This article discusses how advertisements can implant false memories in people. It explains that memories are not immutable, and can be influenced and reconstructed based on new information a person is exposed to, such as advertisements. The article notes that simply viewing an ad can cause people to have false memories of experiences, like remembering seeing the ad or product before it actually existed. It warns that this finding challenges common assumptions about how reliable and unchanged memories are.

1. Measuring capacitance
Lab 8 - Measuring capacitance
Capacitors are useful circuit elements because they can store
charge. For a capacitor, there is a fundamental relationship
between the applied voltage and the amount of charge stored on
the capacitor. In this experiment you will measure the charge
on a capacitor versus the applied voltage for several values of
the applied voltage. A plot of charge vs. applied voltage should
form a straight line with a slope equal to the capacitance.
(1)
You will use this relation to measure the capacitance of
capacitors with different areas and distances between plates.
Then you will verify the relation below using these different
values.
(2)
objectives
· Determine the mathematical relationship between charge,
applied voltage, and capacitance.
· Determine the capacitance of a capacitor.
· Verify the theoretical formula
MATERIALS
Computer w/ internet access
Logger Pro or Excel
PRELIMINARY SEtup (done in lab)
Do the following in your groups, then return to class to discuss
to make sure you know how to use site:

2. 1. Go to the following website:
https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/capacitor-lab-basics
2. Open the capacitor only screen.
3. Play with the controls until you are familiar with how they
work. Make sure you can use the voltmeter to measure the
potential difference between the plates.
PROCEDURE
You will measure the capacitance for each capacitor using
the following protocol. Note that the theoretical value is given
to you at the top of the screen----your fit of your data should
agree with this value.
1. Set the distance and area to the required values.
2. Position voltmeter to measure potential difference.
3. Repeat the following until you have at least 7 points,
starting at 0 and going up in steps of 0.2 V.
a) Set the battery voltage to required value.
b) record voltage and charge in first data table.
4. When complete, use Excel or LoggerPro to plot a graph
between Q (Y axis) and V (X axis) and do linear curve fitting
and determine slope. The slope is C (Cs). Remember to use SI
units when plotting! Include all plots with fits in lab report.
5. You will repeat the above for three values of A and d. These
values will be given to you by your professor. When you
complete this task, fill out the second data table.
6. You will also calculate value of C (Cc) from equation 2.
7. Find percent error between three values of C as shown in the
table 2.
DATA TABLEs
Add rows and columns as needed:
Data Table 1
Voltage (V)
Q1 (C)
Q2 (C)
Q3 (C)

3. Same here:
Data Table 2
capacitor
A (mm2)
d (mm)
Theoretical Cth (pF)
Calculated Cc (pF)
Slope - Cs (pF)
Percent Error 1 for Cth and Cc

4. Percent Error 1 for Cth and Cs
1
2
3
ANALYSIS
1. You have already plotted the Q vs. V and determined the
slopes. This is the first part of the analysis. Put these slopes in
column 4 of data table 2.
2. For the second part of the analysis, use Eq. (2) and the
data in columns 2 and 3 in data table 2 to calculate the
capacitance for each capacitor geometry you measured. Put
these values in column 5 of data table 2.
3. You will compare the results of C in columns 4 and 5, 4 and
6 in your lab report.

5. © 2021 Vernier, PHET and modified by Dr Dipti Sharma
Instructions:
For this assignment, you will annotate an article. Please read
the instructions and follow each step carefully. There are three
steps. Turn on Track Changes under the Review tab in Word
before you begin. Be sure your Track Changes shows All
Markup not just a Simple Markup.Step 1: Predict and preview
After reading the title and glancing over the text and author’s
biography (below), what do you think the text will be about?
What do you understand about the text from the title? What do
you know already about this topic? What questions do you have
about the text? Enter your response to the preview here:Step 2:
Read, summarize, and annotate
As you read the article, use the Track Changes function to
annotate the text.
1. Double click the last word of a paragraph, and then click the
New Comment button under the Review tab to add a comment
box. Type your one sentence summary (paraphrase) of the
paragraph in the box. Summarize every paragraph in the essay.
Group short paragraphs of the same topic together for
summarizing.
1. What words do you not understand? Define them directly in
the text next to the word. Only put the definition for the word in
its exact context (not all the definitions).
1. Annotate the text. Use the functions in Microsoft Word to
highlight sections or words and underline sentences or sections
that are important, just like you would if you were annotating a
hard copy of the essay. Use the following key to annotate your
text:
· Highlight the main ideas of paragraphs, including the thesis
· Underline supporting details or interesting quotes/facts/ideas

6. · Bold any counterarguments. If you are handwriting, you can
circle the counterarguments.Step 3: Vocabulary words
As you read the text, you need to list and words that you do not
know here with their definitions. If you know all the words, you
need to find and define at least TWO words that you think other
students might struggle with. You should have a minimum of
TWO words with definitions listed below:
Step 4: Answering questions about the text (after you read it!)
1. Who is the audience of this article? Provide two quotes to
support your answer.
1. Do you agree, disagree, or have mixed feelings about this
article? Why or why not? Explain
“What’s a College Education Really Worth?” by Naomi
Schaefer Riley
https://www.thehour.com/opinion/article/What-s-a-college-
education-really-worth-Not-8174176.php
Did Peter Thiel pop the bubble? That was the question on the
minds of parents, taxpayers and higher education leaders late
last month when the co-founder of PayPal announced that he
was offering $100,000 to young people who would stay out of
college for two years and work instead on scientific and
technological innovations. Thiel, who has called college “the
default activity,” told USA Today that “the pernicious side
effect of the education bubble is assuming education
[guarantees] absolute good, even with steep student fees.” He
has lured 24 of the smartest kids in America and Canada to his
Silicon Valley lair with promises of money and mentorship for
their projects. Some of these young people have been working
in university labs since before adolescence. Others have

7. consulted for Microsoft, Coca-Cola and other top companies. A
couple didn’t even have to face the choice of putting off college
— one enrolled in college at age 12 and, at 19, had left his PhD
studies at Stanford to start his own company. Of course, Thiel’s
offer isn’t going to change the way most universities do
business anytime soon. These 24 kids represent the narrowest
swath of the country’s college-bound youth. (Though it’s
important to note: When we talk about America having the
greatest system of higher education in the world, these are the
kind of people we’re bragging about.)
There’s not much reason to worry that this program is going to
produce a nation of dropouts, contrary to the fears of some wags
such as James Temple, a columnist for the San Francisco
Chronicle. Temple called the premise of the fellowships “scary”
and worried about the broader message they send. However, as a
country, we are still creeping along toward President Obama’s
dream of universal higher education. Obama sees this not only
as a way for all individuals to have the opportunity to reach
their full potential but also as a key to the nation’s ability to
compete in the global marketplace.
But Thiel put a dollar figure on somethi ng that certain young
people may already have suspected was true. A friend of mine
whose son, a budding Internet entrepreneur, just graduated from
Yale told me about a conversation that her son reported having
with another somewhat successful start-up founder. The latter
had dropped out of Harvard Law School to launch his business,
and he advised my friend’s son to drop out of Yale — venture
capitalists would know that he was serious if he was willing to
give up that Ivy League diploma. My friend was a little
horrified, having already dropped somewhere around $200,000
on her son’s education, but it does raise the question: For a
smart kid from an upper-middle-class family who went to one of
the top high schools in the country, and who already has a
business going, what does a college diploma mean?

8. Colleges have long been engaged in an odd deal with students
and their parents. Paying for a college education — or taking on
a huge amount of debt to finance an education — is a
transaction in which most of the buyers and most of the sellers
have fundamentally different understandings of the product.
Think about it this way: Suppose I start a print newspaper
tomorrow. I might think I’m selling excellent journalism, while
my “readers” are actually using my product to line their
birdcages. It might work out fine for a while. But the imbalance
in this transaction would make it difficult to talk in general
terms about improving the product or whether the product is
worth what I’m charging. I might think I should improve my
grammar and hire more reporters. My customers might want me
to make the paper thicker.
In the college transaction, most parents think they’re buying
their kids a credential, a better job and a ticket, economically
speaking at least, to the American dream. Most college
professors and administrators (the good ones, anyway) see their
role as producing liberally educated, well-rounded individuals
with an appreciation for certain kinds of knowledge. If they get
a job after graduation, well, that’s nice, too.
The students, for the most part, are not quite sure where they fit
into this bargain. Some will get caught up in what they learn
and decide to go on to further education. But most will see
college as an opportunity to have fun and then come out the
other end of the pipeline with the stamp of approval they need
to make a decent salary after graduation.
So does Thiel’s offer suggest that a university diploma might be
most useful lining a birdcage? Yes and no. He has certainly
undermined the worth of a credential. But it is universities
themselves that have undermined the worth of the education. It

9. is to their detriment that they have done so, certainly, but it is
to the detriment of students as well.
In the recent movie “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg is
shown devoting endless hours in his room to computer
programming. He goes to a few parties, but mostly he is
engaged in his new business venture, “the Facebook.” How is
this possible, one might wonder? Was he flunking out of his
classes? No. Thanks to the wonders of grade inflation and the
lack of a serious core curriculum, it is possible to get through
Harvard and a number of other high-price universities acing
your computer science classes and devoting very little effort to
anything else.
Colleges and universities have allowed their value to slip by
letting students call this an undergraduate education. There is
no compelling understanding among students of why they are
there. Studying is not how they spend even the bulk of their
waking hours, and their classes seem random at best. They may
spend Monday in “19th Century Women’s Literature,” Tuesday
in “Animal Behavior” and Wednesday in “Eastern Philosophy,”
but these courses may bear little relation to any they took the
previous semester or any they will take the next. A 2010 report
called “What Will They Learn?,” published by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization that
emphasizes traditional education, surveyed the curricula of
more than 700 colleges. About 4 percent require students to take
a basic economics class. A little more than a quarter of the
public institutions and only 5 percent of the private colleges and
universities require a single broad survey course in American
history or government. And only 61 percent of colleges and
universities require students to take a college-level mathematics
class.
General education requirements are no longer general at all.
They are absurdly specific. At Cornell, you can fill your

10. literature and arts requirement with “Global Martial Arts Film
and Literature.” And at Northwestern, the math requirement can
be fulfilled with “Slavonic Linguistics.” It’s little wonder that
smart students think their time is better spent coding. So yes,
Zuckerberg was wasting his parents’ money and his own time.
Why pay to be at Harvard if that’s what you’re going to do?
Why not take a class on Dostoyevsky or the history of
Christianity or astronomy or ancient history? You are
surrounded by some of the most learned people in the world,
and you are holed up in your dorm room typing code. (One
could place some blame on the students, but it’s hard to fault
people for not knowing what they don’t know.) Surely Thiel has
the right idea when it comes to the Zuckerbergs of the world.
And colleges have only themselves to blame if they lose some
of these very smart young people to his fellowships.
Beyond the top tier, there are also gaping holes in higher
education. Executives at U.S. companies routinely complain
about the lack of reading, writing and math skills in the recent
graduates they hire. Maybe they too will get tired of using
higher education as a credentialing system. Maybe it will be
easier to recruit if they don’t have to be concerned about the
overwhelming student debt of their new employees.
Employers may decide that there are better ways to get high
school students ready for careers. What if they returned to the
idea of apprenticeship, not just for shoemakers and plumbers
but for white-collar jobs? College as a sorting process for talent
or a way to babysit 18-year-olds is not very efficient for anyone
involved. Would students rather show their SAT scores to
companies and then apply for training positions where they can
learn the skills they need to be successful? Maybe the
companies could throw in some liberal arts courses along the
way. At least they would pick the most important ones and
require that students put in some serious effort. Even a 40-hour
workweek would be a step up from what many students are

11. asked to do now. If tuition continues to rise faster than
inflation, and colleges cannot provide a compelling mission for
undergraduate education, we may move further away from
Obama’s vision of education and closer to Peter Thiel’s.
Published: June 3, 2011
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former editor at the Wall Street
Journal, is the author of the forthcoming “The Faculty Lounges
. . . And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College
Education You Paid For.”
© The Washington Post Company
Lama 2
Karishma Lama
Professor: Justine White
English-1302-82701
26th January 2022
Annotation
Step 1: Predict and preview (on the article)
· The text tends to explore the implications that the approaches
of advertisement may have on the audience. As expressed by the
article’s topic, Ads manifest a critical potential of attracting
false memories into someone. How an advertisement is
presented to the public will significantly influence their
perception about the concerned product. The whole thing seems
to involve manipulation of the mindset.
Step 2: Read, summarize and annotate (on
the article)
Step 3: Vocabulary words
i) Memory reconsolidation: is a process made to restabilize a

12. destabilized memory primarily through memory retrieval.
ii) Delusion: impression upheld despite it being challenged by
reality
Step 4: Answering questions about the text (after you read it!)
1. Who is the audience, and how do you know? Provide at least
two quotes that support your answer.
· The relevant audience in this context tends to be the general
public, who are exposed to ads often. The following quotes
emphasize this.
i) “… Although we like to think of our memories as being
immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of
remembering them, they aren’t...”
ii) “…This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely
re-imagine our assumptions about memory…." (Lehrer, 2011)
2. What is your response to this article? What have knowledge
or understanding have you gained after reading it?
· This article critically provides a sensitive concept
comprehensively. It has excellently expressed how commercial
advertisements can trick someone into loving a product that
perhaps they have no solid reason for the same.
“Ads Implant False Memories” by Jonah Lehrer
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/
“My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur
of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for
confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my
siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust. And yet, I have this one
cinematic memory from high-school. I’m sitting at a Friday
night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come
to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the

13. North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I’m up in the
last row of the bleachers (ordinary bench seats at the sports
ground) with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on
AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But
here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we
are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola
(the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine.
Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can
vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of
the cola, the constant need to suppress burps. Comment by
Karishma Lama: The narrator explains their cinematic memory
since their high-school era about the impact that Coca-Cola
drink has on their lives.
It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as
if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What
makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen,
that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from
glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass
containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules —
and I was way too nerdy for that — I would have almost
certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam
container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s
a less romantic image, for sure. Comment by Karishma
Lama: The narrator regards it as a strange experience as if Coke
had an agreement with them after realizing that the experience
didn’t actually happen.
So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from?
My guess is a Coca-Cola ad, one of those lavishly produced
clips in which the entire town is at the big football game and
everyone is clean cut, good looking and holding a tasty Coke
product. (You can find these stirring clips on YouTube.) The
soda maker has long focused on such ads, in which the
marketing message is less about the virtues of the product (who
cares if Coke tastes better than Pepsi?) and more about

14. associating the drink with a set of intensely pleasurable
memories. Comment by Karishma Lama: The narrator connects
their experience to the Coca-Cola ad whereby the marketing
message tends to primarily focus on the virtues of the product.
A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research,
helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my
flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials
are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of
long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we
just watched on television actually happened. And it happened
to us. The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were
introduced to a new popcorn product called “Orville
Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” (No such
product exists, but that’s the point.) Then, the students were
randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some
subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the
delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-
imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy
people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing
the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In
one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other
room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new
popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was
actually used.) Comment by Karishma Lama: A new study
explains the relevance of the marketing strategy used by Coke
and how it has the potential to trick the hippocampus.
One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their
memory of the product. Here’s where things get disturbing:
While students who saw the low-imagery ad were extremely
unlikely to report having tried the popcorn, those who watched
the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried
the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their
ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled
the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these

15. subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories.
The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because
they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was
delicious. Comment by Karishma Lama: The study indicated
that exposure to slick commercial advertisement about a product
tend to have similar feedback as those who had practically
interacted with the product.
The scientists refer to this as the “false experience effect,”
since the ads are slyly (in a cunning or manipulative manner)
weaving fictional experiences into our very real lives. “Viewing
the vivid advertisement created a false memory of eating the
popcorn, despite the fact that eating the non-existent product
would have been impossible,” write Priyali Rajagopal and
Nicole Montgomery, the lead authors on the paper. “As a result,
consumers need to be vigilant while processing high-imagery
advertisements.” At first glance, this experimental observation
seems incongruous (out of place). How could a stupid
commercial trick me into believing that I loved a product I’d
never actually tasted? Or that I drank Coke out of glass bottles?
Comment by Karishma Lama: This paragraph explores the
concept of “false experience effect” whereby the narrator
emphasizes to consumers to be vigilant while processing high-
imagery advertisements.
The answer returns us to a troubling recent theory known as
memory reconsolidation. In essence, reconsolidation is rooted in
the fact that every time we recall a memory we also remake it,
subtly tweaking the neuronal details.Although we like to think
of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow
separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t. A
memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it.
What’s disturbing, of course, is that we can’t help but borrow
many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we
watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal
narrative we repeat and retell. Comment by Karishma Lama: We

16. borrow many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we
watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal
narrative we retell and repeat.
This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-
imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a
ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. The
recall is altered in the absence of the original stimulus,
becoming less about what we actually remember and more about
what we'd like to remember. It's the difference between a
"Save" and the "Save As" function. Our memories are a “Save
As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember
them, which is why the more we remember something, the less
accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of
popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that
alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life.
We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out,
are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.”
Comment by Karishma Lama: We are designed to steal
stories from everywhere whereby marketers tends to be good
sources to do so.
Posted in the Science section on Wired.com on May 25, 2011.
Reference
Lehrer, J. (2011, May 25). Ads Implant False Memories.
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/
Instructions:
For this assignment, you will annotate an article. Please read
the instructions and follow each step carefully. There are three
steps. Turn on Track Changes under the Review tab in Word
before you begin. Be sure your Track Changes shows All
Markup not just a Simple Markup.Step 1: Predict and preview
After reading the title and glancing over the text and author’s
biography (below), what do you think the text will be about?

17. What do you understand about the text from the title? What do
you know already about this topic? What questions do you have
about the text? Enter your response to the preview here:Step 2:
Read, summarize, and annotate
As you read the article, use the Track Changes function to
annotate the text.
1. Double click the last word of a paragraph, and then click the
New Comment button under the Review tab to add a comment
box. Type your one sentence summary (paraphrase) of the
paragraph in the box. Summarize every paragraph in the essay.
Group short paragraphs of the same topic together for
summarizing.
1. What words do you not understand? Define them directly in
the text next to the word. Only put the definition for the word in
its exact context (not all the definitions).
1. Annotate the text. Use the functions in Microsoft Word to
highlight sections or words and underline sentences or sections
that are important, just like you would if you were annotating a
hard copy of the essay. Use the following key to annotate your
text:
· Highlight the main ideas of paragraphs, including the thesis
· Underline supporting details or interesting quotes/facts/ideas
· Bold any counterarguments. If you are handwriting, you can
circle the counterarguments.Step 3: Vocabulary words
As you read the text, you need to list and words that you do not
know here with their definitions. If you know all the words, you
need to find and define at least TWO words that you think other
students might struggle with. You should have a minimum of
TWO words with definitions listed below:
Step 4: Answering questions about the text (after you read it!)
1. Who is the audience of this article? Provide two quotes to
support your answer.

18. 1. Do you agree, disagree, or have mixed feelings about this
article? Why or why not? Explain
“What’s a College Education Really Worth?” by Naomi
Schaefer Riley
https://www.thehour.com/opinion/article/What-s-a-college-
education-really-worth-Not-8174176.php
Did Peter Thiel pop the bubble? That was the question on the
minds of parents, taxpayers and higher education leaders late
last month when the co-founder of PayPal announced that he
was offering $100,000 to young people who would stay out of
college for two years and work instead on scientific and
technological innovations. Thiel, who has called college “the
default activity,” told USA Today that “the pernicious side
effect of the education bubble is assuming education
[guarantees] absolute good, even with steep student fees.” He
has lured 24 of the smartest kids in America and Canada to his
Silicon Valley lair with promises of money and mentorship for
their projects. Some of these young people have been working
in university labs since before adolescence. Others have
consulted for Microsoft, Coca-Cola and other top companies. A
couple didn’t even have to face the choice of putting off college
— one enrolled in college at age 12 and, at 19, had left his PhD
studies at Stanford to start his own company. Of course, Thiel’s
offer isn’t going to change the way most universities do
business anytime soon. These 24 kids represent the narrowest
swath of the country’s college-bound youth. (Though it’s
important to note: When we talk about America having the
greatest system of higher education in the world, these are the
kind of people we’re bragging about.)
There’s not much reason to worry that this program is going to
produce a nation of dropouts, contrary to the fears of some wags

19. such as James Temple, a columnist for the San Francisco
Chronicle. Temple called the premise of the fellowships “scary”
and worried about the broader message they send. However, as a
country, we are still creeping along toward President Obama’s
dream of universal higher education. Obama sees this not only
as a way for all individuals to have the opportunity to reach
their full potential but also as a key to the nation’s ability to
compete in the global marketplace.
But Thiel put a dollar figure on something that certain young
people may already have suspected was true. A friend of mine
whose son, a budding Internet entrepreneur, just graduated from
Yale told me about a conversation that her son reported having
with another somewhat successful start-up founder. The latter
had dropped out of Harvard Law School to launch his business,
and he advised my friend’s son to drop out of Yale — venture
capitalists would know that he was serious if he was willing to
give up that Ivy League diploma. My friend was a little
horrified, having already dropped somewhere around $200,000
on her son’s education, but it does raise the question: For a
smart kid from an upper-middle-class family who went to one of
the top high schools in the country, and who already has a
business going, what does a college diploma mean?
Colleges have long been engaged in an odd deal with students
and their parents. Paying for a college education — or taking on
a huge amount of debt to finance an education — is a
transaction in which most of the buyers and most of the seller s
have fundamentally different understandings of the product.
Think about it this way: Suppose I start a print newspaper
tomorrow. I might think I’m selling excellent journalism, while
my “readers” are actually using my product to line their
birdcages. It might work out fine for a while. But the imbalance
in this transaction would make it difficult to talk in general
terms about improving the product or whether the product is

20. worth what I’m charging. I might think I should improve my
grammar and hire more reporters. My customers might want me
to make the paper thicker.
In the college transaction, most parents think they’re buying
their kids a credential, a better job and a ticket, economically
speaking at least, to the American dream. Most college
professors and administrators (the good ones, anyway) see their
role as producing liberally educated, well-rounded individuals
with an appreciation for certain kinds of knowledge. If they get
a job after graduation, well, that’s nice, too.
The students, for the most part, are not quite sure where they fit
into this bargain. Some will get caught up in what they learn
and decide to go on to further education. But most will see
college as an opportunity to have fun and then come out the
other end of the pipeline with the stamp of approval they need
to make a decent salary after graduation.
So does Thiel’s offer suggest that a university diploma might be
most useful lining a birdcage? Yes and no. He has certainly
undermined the worth of a credential. But it is universities
themselves that have undermined the worth of the education. It
is to their detriment that they have done so, certainly, but it is
to the detriment of students as well.
In the recent movie “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg is
shown devoting endless hours in his room to computer
programming. He goes to a few parties, but mostly he is
engaged in his new business venture, “the Facebook.” How is
this possible, one might wonder? Was he flunking out of his
classes? No. Thanks to the wonders of grade inflation and the
lack of a serious core curriculum, it is possible to get through
Harvard and a number of other high-price universities acing
your computer science classes and devoting very little effort to
anything else.

21. Colleges and universities have allowed their value to slip by
letting students call this an undergraduate education. There is
no compelling understanding among students of why they are
there. Studying is not how they spend even the bulk of their
waking hours, and their classes seem random at best. They may
spend Monday in “19th Century Women’s Literature,” Tuesday
in “Animal Behavior” and Wednesday in “Eastern Philosophy,”
but these courses may bear little relation to any they took the
previous semester or any they will take the next. A 2010 report
called “What Will They Learn?,” published by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization that
emphasizes traditional education, surveyed the curricula of
more than 700 colleges. About 4 percent require students to take
a basic economics class. A little more than a quarter of the
public institutions and only 5 percent of the private colleges and
universities require a single broad survey course in American
history or government. And only 61 percent of colleges and
universities require students to take a college-level mathematics
class.
General education requirements are no longer general at all.
They are absurdly specific. At Cornell, you can fill your
literature and arts requirement with “Global Martial Arts Film
and Literature.” And at Northwestern, the math requirement can
be fulfilled with “Slavonic Linguistics.” It’s little wonder that
smart students think their time is better spent coding. So yes,
Zuckerberg was wasting his parents’ money and his own time.
Why pay to be at Harvard if that’s what you’re going to do?
Why not take a class on Dostoyevsky or the history of
Christianity or astronomy or ancient history? You are
surrounded by some of the most learned people in the world,
and you are holed up in your dorm room typing code. (One
could place some blame on the students, but it’s hard to fault
people for not knowing what they don’t know.) Surely Thiel has
the right idea when it comes to the Zuckerbergs of the world.

22. And colleges have only themselves to blame if they lose some
of these very smart young people to his fellowships.
Beyond the top tier, there are also gaping holes in higher
education. Executives at U.S. companies routinely complain
about the lack of reading, writing and math skills in the recent
graduates they hire. Maybe they too will get tired of using
higher education as a credentialing system. Maybe it will be
easier to recruit if they don’t have to be concerned about the
overwhelming student debt of their new employees.
Employers may decide that there are better ways to get high
school students ready for careers. What if they returned to the
idea of apprenticeship, not just for shoemakers and plumbers
but for white-collar jobs? College as a sorting process for talent
or a way to babysit 18-year-olds is not very efficient for anyone
involved. Would students rather show their SAT scores to
companies and then apply for training positions where they can
learn the skills they need to be successful? Maybe the
companies could throw in some liberal arts courses along the
way. At least they would pick the most important ones and
require that students put in some serious effort. Even a 40-hour
workweek would be a step up from what many students are
asked to do now. If tuition continues to rise faster than
inflation, and colleges cannot provide a compelling mission for
undergraduate education, we may move further away from
Obama’s vision of education and closer to Peter Thiel’s.
Published: June 3, 2011
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former editor at the Wall Street
Journal, is the author of the forthcoming “The Faculty Lounges
. . . And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College
Education You Paid For.”
© The Washington Post Company