The Need for ROI in Learning
“Hard work pays off.” All people, no matter the background or culture, have been taught this value since childhood. I have been taught this virtue. But what if I told you that this was all sham? Disclaimer: before going on, I would like to point out that I am not against hard work. Hard work is necessary for success. I am against blindly working hard. If hard work was all it took to be successful, to be wealthy, janitors would be multi-millionaires, not founders of successful companies. Yet, if this logic is so obvious, why do we not teach our kids in school or at home this crucial life lesson? By neglecting our duty, we perpetuate a culture of overworking.
I have seen the detrimental effects of this culture in education first hand. When I was at my former employer, Thinktank Learning, I witnessed many cases of overwork and inefficiency. There was one case that stood out. To protect her privacy, let’s call her Ava. Ava came from an elite private school in San Francisco, and her family was affluent because they went to elite American universities themselves. Ava had great grades at her high school and participated in many extracurriculars including varsity sports. She was just looking to cap it off with a great SAT score. Intent on achieving that, she spent hours upon hours taking SAT Boot Camps, one-on-one tutoring sessions, and practice tests. In fact, she went through the entire tutoring center’s bank of SAT practice tests. The staff had to find additional ones. I don’t remember exactly how many practice tests she took in the end. 20? 30? 40? The point is that she kept taking those practice tests just to improve marginally. If you took introductory economics, you would consider each try unsatisfactory due to the miniscule return per try. Yet, her parents kept pushing her. The staff and tutors pushed her. She pushed herself. I saw her break down into tears in meetings with all the stakeholders. In the end, she got a high SAT score that got her into one of the best public universities in the country. But at what cost? Putting inefficiency aside, this is abuse. Yet, the current educational environment permits such a thing to happen. In some cases, it encourages it. The accumulated emotional and physical pain including the lack of consistently ample sleep and rest cannot be undone. Our brains continue developing till the age of 25. Before that, we are more vulnerable to trauma.
When I was at Thinktank Learning, I made sure my students never had that amount of work or pressure. Sure, I was tough, but I work under the philosophy of sustainable quality over quantity. At Lowell High, I have gone through experiences such as Ava’s. Math teachers assigned 40 or 50 questions that would be due in a couple days. Each one would take 5 to 10 minutes. Mind you, I had numerous assignments in other classes. I make sure my students never go through what I experienced. At Thinktank Learning, I tried to change the company’s policy. I advocated to lower the frequency of practice SATs from each week to once every two weeks. Students need time to digest their performance. A week is not enough time.
It is these experiences working in the education industry and my own experience in school that have shaped my mission and teaching philosophy. I will be blunt: my mission is to wipe out this type of thinking from American society. The tutoring centers, schools, etc. that push this culture and glorification of overwork must go. But it’s a tough task. They own the narrative, marketing power, and incentive structure. They have the status quo.
But I do my damndest to fight the good fight. I do my small part by teaching my students the concept of return on investment (ROI).
My experiences in personal investing inspire my teaching of the concept. Say someone makes $1,000,000 dollars. Sounds impressive right? Not necessarily. We need to ask how much was the investment in terms of time and/or money? What if the person put in $900,000. That translates into about 11% return. Now, this provides more information. Yet, more context can help make a better judgement. How much time has elapsed? If the answer is 4 years, the person made an annualized average return of $25,000 per year or 2.8% per year. Now with more information, the $1,000,000 is less impressive. This is just a simple example of ROI. We could delve further: say this was return from real estate. This is actually not too bad. But what if it was from the stock market in the last four years? 2.8% annualized returns is horrible, considering that the NASDAQ averaged a return of 25.80% in the last four years. We can account for inflation. We can conduct a opportunity cost analysis. And so on.
The education system solely needs such analysis on the collective and individual level. On the individual level, we must educate our students to use ROI style analysis in their lives. If Ava used a rudimentary form of ROI, she would have realized that her past trajectory in regards to the SAT was not worth the cost. With such a realization, she could have taken the steps to increase the rate of improvement. In my practice, I guide my clients to identify two to three specific areas on the SAT. Remember, if everything is a priority, nothing is of priority. Say of those areas is misplaced modifiers. We both work to see whether the particular obstacle is of a fundamental or testing nature. If it is fundamental, we work on the underlying concept and practice outside of the SAT format first. If it is just within the confines of the SAT format, we jump ahead. If the area is something basic like overall reading comprehension, I structure a regiment to improve reading comprehension across all formats and topics. The SAT format can wait.
The same postulate translates over to a student’s long term trajectory. I have used this truth to help my clients navigate their year to year growth. For one client, we used opportunity analysis to inform her decision on how to appropriate her free time outside of school. She was wondering if she should reallocate time from her varsity sport to pursue her ambition to start a podcast channel and grow it. Perhaps, the channel could set the benchmark for the podcasting in the teenage demographic. However, she spent exorbitant amount of time on varsity swimming including many school days with double practice— one before school and one after school. This does not include preseason conditioning and time spent on competitions. This student liked swimming, but did not envision a professional or semi-professional path in swimming. She saw podcasting in the opposite life. The time spent on swimming was not giving her extra marginal utility, and it was preventing her from spending time from starting the channel. The choice was clear. We worked together to set a blueprint to wind down her commitment in swimming and startup her media career.
Utility, opportunity cost, and rate of return. These words may connote cold, hard numbers lacking any whiff of emotions, but actually, they can be used to make the journey through education a more humane, enjoyable, and satisfying one.
