HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

It is optionality that makes things work and grow — but it takes a certain type of person for that. Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United States (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these people fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant.

Indeed. Also:

No one at present dares to state the obvious: Growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas on their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.

Universities aren’t the best place to look for those people, either.