving unequivocally in that direction. It's a process for dealing with the reality that we don't know what will work and what won't work. Eric Ries came up with the idea, wrote a book about it, and now he's at Harvard evangelizing it to the next generation of entrepreneurs. The idea took hold of the Silicon Valley crowd first, of course, but at this point, the idea of the lean startup has infiltrated entrepreneur circles in middle America as well.

The lean startup is such a strong, salient idea for our era because it is the natural response to the situation where we have the ability to gather information quickly and move quickly. But why do we only apply this idea to companies? Why not also apply it to our lives? We don't need to figure out a goal when we are in our 20s and then move toward that goal. We can constantly gather information, ask questions, and readjust our goals. Our lives should run as lean as our startups do, which is to say, aiming to get rid of the baggage from goals we once thought might work but now clearly will not.

Next, we should stop investing in our lives as if they are set in stone. The less stuff we have, the lower our monthly costs are, the more flexible we can be to respond to new information about what really works for each of us, in our own lives.

3. Fake is an art form.
Instead of fighting against fake, maybe we should celebrate it. After all, we have a long history of loving fakery. You know what the people did with the discovery of oil paint? Now that they could make lines and colors so precise as to look real, they started painting pictures of beautiful women for men to hold onto when they couldn't have a real one. (Girl With the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, is a great story of this practice.) Andy Warhol devoted his life to making art about our love of the fake.

So here we are, in 2012, and did you check out the photo of the Apple store at the top of this post? Here's another photo of the store.

Guess what? It's a fake Apple store in the middle of nowhere in China. All the employees think they are working for Apple. And the customers think they are buying from Apple. And though some mistakes are obvious, a former Apple store employee stumbled upon the store and she documents all the little details the store owners got wrong in a very fun blog post.

I want to tell you this is thievery and dishonest and an international crime. But you know what? I love it. Fake is fun, and China is just amazing at it.

4. The rise of career centers.
At some point, there's going to be a huge shift in university politics, and the head of the career center is going to be the god of academia. That's because the value of a school is no longer in the knowledge it spews—anyone can take the classes online. Anyone can access the teacher's papers online, and anyone can email the professor with a good question.

The value in the school is the jobs kids get after they graduate. For some schools, just the name of the school will open doors. For most schools, though, this is not true. And for those schools, the career center has an opportunity to add huge value to the diploma.

At some point, university administrators will stop courting physics professors and start courting a high-profile head of the career center. Because right now the career centers are throwing the students under the bus.

You know what will make this shift go much faster? When US News and World Report gets a reality check about what people reallly want to know about higher education, and they start publishing lists of schools ranked by how well they place kids in the job market after graduation. There's nothing like a new list criteria to force the hand of university presidents. (And in the meantime, we should complain loudly that US News and World Report uses largely irrelevant criteria for school rankings, like class size. It's 2012. If you don't like the size of your class, go online and have a class of one, and then meet your professor during office hours.)

5. The compounding effect. The guy who publishes Success magazine, Darren Hardy, wrote a book called The Compound Effect. I liked the book as soon as I heard the title. I thought to myself, "Of course! Making good career decisions every month is like putting money in a 401K every month!" The thing is that most of us are not putting money in a 401K every month. (And it probably doesn't matter, because saving for retirement is an antiquated approach to life.) But most of us can get the compound effect by making solid decisions each month, again and again and again.

The opening of Hardy's book is: "Ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm the tortoise. Give me enough time, and I will beat virtually anybody, anytime, in any competition? Why? Not because I'm the best or the smartest or the fastest. I'll win because of the positive habits I've developed, and because of the consistency I use in applying those habits."

I like that. I like the idea of making lots of good small decisions about my career knowing that the compound effect will create big rewards over time. Which reminds me of the idea that captured my attention in 2008: having a strong career is so much more rewarding than having a 401K.

And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids with a love of learning are lifelong learners (essential for workplace success today), but truly, who wants an unemployed Ph.D candidate? You don't want a lawyer who can't get a job because of poor social skills, you don't want a kid with  perfect SAT scores who marries for money because supporting oneself seems too hard. Every parent wants to raise a kid who is capable of supporting himself and capable of finding engaging work for a stable life.

Here's how schooling affects earning power.

1. Focus on pre-K through third grade. 
Why focus on pre-K? There is very solid data that the earning power of kids who attend a pre-K program is so much higher than kids who don’t that Head Start is one of the most sacred of all publicly funded programs in the US.  So the school impact on one’s earning potential starts in pre-K.

Why third grade? Research from Project STAR shows that after third grade, the quality of one’s classroom has little impact on one’s future earning potential.  There is clear data (spanning 25 years and researchers at six universities) that shows that test scores after third grade are not indicators of future earning potential.

2. Ignore standardized test results, obsess over self-confidence levels.
This means, of course, that it doesn’t matter how one performs on national standardized tests since those test scores do not have impact on the sixty years one spends in the workforce.

And this conclusion is consistent with one of my favorite studies in the whole world: It is from Alan Kreuger, professor at Princeton, that shows that while it is true that kids who go to Harvard and Princeton have advantages over others when it comes to future earning, you can get those same advantages just by applying to those schools. It’s having ambition and believing in yourself that are the real harbingers of success. The fancy diploma is a red herring.

3. Teach kids to find mentors.
Faye Crosby, professor at the University of Santa Cruz says that the two most important factors in a person’s earning potential are quality of schooling and quality of mentoring. Now we know that the schooling part of this equation is up to third grade. So maybe, starting in fourth grade, we should be teaching our kids how to get the best mentors.

Let’s consider what life would look like if you took all fourth graders out of school and started teaching them how to get mentors. First of all, the act of finding a mentor is very consistent with what current research on education reform says that kids should be doing: Following the paths that interest them and finding someone to guide them.

4. The best schooling after third grade is unschooling.
Here is a fascinating article from Psychology Today about why school reform will not work because schools are so incredibly ill-suited for teaching kids. In fact, the formula for school—telling kids what they should learn and how they should learn—is a method only for killing their creativity.

Lisa Neilsen, who manages teacher training for New York City public schools, also comes down hard on the classroom structure. She tells parents that kids should learn in a project-based program where the lesson plans are dictated by a child’s current interests. Neilsen says that if the school won’t do that for your kid, take your kid out of school.

5. Aim for out of the box. Way out of the box. That's when things will look right.
So let’s say you take the advice of people whose job is to study what is the best way to teach your kid. Let’s say you take the advice of the reams of research about what factors influence a child’s future earning potential.

What you are left with is waking up every day, asking your child what he or she wants to do, and then finding someone to help them, if you are are not the right person. Some days you will offer up some ideas, some days your kid will say no to everything and decide to play video games.

Here’s what I’m doing to increase my fourth-grader’s earning potential: Pottery.

He told me he wanted to do clay. He said he’s upset that each year of school he got to do a clay project, and this year, since we’re homeschooling, he’s going to miss it.

So I did a little Googling, and I found a pottery studio: Bethel Horizons. (It is Christian, of course. Everything in rural America that has funding is either government or Christian.)

The minute I walked into the studio, I knew we were so lucky. Krista is the pottery teacher, and she took incredible care to make sure each step was a way to focus mentally and "connect with the clay."

She showed him how to use machines and tools and she showed him that part of the process is keeping the workspace neat and clean so the brain and the hands can work in peace.

Then Krista told my son he'd make a pot each time he sits at the wheel. I thought about the study about pottery in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Students who were asked to make one, great pot, learned much slower than kids who made a terrible pot each time at the wheel. Greatness comes from lots of terribleness, so I liked that we were on that path.

I coach so many people who want advice about their career, but so often, these people really just need to learn how to figure out what they want:  experiment, find what might be fun. Try it for a bit. People need coaching on how to take risks and not worry if they fail. People need coaching on how to find a mentor who is invested in their particular path. I see that all these things are related to earning power, and all these things are what kids learn when they direct their own curriculum.

So, my son probably will not grow up to make expensive pots to sell. But I know that while he's skipping school and managing his pottery-learning himself, his earning power is going up, and it's a joy to watch.

So the question is: how can you make the most of the fact that you are going to college at a time when most people think college does not prepare you for the next step in your life?

Here are seven things you can do right now:

1. If you're taking out loans, transfer to a cheap school.
Believe it or not, there is no undergraduate degree that is worth taking out student loans to complete. This is true even for the Ivy League: Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that the indicator of whether someone will be a super achiever is not whether they attended Harvard or Princeton, but whether they applied. So the act of seeing yourself as a high achiever is more valuable than taking out loans to attend a high achiever school.

Here are many other arguments as to why you should not take out student loans for college. And Zach Bissonnette wrote my favorite book on the topic. But the bottom line is to figure out how to transfer to a very cheap school right now.  Because the biggest thing you can do to preserve your ability to land a job in the future is to keep yourself debt-free now, so you can afford a job that does not pay well.

2. If you're rich, get your parents involved.
For those of you who have rich parents, expensive schools are a possibility. I, for one, am a big fan of using the money you would have spent on college and instead, start a business. Even if you fail, the failure will do more to prepare you for your adult life than college will.

But if you’re not going to take that advice, what’s the best way to make sure you grow while you’re at college? The answer, according to the educators themselves, is that you need to rely on your parents. The value of college is personal growth, but that value is hard to get to, according to Richard Arum, professor at NYU and author of the book, Academically Adrift,  He writes that "No actor in the system has the student's growth as their primary goal." So Arum argues that parents need to take a bigger role. Which, finally, is a seal of approval for helicopter parenting. (Which I have said all along is great for kids to have.)

3. Start looking for an internship.
Look, you can tell me you are at college for the love of learning. But if you really love to learn you can do it your whole life, every free hour you have. But not if you starve to death. Which is why recent grads say one of their biggest regrets about the time they were in college is that they didn't get good internships.

According to Vault, 90% of students graduating from college have had an internship. So it’s not like a leg up on the competition if you get one. Getting one is just surviving.

If you want a leg up, you need to get a good internship, and most of those get locked up in the fall. That’s right. Before winter break, most of the people who are going to get great internships have already spent tons of time making the perfect application and sending it in.

So get moving now to line up a good summer job for next year.

4. Invent jobs for yourself.
Actually, you don’t need an internship to build a resume. Start and sell a company. That’s a great way to look like a college prodigy without even having rip-roaring success. Also, start adding bullets to your resume by making up projects for yourself.

You do not, for example, need permission from Nike to do a social media campaign. You can write a great tweet and link to a page on Nike’s site. Then you can count the retweets. And here’s what it looks like on your resume: Designed and executed a social media campaign for Nike.

In the interview, when you have to talk about what you did, talk about how you decided to drive traffic to that page, and how to quantify success by counting retweets. You’ll sound smart. No one cares if you got paid to be smart once they notice how you sound smart.

5. Understand yourself.
Take the Myers Briggs test. Your score isn’t going to change anymore. So change your major to match your score. Because you are likely to discover that whatever your parents raised you to be – doctor, lawyer, artist – is not right for you. That’s okay. Better you should find out now, when you can get a grip on who you are and what you can expect from yourself in the workforce.

Also, while you're being honest with yourself, now is the time to face the fact that you have been a depressive, or neurotic, or drunkard for too many years of your life. Because many mental illnesses are largely latent until one's early 20s. So if you've got it, it's probably going to get bad in college. Investigate mental illnesses, and get help for it in college, where there's a built-in support system.

6. Read Lolita.
Reading fiction is a great way to understand yourself and other people.

It is not cool to say there is a western canon, but I think there is a canon, it’s just different.  It’s not Harold Bloom’s list, because, let’s just all admit that we did not read Thomas Kyd and Charles Lamb. The list is not fun. It is tiresome. So don’t bother with it in college.

However the idea that we have a shared frame of reference is fun. And there is a group of books that so many idea-oriented people have read that the books become part of the fabric of contemporary thinking.

And, to begin the discussion about what is the new canon, I’d like to propose we measure literature by how many people have made entries on a book’s Wikipedia page. Lolita has 2,300 changes.

Note: While researching links to support my claim that Harold Bloom is a bore, I did come across Thomas Kyd, who is on the list for writing a grisly report of a wife who poisons her husband.

Now that I grow all my own food and cook three meals a day, I wonder why more women do not poison their mate. Surely this topic should be part of the new canon. So maybe we can each read Thomas Kyd, and make an edit to the Wikipedia page.

This is a great question.

I see this picture outside my window at least once a month.

I have only a little idea of what's going on. Should I go to graduate school to figure it out? I could. I could get in. And it's clear that the next stage in my life will involve some sort of work related to farming. A business. Or writing. Or marketing. But I'm not going to graduate school to learn about agriculture because I have tried going to graduate school to get a jump on my job prospects and it doesn't work.

When I graduated from college, I was supposedly going to graduate school in history. But I kept writing entrance essays about why I wanted to tell stories about people and history is a good way to do that. And finally, my professor who had stood by me for four years, getting undergraduate research grants for me to study mass movements in colonial America, said, “Forget it. You don’t want to be a historian.”

What she really meant was, “I’m not pulling strings to get you into Yale.”

And that was the only place I applied. Because she said she’d get me in.

Every job interview I went on seemed stupid: An incredible combination of not enough money to live on and a job description that was one step up from slave.

So I played professional beach volleyball. I got as high as #17 in the US rankings. But when I went back down 32 I had no competitive urge to get back up. So I knew I needed to do something else.

But I couldn’t get a job. I mean, I could. Working for my boyfriend. But that had sucked before.  So I knew it would suck again.

I took the GRE and scored in the bottom 20^th percentile in quantitative reasoning, which got me into an English master’s program.

It took me a year and a half and $15,000 in loans to realize this degree would never get me a job.

I tried to date a few professors, but they were already adept at judging whether or not a grad student was too messed up.

Now I’m going to tell you what I did to make things come together in my career.

First, I stopped doing work that wasn’t going to lead to a job. I got a C in Victorian Literature, a D in Film and Literature, an A in modern literature only because I plagiarized from the New York Times Book Review.

Meanwhile, I taught myself HTML before people knew what the Internet was. I presented a paper at the Dartmouth Technology Conference while my fellow English grad students were writing novels.

I left grad school a month before it ended. I just left. Went back to Los Angles.

I was the thinnest I have ever been in my life because I had no money for food. People worried about me and brought me leftovers. I ate them. This was happening when you had to send out resumes on thick,  expensive white paper, and I used food money for postage.

I got an interview 50 miles from where I lived. I borrowed a friend’s car and got the job.

I was hired to run the whole Internet for a Fortune 500 company, Ingram Micro. My job was to enforce the AP Style guide even though I’d never read it. I was in charge of the web development team even though I didn’t know anything about development besides the HTML pages I wrote in grad school.

I gave myself a graduate course in Internet. And a graduate course in copy writing. And a graduate course in management. I read books. I read magazines. I tried stuff out and took way too long and then tried it again.

I worked 15 hour days, and I felt like I was a student. I was learning all the time.

So it’s logical to me that this is what everyone should do. Find a foot in a door and then start learning everything you can to open that door wider.

I got fired for having sixteen non-work projects on my work computer. At the time I was horrified. Now I think it was the inevitable result of me taking control over my own education.

If you are thinking of going to graduate school, you need to understand that the process of discovering what value you bring to the adult world is a very hard process to endure. Because you are probably smart, and you like to learn, and most jobs are not about paying you to learn. You have to create that for yourself.

The best thing I did is that I kept my learning curve very high even outside of school. I saw where the opportunities were, and I started learning in that area, trying to figure out where I fit.

So look. Brazen Careerist has a Social Media Bootcamp. Everyone who is thinking of going to grad school should take the course. It’s $245, which is nothing—nothing—compared to grad school loans. And the course can show you a way out. The Bootcamp is about possibilities.  A course cannot answer your big life questions for you. But it can show you that you have more options than you think you do.

If you are thinking of going to grad school, it's because you don't like the choices you see in front of you. Maybe nothing gets you excited. But you can use social media to bridge the type of learning you loved to do in school with the type of learning you can get paid to do. And you can use social media to see how to make jobs for yourself that get you excited.

It might seem like a harder path to sign up for Social Media Bootcamp instead of getting a graduate degree. It seems harder because you won't have someone's stamp of approval. But credentials don’t get the job. Experience does. So, in fact, Social Media Bootcamp is the path of least resistance. Your safety net is not a degree, but practice learning new ideas on your own and implementing them. So you know you can do that again and again.

Life should be a process of learning and doing, learning and doing. Grad school is all learning. It’s an imbalance that is not fair to you, and not right for you. Create your own grad school. Open your own doors. Sign up right now.

 [Note: The bootcamp registration has passed. But so many people have asked me about signing up that I am offering a one-hour bootcamp alternative. Email me for details: penelope@penelopetrunk.com]

Yet, I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.

Here are the six most common arguments they make. And why they are wrong.

1. My parents are paying.
Get them to buy you a company instead. Because what are you going to do when you graduate? You’re right back at square one, looking for a job and not knowing what to do. But if you spent the next three years running a company, even if it failed, you would be more employable than you are now, and you’d have a good sense of where your skill set fits in the workplace. (This is especially true for people thinking about business school.)

2. It’s free.
But you're spending your time. You will show (on your resume) that you went to grad school. Someone will say, “Why did you go to grad school?” Will you explain that it was free? After all, it’s free to go home every night after work and read on a single topic as well. So in fact, what you are doing is taking an unpaid internship in a company that guarantees that the skills you built in the internship will be useless. (Here’s how to get a great internship.)

3. It’s a time to grow and get to know myself better.
If you’re looking for a life changing, spiritually moving experience, how about therapy? It’s a more honest way of self-examination—no papers and tests. And it’s cheaper. Insurance covers therapy because it’s a proven way to effectively change your personal disposition. There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover grad school.

4. The degree makes me stand out in my field.
Yes, if you want to stand out as someone who couldn’t get a job. Given the choice between getting paid to learn the ropes on the job and paying for someone to teach you, you look like an underachiever to pick the latter. If nothing else, you get much better coaching in life if you are good enough and smart enough to get mentorship without paying for it.

There are very very few jobs that require a non-science degree in order to get the job. (And really, forget about law school if that's what you're thinking.) So if you don’t need the degree in order to get the job, the only possible reason a smart employer would think you got the degree instead of getting a job was because you were too scared to have to apply or you applied and got nothing. Either way, you’re a bad bet going forward.

5. I’m planning on teaching.
Forget it. There are no teaching jobs. In an interview last week, the head of University of Washington’s career center even admitted to a prospective student that getting a degree in humanities in order to get a teaching job—even in a community college—is a long-shot at best. And, the University of Washington career coach confirmed that there is enormous unemployment among people who are qualified to teach college courses but cannot get jobs doing it. This is not just a Washington thing. It's a welcome-to-reality thing.

6. A degree makes job hunting easier.
It makes it harder. Forget the fact that you don’t need a graduate degree in the humanities to get any job in the business world. The biggest problem is that the degree makes you look unemployable. You look like you didn’t know what to do about having to enter the adult world, so you decided to prolong childhood by continuing to earn grades rather than money even though you were not actually helping yourself to earn money.

Also, you also look like you don’t really aspire to any of the jobs you are applying for. People assume you get a graduate degree because you want to work in that field. People don’t want to hire you in corporate America when it’s clear you didn’t invest all those years in grad school in order to do something like that.

7. I love being in graduate school! Everything in life is not about careers!
Sure, when you're a kid, everything is not about careers. But when you grow up, everything is about earning enough money for food and shelter. So you need to figure out how to do that in order to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. This is why millionaires have stopped leaving their money to their kids—it undermines their transition to adulthood. But instead of making the transition, you are still in school, pretending things are fine. The problem is that what you do in school is not what you will do in a career. So if you love school, you'll probably hate the career it's preparing you for, since your career is not going to school.

When I met the farmer, one of the first things he told me was that he went to school for genetic biology. But in graduate school his research was in ultrasound technology for pigs. But he missed being with the pigs, which is what he wanted to do for his job. So he left school.

And every time I see the pigs on our farm I think about how he took a risk by dumping a graduate program in order to tend to pigs. I love that.

We had no idea what she was talking about. I told Melissa I was too happy reading Little Bee in the sun. "But," I said, "Kathy is so nice to us. One of us has to go. We have to be good neighbors."

Melissa said, "Then you go."

"Let's do rock scissors paper."

"No. You want to be a good neighbor, you go. And the lambs are so happy sitting in my lap. I don't want to move them."

"Take the lambs with you. They'll like that."

"In the car?"

"Yeah. Like dogs."

Melissa goes. It seems like maybe this would be okay because when my sons walk over to Kathy's house, the goats follow my sons, and Kathy invites the boys in for chocolate milk and anything else they find in her fridge, and the goats wait outside, like watch dogs who have a big appetite for grass.

We thought the lambs would do that. Maybe. Or wait in the car. I don't know what we thought. But Melissa was back in five minutes.

"You have to come. You're not going to believe it. The whole school is there. At Kathy's."

"Did you see Zach and Mitch?"

"Yeah. But you have to come."

We pull up to the house, with the lambs in the car, and there is the senior class, in prom outfits, lining up for photos. We get out of the car and start searching for Zach and Mitch. The lambs follow us.

Mitch and Zach look so cute in their tuxes that match their dates' dresses. We want to talk with them but the lambs start making noises because they are not close enough to Melissa, and they won't shut up, and we really just need to get the lambs back into the car.

Days later, when we ask Mitch how was prom, he says, "People thought you guys were nuts wearing those hats."

"What about the lambs?"

"The hats were more crazy."

We wear our sun hats everywhere. In the country, this is not done. I'm not sure why. I guess women are not protecting their faces from the sun. I don't really know. But Jeanenne, my assistant who translates life in Darlington for me, says that people think Melissa and I wear the hats because we think that's what you're supposed to do in the country.

Here's the career part of this post: The thing that is most difficult in work life is adjusting to different cultures as seamlessly as possible. People do not lose jobs because they don't get the job done. People generally lose jobs because of poor cultural fit. If people think you fit on the team, they'll cut you slack even when you don't get the job done. In fact, the Harvard Business Review reports that people don't even care if you don't get the job done if they like you.

It's the getting people to like you part that is so hard. And our hats are such a good example. We think we are really pushing the limits of what's socially acceptable by driving around with baby lambs in our car. But really, where we cross the line is wearing sun hats everywhere.

The question is not "how to always know the rules for blending in" because you can't—especially if you are constantly challenging yourself with new work environments. The question is, instead, "How can you recover from a cultural misstep?"

So if the ability to navigate a cultural misstep is what separates stars from regular performers, then how do you prepare to be a workplace star?

By ignoring the work that's put in front of you. Over and over again.

I'm not kidding.

Here's a great article in New York magazine by Wesley Yang, about success in the Asian community. In case you did not have any AP math classes, Asians are kicking everyone's butt in academics. Even the rich white kids cannot keep up with the Asians. This is reported in depth in the article, but suffice it to say that Asians make up a very small percentage of the US population but they are not considered a minority in the Ivy League because they make up such a large percentage of the students there.

But the article is really about how Asians don't do as well in the workplace. Because the skills that you need to do well in school are not the skills that you need to do well at work. Work is not a meritocracy—it's a popularity contest. And the book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, explains that Asian kids miss sleepovers and basketball games to practice violin and cello, which is why the art of brown nosing eludes overachiever Asians.

So we have statistical proof that working hard to get good grades does not help at work. But here is something else: Lauren Rivera professor at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, finds that extracurricular activities matter more than grades. Highly selective hiring managers – those with piles of Ivy League resumes – distinguish between candidates  not by GPA or major, but by extracurricular activities; how you interact with peers matters a lot.

I don't know what makes me so sure that Zach and Mitch are good for me to be in business with. But I think it has something to do with how they navigated the prom scene so well. I remember being nervous and unsure of myself. They seemed to be able to read the crowd of girls and go with the flow.

There is no better skill than being able to read a group and know how to fit in. Or maybe it's just that I'm lacking that skill, so to me, there is no skill more impressive. And no skill I need more.

I used to look at my old prom pictures and think, prom is so stupid. Why did I go?

Wait. Look at this. It's me going to prom. I was a junior. The boy was a senior. I'm pretty sure I was disappointingly prudish and overly concerned with what color barrettes I wore.

But now I feel like going to prom was important. It was me putting myself in an uncomfortable situation with rules I didn't know and seeing how it felt. It felt scary, of course, but this is what the hard work of adult life is: navigating scary situations so they are not scary anymore, and then doing that again and again.

As a history student in college (history of political thought, for all you fans of the Republic) and still an obsessive researcher of generational demographic trends (everyone should start with Strauss & Howe) I understand that to study history (contemporary or ancient), you must study generational shifts in thinking, because the way the generation thinks helps us to understand and explain historical action. And maybe predict future action.

So I think a lot about what Generation Z will be like. I have written before about what Generation Z will be like at work , but I’ve been thinking, recently, that the way Gen Z is educated will change the workplace when they enter it.

Baby boomers changed politics, Gen X changed family, Gen Y changed work, and Gen Z will change education.  Here’s how the education of Gen Z will affect us at work.

1. A huge wave of homeschooling will create a more self-directed workforce.
Homeschooling is going mainstream. We have known for a while that public education in the United States is largely terrible. Yes, there are pockets that are exceptional, but for the most part, we have an education crisis on our hands. But Baby Boomers were too scared to solve the crisis with homeschooling. If you homeschool your kids, you take them out of the typical ways to measure how well kids are doing in the competition. Baby Boomers couldn’t handle that, and they also wanted to work full-time, so instead of homeschooling, Baby Boomers got kids tons of tutoring and extra help after school.

Gen X is more comfortable working outside the system than Baby Boomers. Gen X women are fine quitting their jobs to take care of their kids—they have no feminist ax to grind in the workplace. And Gen X parents don’t feel a need to have their kid compete because Gen X is so noncompetitive. So homeschooling among Gen X parents is becoming mainstream. It’s no longer just for religious radicals and problem children. Homeschooling is for parents who know public schools are broken and don’t have $20,000 a year for private school.

This means we will have a generation of kids who grew up with largely a self-learning, self-directed model. They are more accustomed to figuring out what they like to do, and doing it on their own. The crisis to figure out what to do with one’s life will not last so long because Gen X will raise more independent and self-directed kids.

2. Homeschooling as kids will become unschooling as adults.
We have established that school does not prepare people for work. In fact, Gen Y has been very vocal about this problem because a) they did everything they were told to do and it didn’t help them get a job and b) we have a national crisis because gen y has huge debt from college and little ability to pay it back.

With alternative schooling and an emphasis on independent investigation, Generation Z will be the first group of knowledge workers who were trained to do their job before they started working.  For example, Generation Z will be great at synthesizing information because they will have been doing that—rather than memorizing—the whole time they were in school.

The workplace ramification of this shift in learning is that Generation Z will have no problem directing their careers. They will know how to figure out what skill to learn next, and they will have more self-discipline to do it on their own.

When Gen Z enters the workforce, the older people, Gen X and Gen Y, will work to live, not live to work. This will be something Gen X and Gen Y fought hard for. To Gen Z it will be easy to do and self-learning will take center stage in their work day. So, as qualifications for the workplace will rapidly change and older people who don't keep up will be outdated, it will be Generation Z that is best at keeping up. Not because they are young, but because they understand that unschooling is not a movement for kids, but a way to live a life, and it doesn’t stop when you start getting a paycheck.

3. The college degree will return to its bourgeois roots; entrepreneurship will rule.
The homeschooling movement will prepare Generation Y to skip college, and Gen X is out-of-the-box enough in their parenting to support that.

One of the books that really changed the way I think is Zac Bissonnette's book, Debt-Free U. He explains why no one should go into debt for college. It’s just not worth it. He says, even if your parents have the money to pay for college, use it for something better—like buying yourself a franchise and learning something that’ll really help you establish yourself in the adult world.

Baby Boomers are too competitive to risk pulling the college rug out from under their kids. And Gen Y are rule followers—if adults tell them to go to college, they will go.  Gen X is very practical and is also the first generation in American history to have less money than their parents. So it makes sense that Gen X would be the generation to tell their kids to forget about college.

Ninety percent of Gen Y say they want to be entrepreneurs, but only a very small percent of them will ever launch a full-fledged business, because Generation Y are not really risk takers.  However  I am guessing (based on links like this one) that most members of Gen X have, at some point, worked for themselves. The entrepreneurship bug will be in full force when Gen Z comes along. They will feel they have no choice but to do that or weather an unstable workplace with huge college debt. People will trade in a college degree for on-the-job learning. The result will be a smarter workforce and the end of universities as a patronage system for philosophers.

Photo by Melissa Sconyers.

Ben Casnocha has one of the most thorough, self-examined discussions about the value of college on his blog. He went to college, probably, because so many people told him to. (Here are some good links on Ben's blog.)

Ben left college. Early. And he’s fascinating, and he’s educating himself through experience, which is what the Internet does not provide. The Internet provides books and discussion, so why would you need to go to school for those things?

It’s the time of year when college students start looking for the return on investment for their education: They start worrying about what they’re going to do this summer.

More than 90% of college kids get internships at some point or another, and, whether or not internships are fair (some parents buy them), it is really, really important to have productive summers that can distinguish a recent-grad’s resume.

And, of course, it’s a tough time to graduate into the workforce. Tough is totally relative, though. It’s not as tough to be entry level as it is to be, say, a baby boomer with 20 years experience at a newspaper, or 20 years of experience underwriting ridiculous mortgages. But still, it’s tough to be in college right now.

It would be so great, and helpful, if college career centers could be front and center in every student’s planning. But most career centers are useless, because most colleges presume you still need college to teach you how to think critically. So they can get away with having incompetent career centers.

This is why you should be really careful using career centers – because colleges have this ivory-tower delusion that supporting yourself is ancillary to why you went to college.

Here’s why career centers are terrible:

Career centers cater to companies, not candidates.
Career centers are in the business of booking interviews on campus. They already have the students on campus, so they worry about getting companies on campus. This means that career centers do things that are not necessarily good for students. For example, companies want to compare apples to apples, so they want all the student resumes to have the same format. Career centers encourage this, so that companies are happy.

But if everyone has the same format, then only the students who excel at what is emphasized by the default resume structure will benefit.

So ask your career center for input on your resume, but don’t let them dictate structure to you.

Career centers don’t understand social media.
Most people get jobs from their network, not from a career center. And social media is the fastest, most effective way for you to build a network. Career centers want to get credit for everything they do — it’s their job security. So they want your blog, your domain name, your online identity — everything — to be tied to the university career center. How does this help you? It only serves to limit you in the social media world. You can crosspost to the career center, fine, but making the career center the focal point of your online identity is extremely short-sighted and could only be promoted by an institution failing to put student needs first, or to understand them in the first place.

Career center staff is self-selecting for underperformance.
Colleges have not, typically, focused on career centers as an ROI focal point.

Colleges, especially the really expensive ones, think of vocational school as pedestrian. So they track how many students go on to get a Ph.D in Russian from Columbia, but not how many students get jobs. Therefore, the career center is not exactly the hot button in budget meetings, and it’s not the landing ground for visionaries, because what visionary goes to a part of an institution no one cares about?

Here’s what you can do to make your college investment pay off:

Forget the idea of paying for a liberal arts education.
It used to be that people only did writing and critical thinking for school. So they needed school to teach them communication skills and critical thinking skills.

The generation that grew up with social media is the most effective at communicating of any generation in history. Despite their schooling, not because of it. Students today don’t need teachers who don’t know how to write a blog post to teach them how to persuade people. Because the bar for communication is high, and it’s in the blogosphere, and if you can write a blog post that gets a decent conversation started, then you already know how to write a persuasive, engaging argument.

Pick a school based on their track record for getting students jobs.
Look, did you get into Harvard? Did you have a 4.0 in high school? Then forget paying a lot of money for some chi-chi liberal arts school. Just go to a cheap school and get the degree. Don’t delude yourself that the 40K a year is worth it for a mid-tier school. And, since you’re not picking from a list of brand name schools, make your choice based on their track record for getting their graduates great jobs. (Hat tip: Melissa Sconyers)

Look, I'm not saying school is stupid. I'm one of the people who constantly commented on Ben's blog that I thought he should go to college. But I'm saying that you need to calculate the return on investment on going to college before you go to college so that you make sure you're going to college for rational reasons. Just because the liberal arts education was a default goal to the bourgeois of the last three centuries does not mean that route will work for you, right now.

This post is supported by Ontario business schools.

Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing.

It’s the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone’s Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

The people who are complaining that no one can write anymore are the same ones who are stressed about information overload. This is not a coincidence. Information is changing, the flow of ideas is changing, and written communication is changing with it. Information overload is the feeling of not being able to deal with this change. Young people do not feel information overload, which is another sign that they are excellent writers for the new millennium: They can process and communicate new ideas at the new pace.

I remember the first time in my life I heard about people who can’t write anymore. It was my grandma telling me to read A Little Princess, instead of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

The people who tell you who can write and who can’t are the people who don’t want language to change. They don’t want ideas to change. They don’t want people to talk in ways that are new to them.

And now, for all you doubters, I present the research to end all research. It comes from Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She has conducted the Stanford Study of Writing, which includes about 15,000 writing samples from students from 2001 – 2006.  The always-interesting Clive Thompson reported her findings in Wired magazine:

First, only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom. Prior to the Internet, almost all writing people did was for the classroom. The increased amount of writing that young people do outside the classroom these days is so significant that Lumsford calls it a paradigm shift.

Second, the type of writing that students do—via IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth—is actually great for building communication skills.  Thompson writes that, “Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

Third, the students have an acute sense of what good writing is because they are almost always writing for an audience. Lumsford found that students are writing mostly to debate, organize, or persuade. This is much more demanding writing than most of the writing students do for school. And, in fact, students in the Stanford study were not as enthusiastic about writing for school because they felt that the only purpose was to get a grade.

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

Lumsford finds that students are adept at making their point heard across a wide audience. And a study about Twitter, reported in Fast Company, shows that the text most likely to go viral—that is, the most persuasive text—does not have abbreviations or emoticons, the evidence most cited of a crisis in modern writing skills. Which means that students probably know intuitively to use texting slang only when texting.

Which makes me think that the people who are most worried that kids today don’t know how to write are the people who are most unable to write for an audience.

In the history of western thought, the first thing to happen when there was a paradigm shift was that the writing shifted, (Chaucer's stories of common people and Martin Luther's translations of the Bible come to mind). And the first people to complain were those who had a stake in keeping things the same. So ask yourself, do you want to be part of the next period in history, or do you want to be a person representing the futile force in history that tries to hold us back?

The New York Times reports that we’re experiencing a sea change in the career department because the former favorites are no longer prestigious, and new choices, like teaching and government service, are rising in popularity. But, as college grads contemplate their options for June, and twenty-somethings watch pink slips fly, here’s something to consider: The prestige job of the new millennium is waiting tables and folding shirts. That’s right. If you are in your 20s, you should try retail. Here’s why.

Retail enables an honest approach to adulthood
Emerging adulthood makes life in one’s 20s more difficult than ever before in history. Being lost is important in terms of navigating to adulthood. And the most dangerous thing you can do in your 20s is try to get around the discomfort of being lost by over-committing to a career. You will change careers five times in your life. You will depend solely on yourself to build your own skill set and forge your own path. So give yourself time to figure out what’s best for you.

Going to grad school burdens you with an amount of debt that severely limits your career choices. And it’s a way to prolong childhood by continuing to have someone tell you what to learn and reward you for doing it.

Posturing as someone who makes only perfect choices means you’ll probably end up lying to yourself: Only 12% of people make a good career choice for themselves right out of college.

The best way to figure out what you should be doing with your life is to give yourself time to explore yourself and the world. Which means you need time to think. Retail is flexible, and it doesn’t take a lot of brain power. This leaves a lot of time and energy to do what you really need to be doing: Trying a lot of things on for size.

So the people who are honest with themselves about where they are in life also are brave enough to admit they are lost and should take a retail job to give themselves space to figure things out.

Retail gets you the American dream
The American Dream is no longer about money and things. It’s about self-knowledge. The ultimate achievement is not a huge house and an expensive car. It’s a solid family life and self-knowledge to steer clear of a quarterlife crisis or financial meltdown.

Kurt Anderson captures this shift in his essay in Time magazine: “[Too many of us have been] operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. (That was always the yuppie dream: an aristocratic life achieved meritocratically.) Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations of the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life.”

The best way to give yourself that knowledge is to give yourself time in your 20s. It’s difficult to explore who you are after you have kids. And it’s difficult to focus on yourself once your career is in full swing. So you need to establish a foundation for personal exploration by practicing in your 20s. Practicing a lot. Retail enables this.

The new dream job is a combination of jobs – retail is usually a part of this, at least to start.

It’s clear that the age of job security is gone. And the best way to get security is to have multiple revenue streams, so that if one fails, you have a backup. In her book, Marci Alboher labels this the “slash” life – where you have more than one profession and a slash between them.

In a nod to this trend, PayScale created a list of a new type of dream job – one that affords a slasher life, and also enables the type of control and flexibility in life that accommodates the values of the new American Dream. The dream jobs Payscale cites are freelance, hourly, and generally creative on some level. They validate the idea that the American Dream is not about money but instead about personal growth and control over one’s life.

It would be great to be able to support yourself in one of these jobs, but it’s tough going. Especially if you need health insurance. So retail is a stepping stone to the dream jobs of the new millennium. Retail gives you a safety net, a financial cushion, and the flexibility to build a dream career.

Retail gives camaraderie – something you really need in your 20s
One of the most jarring aspects of emerging adulthood is that in college we are surrounded by friends, and after college, our friends disperse. This means that at the time in life where we are separating from our parents, learning to support ourselves, and trying to figure out where we fit in the world, we’re doing it alone. This is why depression is such a huge risk for people in their twenties, and why a support system is so important.

For everyone in the workforce, having two friends in the office can save a worker and a job. But this is especially true for people in their 20s because while other people probably go home to a significant other and maybe even kids, many people in their twenties go home to no one. In an office full of people in their 20s – which is most retail and not most offices – the shift from college to adult life is not so drastic and lonely.