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I don't know. You're making the leap to suggest that 33% of Americans are responsible for 90% of the innovation. I don't think that's the case at all. It's pro

I don't know. You're making the leap to suggest that 33% of Americans are responsible for 90% of the innovation. I don't think that's the case at all. It's probably more like 0.1% of Americans are responsible for 90% of innovation. Or in other words, 32.9% of the population of Bachelor degree holders don't add any more innovative value than the 67% of non-Bachelor holders. Or to put it another way, there isn't a direct correlation between Bachelor's holders and innovators. Sure there are some ridiculously smart people out there, and probably most of them have some formal higher education. But their education probably isn't what made them ridiculously smart; instead it was probably their education that helped shape their thinking and possibly opened some doors. And of course there are many examples of innovations that came from people without degrees. Many technology company founders that we would today consider innovative did not necessarily hold a Bachelor's degree. In short, I think your connection that 33% of Americans are automatically innovative just because they have a degree is quite the stretch. A degree doesn't have any correlation to ones aptitude for innovation.

tfehring 8y ago
I think you’re either thinking of innovation more narrowly than I am or underestimating the number of people who contribute to it. I don’t think you can attribute, say, the development of a new drug to a single person in most cases. Or the implementation of a machine learning model. Or the changes that have led to massive improvements in the efficiency of clean energy in recent years. Or, if you want to really stretch the definition of “innovation,” the development of financial instruments to help investors better allocate capital and manage risk. The list goes on, of course. But what I want to illustrate is that entrepreneurs with “a-ha” moments don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Far from it. Now, going through that list of innovations again, what proportion of the people involved do you think have a Bachelor’s degree or more? I promise I didn’t intentionally cherry-pick at all - I suspect the pattern will hold if you come up with your own list, provided that you limit it to the last, say, 50 years. And at least in the examples I gave, the fact that the people responsible overwhelmingly have college degrees isn’t incidental, it’s a result of the fact that deep subject matter expertise is needed to push the envelope.

tfehring 8y ago

I think you’re either thinking of innovation more narrowly than I am or underestimating the number of people who contribute to it. I don’t think you can attribute, say, the development of a new drug to a single person in most cases. Or the implementation of a machine learning model. Or the changes that have led to massive improvements in the efficiency of clean energy in recent years. Or, if you want to really stretch the definition of “innovation,” the development of financial instruments to help investors better allocate capital and manage risk. The list goes on, of course. But what I want to illustrate is that entrepreneurs with “a-ha” moments don’t have a monopoly on innovation. Far from it. Now, going through that list of innovations again, what proportion of the people involved do you think have a Bachelor’s degree or more? I promise I didn’t intentionally cherry-pick at all - I suspect the pattern will hold if you come up with your own list, provided that you limit it to the last, say, 50 years. And at least in the examples I gave, the fact that the people responsible overwhelmingly have college degrees isn’t incidental, it’s a result of the fact that deep subject matter expertise is needed to push the envelope.