A Low-Risk, Cost-Effective Program for Training Leaders
Remnant Review
I'm going to propose a program for restoring limited government and therefore liberty around the world.
This is a long-term project. We didn't lose the world in one generation, and we will not reclaim it in one generation.
I have told this story before, but it is worth telling again. In 1972, I gave a lecture at a weekend seminar sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education. It was my usual FEE speech on the difference between bureaucracy and the free market. It was a good speech. Basically, it was a presentation of this article: "Statist Bureaucracy in the Modern Economy."
After my speech, an older man approached me. He said that he would like to do something to change the country for the better. I told him that it would take several generations. He replied that he never gave money to any cause that he couldn't see the results in his own lifetime. I told him it was probably better that he save his money. I learned afterward that the man was Forrest Mars, the head of the Mars candy empire. He was worth at least $700 million. That was a lot of money in 1972. Nevertheless, if I had known how much money he had, I would have told him exactly the same thing. It was my best advice to anyone seeking to promote a specific worldview.
My basic strategy has not changed since 1972, but the technologies have changed for the better. What a rich man could have done in 1972 can be done simultaneously around the world today, and for not significantly more money. There would be far more bang for a billionaire's buck.
RECRUIT AND TRAIN BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE
The billionaire would need to find a project manager who shares his vision. This man must be bright, well-educated, a good writer, a good public speaker, and a good manager of men. This man would run the project. He is crucial. Probably, the billionaire should hire at least two of these people, but one of them has to be in charge. He should be made completely responsible.
The goal of the project is to identify and assist young people who have demonstrated that they could become leaders. This means bright, energetic young people who want to go to college, and who are teachable. They must have demonstrated competence: writing, public speaking, and self-discipline. I was such a person at the age of 17. These people are out there.
The student should have had an afterschool job. Even better, he should also have done volunteer service on a regular basis. When I say he, I also mean she. We had a phrase in my day for people like this, "go-getters." But "go-givers" are even better.
What makes things different today is the World Wide Web. These young people can be found all over the world. They can be trained for little money. All they need is an opportunity to get the training.
They also need financial incentives to finish their formal educations. This is the bait: fellowships. These would not be strictly scholarships. They would not involve carte blanche distributions of funds. They would have to be earned.
Bright students probably need to graduate from college. There will be parental pressure on them to do this. One way or another, they are going to go to college, somehow finance it, and get certified. My recommended strategy would be to take advantage of this motivation, and then channel it. Nobody did it with me, but I would have been a good candidate.
I would have the manager of the project recruit a team of mentors. He should find bright, energetic, retired scholars or retired small business owners who created their own businesses from scratch. They must have the ability to speak in public. These men would be online mentors to at least a dozen students. I think that's about the limit that anybody can have as a mentor at one time. Jesus had 12, and one of them was a ringer. They would probably start out mentoring half a dozen students. If they are really good, they can take on more.
How would the students be recruited? Offer college scholarships, but only on this basis. A scholarship would be available only for upper division work. The student would have to have earned college credits for the lower division years. This is best done through CLEP exams, AP exams, and DSST exams. It takes self-motivated students to do this. The program should screen for this characteristic psychological make-up.
They must be Internet-savvy. They must be able to benefit from distance-learning. They must be able to respond effectively to mentoring through Skype or some equivalent technology. This would be a face-to-face mentoring process: two hours a week. They would also participate with students in their own field through online group sessions, at least two hours a week.
The goal here is to create an early career network for these young people. They would meet people their own age who have the same outlook and motivation. These other students could be located anywhere in the world. In fact, they should be located around the world. We need internationalism, but within the context of localism. People should believe they are part of the long-term international movement, not just a national movement. Whatever they are committing to, it should be capable of extending across national borders.
In order to become eligible for the fellowship money, they must participate in group sessions and also one-on-one mentoring. They would have to demonstrate competence academically before they get any money. They would have to perform effectively enough to graduate from college. This means that the money should not be handed out early.
The money should cover tuition only. The student is going to have to hustle, or his parents will have to put up the money, for room and board. This would encourage the student to get the upper division degree from a distance learning school, such as Patten University or Thomas Edison State College. This would also cut the expense of the fellowship program. But if the student is good enough to get into the best university in the state, or some other university, the fellowship program will pay for the tuition. This would be a very good fellowship for somebody who wants to go to a school like Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, Stanford, any of the Ivy League schools, the University of California, Berleley, UCLA, the University of Michigan, and so forth. It would also include smaller four-year colleges: Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Swarthmore, Amherst, etc.
The program's cost would grow as it expanded, but so would the payoff. If tuition payments are in the range of $25,000 a year, a hundred students would cost $2.5 million. The billionaire can afford this. If the program never grew beyond this, it would be an effective program.
I think homeschool students would be the obvious initial market. These people are probably self-motivated. If they are smart enough and industrious enough to get their first two years of college taken care of by CLEP exams, by paying about $2,500 or less, they are prime candidates for the fellowship program. They have shown self-discipline. They have shown that they can think ahead. They want to beat the system if they can. They don't want to pay retail for second-rate educations, which is all they are going to get for the first two years of college. They figure this out. They're not going to college just to get away from home.
Because they have shown such initiative, they are a much lower risk as far as providing scholarships. There is a self-selection system involved in what I am recommending.
I think it's a good idea for students to stay at home while they are in college. That's why I would only pay for tuition in the fellowship program. That's why I would avoid paying anything for room and board. This would encourage the student to go to a local university. He would not get involved in the university affairs. He would not be on the campus much except to attend classes. Of course, it would be better in most cases if the student simply got the degree online.
The program should also offer this option. Any student who elects to pay for all of his undergraduate education online would automatically be eligible for a tuition fellowship for his graduate school training upon graduation. It would be a guarantee. That way, the billionaire would get a lot more bang for his bucks. He would have a highly self-motivated graduate student to fund.
So, once granted a fellowship, the student would have his choice: tuition payments for the last two years of college or else tuition payments for up to two years of graduate school. If he wanted to guarantee that he would get the graduate school money, he would have to pay for the first four years of college. He would also have to participate in the weekly online mentoring program.
To become eligible for any of the undergraduate fellowships, the student would have to produce a 25-page, double-spaced term paper on a particular topic. He would have to show competence in writing and researching. He would also have to produce an online course based on his term paper. That would be posted on YouTube. The student must be willing to go in front of all of his peers and everybody else with whatever he had to say. This would mean the student would have at least minimal technological abilities. He would have to write his way and talk his way into the fellowship program.
The term paper topics would be assigned by the program. There should probably be two or three topics in each field. This way, the screening committee would have multiple papers to consider. That is something that somebody who has gone through the fellowship program and has received a bachelor's degree could do for the program. While he is in the grad school program, he would have to read term papers and review YouTube courses. He would then give recommendations to the final screening committee. This would be highly productive grunt work that would help relieve the burden placed on the senior tutors.
Students who are in grad school will be required to read term papers and watch YouTube videos. They will screen candidates. They will accept no more than half of them, and 20% would be better. The more students who elect to accept the graduate fellowship, the more screeners there will be. The program can expand faster.
The tutors would be retired academics or retired businessmen. I think a retired professor would be happy to work for $25 an hour. It would be good supplemental income to his retirement checks each month. They would be paid for the number of students they personally mentor. For two hours a week mentoring face-to-face, one-on-one, the person could mentor 12 students. He would also have to spend two hours a week in a joint session. So, call it 30 hours or thereabouts of work. At $25 an hour, that would be $750 a week. So, for $3,000 a month, the billionaire could hire productive retired professors. Here would be a way for older men to transfer their vision and much of their learning to self-selected, innovative, hard-driving younger men and women. What better deal could a retired professor expect?
He could hire 10 of these people for $360,000 a year. That's chump change. If a retired academic dealt with 10 students a year, a team of 10 academics could mentor 100 students. There's nothing like this available today.
From the point of view of students, this would be a terrific deal. They would begin to develop their own career network system. They would get trained by highly skilled professors in their field. They would get personal advice two hours a week.
There's nothing like this available.
If a student is good enough to get into Harvard as a freshman, he should not go to Harvard as a freshman. He should go to Harvard as a junior. Preferably, he should go to Harvard Business School or Harvard Law School. That's where the big payoff is going to be in terms of his career.
The billionaire should not pay students to get a Ph.D. It will be much better to pay students to get an MBA. That is going to open more doors than a Ph.D.
The program should also require that every student receiving a fellowship join Toastmasters International if there is one in his community. Going to Toastmasters every week during the period of the fellowship would help develop the student's speaking skills.
A BUSINESS TRACK
The billionaire should also recruit a team of retired businessmen who created their businesses from scratch. This would open a door to another group of students. For students in the business track, the mentors would be ideal: businessmen who started small. If they want to start businesses, this would be the way for them to become a millionaire next door. I think a billionaire could appreciate this.
The screening would be more rigorous. In addition to the term paper and videos, the candidate must run a profitable business. As long as it has turned a profit, it counts, no matter how small.
He should not pay these tutors anything. He is offering something of real value to them: access to a chance to train high-performance future business leaders.
He should encourage them to finance a retired professor. This would multiply the program's scope. The billionaire would put up less money.
A TEST RUN
This program could be tested inexpensively. If it works, it can be ramped up.
Word would get out about the program. Top-flight students from around the world want to be involved in this. It would solve their academic problem. It would also help solve much of their parents' financial problem.
Think about what this could do for a student in sub-Saharan Africa. Think of what it could do for a student in China or Indonesia or India. This would open an entirely new world to the student. He would have to speak English. But the students know this anyway. If you want to do well in academia, or if you want to do well in business, you have to speak English.
The program would be decentralized in terms of where the students live. It would be decentralized in terms of where the tutors live. Everybody could stay at home and still get all of the benefits. Students would retain control over where they go to school, but they could go to school wherever they are academically qualified to get in.
In the long run, this money could transform the lives of hundreds or even thousands of highly efficient young people who would be equipped to achieve something of value in their communities.
Note: it would not take a billionaire to launch this. A multimillionaire could do it.