A new startup is offering loans to students who take courses with a quantifiable payoff.
The Hustle
Fri, Jan 27
You can’t put a price on a good education…
But Climb Credit is damn well trying. The finance startup provides student loans for educational programs with quantifiable returns (aka degrees that are most likely to result in stable, higher paying jobs for graduates).
Because being “well-rounded” is valuable…
But the benefits are harder to measure
Climb calculates return rates based on the increase in earnings after completing a course, minus the cost of the course itself.
They track all of their loans right alongside things like subject area, job offers, and salaries, and refuse to lend money for fields like acting or modeling unless they show justifiable returns.
As a result, they focus heavily on skill-based courses (paywall) like coding programs, welding school, or learning how to program robots for auto assembly lines.
Basically, they’re the STEM-crazy parents who refuse to bankroll their kid’s education unless they major in something “practical.”
Plus, unlike other student loan companies…
The programs they finance are typically less than a year long, making them ineligible for federal funding granted to 2 or 4-year degrees.
Climb also allows students to start making tiny payments as soon as they take out a loan, rather than accumulating interest in the shadows, and surprising them with a huge bill on graduation day.
And, although Climb’s student loans accumulate interest at about 9% a year (nearly double the federal rate), their default rates are promising, in “the low single digits.”
Investing in education that actually pays the bills, what a novel idea! (Say the 2 writers…)
Living the dream
Experts make better bosses
Most studies on workplace leaders focus on their personality, management style, and how those things affect the company.
But what about a leader’s competence? If your boss doesn’t genuinely understand the work you’re doing, is that a problem? And if she does, how much of an impact can it have?
A trio of college professors set out to get the answers…
Their study, published in the Harvard Business Review, looked at 35k random employees in the US and Britain. And, since “competence” is vague AF, they measured 3 distinct things:
Whether the boss could, if necessary, do the employee’s job
Whether the boss worked his or her way up inside the company
The boss’s level of technical competence as assessed by the worker
What they found was that employees are exponentially happier when working under someone with “deep expertise in the core activity of the business.”
In fact, among American workers, having a technically competent boss was significantly more important than their salary.
So, what does this mean?
Plenty of people believe that certain personality traits, not technical expertise, make a good manager.
They’ll argue that the sharp, charismatic guy or gal should be in charge and that promoting, say, an engineer to lead other engineers is a mistake.
This research proves otherwise.
It also supports other studies showing that hospitals are better off led by doctors rather than general managers and that colleges do better when top researchers, not administrators, are in charge.
In conclusion…
Employees are happiest (and most productive) when their boss fully understands and appreciates the work they’re doing. Pretty simple.
As Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson points out, this is one explanation for why Apple and Microsoft struggled when they lost their tech CEOs (Jobs and Gates), and sales guys took over (Scully and Ballmer).
And it’s also, Hansson says, a likely reason why VCs have stopped bringing in “an adult” to run companies once the founders “hit a few snags."
Adults ruin everything
It’s not easy being Google
Because when you’re king of the hill, people are always looking for reasons to push you off. And, while Google’s Q4 revenue grew 22% from last year’s, Wall Street isn’t cutting the search engine any slack.
Their shares took a hit yesterday, after heavy spending on facilities (its capital expenditures were up 46% from last year to $3.1B) caused profits to come in slightly under expectations.
But, their “X-files” are doing well…
Relatively speaking, that is. Google’s miscellaneous “Other Bets” category, which includes autonomous vehicle startup Waymo, and our false prophet, Fiber (Google, you promised us!), increased revenue by 62%.
This bump comes on the heels of their restructure, which gave investors more visibility into the losses of some of Google’s more “exploratory” investments (like internet balloons).
However, the experimental division is still $1.08B in the red (compared with $1.21B in Q4 losses last year). So, it looks like they’ll be doing some spring cleaning moving forward.
Or, in other words, focusing their efforts where it counts…
Namely, cloud services and voice-controlled hardware in an attempt to chip away at Amazon’s lead in both.
CEO Sundar Pichai says they’ll be banking heavily on their Cloud division with greater investments in infrastructure and headcount in 2017 (Amazon Web Services still holds nearly double the market share).
At the same time, Google also plans to leverage their Home and Pixel devices’ strength in voice control technology to give the Echo a run for its money. Because, according to Pichai, the battle for connected homes has “only started playing out."
So sure, they’re off to a slow start, but it could be a tortoise-hare scenario. And either way, Amazon better not sleep on ‘em.
Stay woke, Bezos
IBM’s coming in hot with predictions for 2022
The tech behemoth recently released its latest “5 in 5” list, highlighting the 5 innovations they believe will have the greatest impact on our lives come 2022. Here they are:
Thanks to AI, our speech will be a window into our mental health
According to IBM, “What we say and write will be used as indicators of our mental health and physical well-being.”
Seems pretty nuts, but considering a team from USC built a program last year to identify signs of depression based on speech patterns, maybe it’s not.
Superhero vision will be a thing
Sunglasses that help colorblind people see color do exist, but those types of devices are mostly experimental.
In the future, IBM sees those becoming commonplace, as well as devices that allow us to see infrared images, making it possible for, say, self-driving cars to see through fog.
“Macroscopes” will change how we understand our planet
Macroscopes are systems of algorithms that could help us gather data from millions of devices and analyze it on a large scale.
Medical labs “on a chip” will revolutionize medicine
Imagine having a full biochemistry lab the size of your palm in your house, allowing you to get accurate diagnoses, at a low cost, to catch diseases earlier than we ever thought possible.
Smart sensors will detect pollution “at the speed of light”
IBM thinks smart sensors will be implanted in the ground or attached to drones to identify pollutants and emissions in real-time.
For example, methane leaks are the 2nd largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, but they’re invisible to the naked eye. Enter smart sensors to save the day.
Gimme those X-ray specs
friday shower thoughts
The first thing you get after obtaining a bachelor’s degree is a sudden lack of respect for people with a bachelor’s degree.
I always remember how to spell Wednesday by saying “Wed-nes-day.”
You’ve known your parents your entire life, but they’ve only known you a fraction of theirs.
When I’m vacuuming and can’t get something off the floor, I’ll run over it from 40 different angles for 5 minutes rather than taking 2 seconds to bend over and pick it up.
Both “I’ve waited for 10 years, I can wait a couple days longer” and “I’ve waited for 10 years, I can’t wait any longer” are equally sensible arguments.
via Reddit
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