Few people make a living as a public speaker but many people build it into their career. A career is like a suit of clothes: to look its best, it must be tailored and accessorized. So whatever career you choose, let's say it's social work - you can, for example, ask your boss - if you can give talks at housing project community centers about the social services available.

Only someone who already knows and likes you is likely to give you a good job with modest relevant experience.

What may create even more jobs is to develop more entrepreneurs, of course, ethical ones.

It's absurd how aspirants to designer-label colleges become obsessed with perfection so they can get into one. I'm not convinced it's worth prostituting yourself for that.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.