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Education Matters to attend 2012 US Empowered Gala

Later this week, Education Matters Project will have the pleasure of attending US Empowered’s annual gala ceremony.  Each year US Empowered hosts its annual Graduation Gala to celebrate the achievements of our Fellows and Program Directors, and offer an opportunity for community leaders to learn more about US Empowered, meet the Fellows and pledge their support.

On Wednesday, Marquis Parker and I are looking forward to joining the innovative nonprofit in welcoming the largest group of graduate to date.  The team and Board of Directors for US Empowered have worked hard to create the event so we look forward to showing our support.

Founded by Jeff Nelsen, US Empowered is “the nation’s only teacher-led college persistence program, that identifies and trains highly effective teachers to lead students attending non-selective high schools in low-income communities to enroll in and graduate from college.”

To show just how far they have come, in 2007, US Empowered served 30 students at three Chicago high schools and this year, we are working with nearly 1,000 students and 44 teachers in 20 high schools. They really are doing great work here in Chicago, and will soon be expanding to a number of other cities.

At Kellogg and other leading MBA programs,  business students seem to be increasingly seeking jobs in the education industry.  For those considering that option, I highly recommend that you consider getting to know US Empowered. It’s a great organization with a great mission, and a strong team of staff and board members.

See below for a video clip from last years gala!

Merger Article on The Education Matters Project

If you look anywhere on the web today, you’re almost guaranteed to find a story on education reform. In fact, many of my blog posts talk about the same topic. While this is not necessarily a main factor that MBA applicants use in picking a program, today business schools are spending more time and resources on their social enterprise departments. Schools like Stanford that offer the joint MBA and M.Ed. Schools like Yale, reknowned for their nonprofit recruiting. And schools like Kellogg that have an entire department dedicated to Social Enterprise.

Well just last week the latest edition of the Merger came out. Written by Medill student Nicole Koetting, this version featured an article written about the Education Matters Project. See below for the article.

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Title: Fortune Favors the Bold

Author: Nicole Koetting

It all started when Jeremy C. Wilson read an article by Peter Thiel that said that going to college didn’t matter. It was the spring of 2011, and I was bothered by the article. Education had been very important in Wilson’s life, and he didn’t agree with Thiel’s argument that higher education was essentially useless.

“I wish I could talk to every student for five minutes to tell them, education matters; and education is worth fighting for. I know because I fought for it myself,” Wilson said  He talked with other people about the piece and Thiel’s ideas. Then, suddenly, an idea came to Wilson in a flash. He should do something about it.

Now, Wilson, along with a team of Northwestern students and a host of volunteers, has started the Education Matters Project, a non-profit organization with a pretty big mission: “To change the way humankind views the benefits of education and to help fund a better education for students who need it most.”.

Modeled after the It Gets Better campaign, the Education Matters Project website uses videos of role models and students who tell their stories and why they believe that education mattered in their lives.

The Education Matters Project’s aspirations seem to be three-fold: At the organization’s core is changing how the world views education. If everyone had equal access to receive a good education, the Education Matters Project posits, the world would be a better place.

Secondly, the Education Matters Project wants to inspire disadvantaged junior high and high school students to continue their education. “It’s always going to be easier to quit,” a “Welcome to the Education Matters Project” blog post says. “It’s always going to be easier to say no, to stay home, and to stop trying. The problem is, it’s also easier to fail than it is to succeed. That’s what makes it success. We here at Education Matters want to help you understand that working hard and getting the best education you can is critical to becoming the best version of yourself.”

Of course, it’s not that easy: even if disadvantaged high school students stayed in school and were accepted by a college, going to college costs a lot of money. Wilson and the other Education Matters Project team members understand that. Their third objective reflects that discrepancy: the organization wants to be able to give underprivileged students who want to go to college the money to be able to do it. The Education Matters Project will eventually crowd-fund scholarships for students from low-income families who cannot afford it. Donors will be able to give money to specific students through the website, and will be updated on their student’s success.

As of today, the website hasn’t officially launched yet, but the project has over 100 videos and written pieces, as well as hundreds of photos from people who say that education does matter, and those numbers are growing more every day. Wilson’s video was the first one.

Education is a very personal subject for Wilson. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where the poverty rate was nearly 50% and very few people considered going to college.. Wilson’s parents were the ones who pushed him through school. Wilson says, “They imagined me and my sister getting a good education and attending the best schools in the world, even though nobody game them the same opportunity.” He noted that they jumped on a greyhound and fled Youngstown and moved to west to Arizona in search of opportunity..

They were right. Wilson ended up going to Stanford University, where he majored in Anthropology. Now, as a graduate student who knows how difficult it is for students from low-income families to go to college, he’s made it his personal mission, through the Education Matters Project, to inspire students to go to college, and fund them.

For the short term, Wilson wants the Education Matters Project to target junior high and high school students to show them the potential they can achieve if they pursue a higher education. But in the long run, he wants to make education more equal – he wants all students, whether from high-income or low-income families, to be able to go to college if they want to.

As for what the start-up organization needs right now, Wilson says, “At the heart of what we want to get is as many stories as possible. After that, we need to find a way to get the world’s attention. Because the more people that look, the more fundraising we can do.”

Wilson ended by saying, “There’s never been a more pivotal time to show the world that education still matters.”

Reflecting After 2012 Day at Kellogg Admitted Students Weekend

Just a few weeks ago, many of you found out you were one of the lucky ones who got a call from Kellogg admissions.  They told you that you’d been accepted into the MBA program.  Some of you may have been pretty confident you would enroll here in the fall.  But for others you were uncertain, so you wanted to go check out the schools and see what they had to offer. And just a few days ago, when you thought you couldn’t be more excited, many of you come to Evanston to visit Kellogg during DAK (Day at Kellogg), which is Kellogg’s version of Admit Weekend.

First off, congratulations on your acceptance to Kellogg. I remember my acceptance to Kellogg a few years ago . I hope you are thrilled to get in. Second, congratulations to those of you who made it to the admitted student weekend. That was a great decision.

Feedback after the DAK 1 was that everyone had a blast.  And the point of this post is just to quickly to say that I think the same thing was true for DAK 2.  Many of you have already decided that Kellogg was the place for you during your stay, which is great news. And others have been making those decisions all week.

But don’t take it from me, take it from the feedback emails we’ve been getting since DAK ended:

www.educationmattersproject.org is ready to view and share

How can we fix the education system today? My readers, friends, and colleagues talk about that question all the time, and many of them ask me that same thing. To answer this question, we have to understand what’s broken and what people care about in the education system. So here’s my question right back to them: Why does education matter to you?

Over the past few weeks we’ve gone out and asked the world this single, straightforward question. To compile the responses, we’ve created a forum for people to lend their voice and a multi-media technology platform to get the word out in a meaningful way.

Our website is totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation about why education is important.

It took a lot to get it to you. We’ve gotten help from a few MBA students, law students, journalism students and undergrads. So I’m encouraging you to take a few minutes to check it out, and  after you read it, I’ll ask you to put up a story of your own.

There’s never been a more pivotal time to move our communities forward by showing how much education matters. Please help us in spreading that message.

Running a campaign can be (to some degree) self-taught

Learning how to execute a campaign is a skill that certainly be taught. In classrooms, you learn the basics. At conferences you learn the strategies. And by working on real campaigns, you learn what actually works in the real world.  And so in many cases, it’s easier to get started if you’re taught. But might there be a benefit to learning more informally?

In business school we think about campaigns all the time. How to create a marketing campaign for products. How to start spreading the word for a big conference. And how to build buzz for clubs and organizations on campus.

In law school the same things happen. Students think long and hard about how to get momentum. How to start the process to change the things you care about. And how to organize and structure thoughts to make a good argument – to have a case.

But maybe that stuff is not good enough for a world class campaign?  Because to do that, you need the ability to connect the dots from start to finish. To change course of events, not just for your campaign but also considering other campaigns around you. And to understand the emotions of the people, not just the mechanics behind the process.

Perhaps the ability to do that can only come from learning from the ground up. From creating yourself.

Not from a teacher. Not from books. And not from a place without the same level of emotion.

Nominated for Clear Admit Top MBA Blog

ClearAdmit’s has become the standard in the MBA blogging world. Not only do they have one of the biggest hub of blogs aggregated but they are also useful for spotlighting where to find more information about business school. Well, just a few days ago, I found that I was nominated again for the Best of Blogging awards for 2011-2012.

For those embarking on the MBA application process or career process in general, I’d love it if you kept visiting and asking questions.  Unlike most bloggers before me, I have no plans to slow down here on JeremyCWilson.com. Instead, I plan to pick up the pace over the next few weeks and months.

Stay tuned for more great posts to come.

Good luck to everyone on the ballot.

And CLICK HERE to vote for me.

The Education Matters Project Joins Rosario Dawson and Voto Latino at Power Summit

Just a few hours from now, more than more than 300 participants will come together in downtown Los Angeles California in an event that most will consider an amazing opportunity. A chance where many of the attendees will not only leave the weekend with new friends and new ideas, but many will also leave with inspiration and hope to take action in their communities.

The Voto Latino conference that is taking place this weekend in Southern California. So I’m spending the weekend out in Los Angeles, CA along with the Education Matters Project to speak on a panel at Voto Latino’s Power Summit. As the 2012 election campaign season is under way, VotoLatino is launching their first annual conference to give participants the skills they need to organize.

Organized by Rosario Dawson and Maria Theresa Kumar VotoLatino’s goal is to empowers American Latinos to claim a better future by voting and bringing their voices into the political process.

This two-day event at the University of Southern California’s Davidson Conference Center will educate, engage and empower young Latinos from across the country to create positive change in their communities. Leaders will receive training from public officials, artists, grassroots organizers, and business leaders in new media, public speaking, activism and community organizing. Participants will also be the first to preview our new technology that will revolutionize the voter registration process.

With the election campaign in full force, there’s never been a better time to bring everyone together to discuss voting, having a voice and the education matters campaign.

Few More Days

Bringing forward a new idea or technology is not easy. Especially one that you are passionate about. And one where so many of the details make a difference.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on just that. We’ve gone out personally and asked a large number of people why they care about education? And today, we are organizing their responses to you exactly what they said.

Today, we have videos and written stories from people all over the country. And people from all different backgrounds. And now we’re just days away from having a live website, where you cannot only view and read stories but also share your story with the world.

There’s never been a better time to stand up and tell the world why education matters to you?

Stay tuned for our new site where you can do just that.

Data on the Size of the Achievement Gap in the US. EVERYONE should see this

America has long been seen as the land of opportunity. The place where you can achieve anything. The country where your starting point does not have to dictate your end point. The environment, where if you work, you can reach for the stars.  In many ways, this is true. In fact, I’ve seen it happen many times over. On the other hand, the numbers also tell another story.

Just a few days ago I came across a great presentation by the Education Trust, where they summarized the lessons learn in schools districts studied in New York. Here are some of the lessons:

Over past 30 years, earnings among the lowest income families have declined—while biggest increases have occurred at the top

U.S. has the fourth-highest income inequality among OECD nations

 Median Wealth of White Families is (A) 20 X that of African Americans (B)   18 X that of Latinos

High school math achievement flat over time

High School gaps between groups are mostly wider today than in late eighties, early nineties

No matter how you cut the data, our students aren’t doing well compared to their peers in other countries

Only place we rank high? –> Inequality

Students in Poor Schools Receive ‘A’s for Work That Would Earn ‘Cs’ in Affluent Schools

African American, Latino & Native American high school graduates are less likely to have been enrolled in a full college prep track

More Classes in High-Poverty, High-Minority Schools Taught By Out-of-Field Teachers

CLICK HERE to read the document in its entirety

And special thanks to Rohit Agarwal for finding this great resource and sending it along to us.

Writing it down

Have you ever had an idea that you knew was good, but forgot about it later in the day. What about an email you wanted to send or call you wanted to make, to make progress on an idea you were working on. It’s happened to me and I’m willing to bet it’s happened to you too. But one way you can avoid missing big ideas is by simply writing them down.

This post comes to me ironically because it happened to me yesterday. I had a great idea for a blog post. I came up with it on my way to the gym. Thought about the concept during my workout and was ready to write something great when I got back. But just when I got home an hour later, I realized that I couldn’t remember it anymore. And it’s been bugging me all day today.

Every time this happens, it reinforces the idea that writing down your idea can be powerful. Even if it’s just a rough note to help you remember. Today, we’re busier than we’ve ever been before. We’re also inundated with more content, more people and more noise than any time in history. In some cases writing down an idea or a reminder will be the only way you will remember.

And while right now you might feel like going out of your way to do this isn’t worth the effort, the one time you have a great idea that you forget just hours later, I guarantee you won’t feel the same.

Easter Sunday

I’m not surprised that Easter Sunday comes in early April. It’s the beginning of spring time, the flowers are starting to bloom and the sun is finally starting to come out again after being cold for months. As a result, it always feels like a time of recharging for the rest of the year, which is exactly what the Easter season symbolizes.

Today, many people around the world wil recognize Easter in some form. Some will head to church service or mass. Others will celebrate Passover with their families. And others will just go out for a walk, some around Evanston and others to the city to enjoy the Sunday morning. Many with the mission of celebrating this rebirth and renewal.

Personally, I’m taking an early morning walk today, to get outside and see Evanston. Then I’ll stop by the store and head to the gym. And then I’ll stop by two brunches to enjoy the morning with friends and family.

First, I’ll head over to a brunch sermon with the Kellogg BMA family who will celebrate the holiday at Dean Rogers place. The gathering will start around 11am and should go for about two hours. One of our very own Kellogg MBA members will deliver a brief message to the group.

After that, I will join the Kellogg Christian Fellowship (KCF) at a brunch event today.  KCF is teaming up with Catholics@Kellogg for brunch at the Celtic Knot. We will have the entire section for our gathering to enjoy fellowship with other likeminded people.

For many people at these events, and around the rest of the city, it should be a good time of rebirth, recharging and renewal, not just in the physical sense but also the spiritual sense.

To those who are going to church today, including my parents, Happy Easter. To those who will head over to mass, hopefully you enjoy that too. And to those who have been celebrating Passover this weekend, including both of my roommates, “Chag Sameach”.  To everyone else, I hope you feel renewed on this spring day.

Neither failure nor success

You can fail. You can succeed. And you can do neither. Those are usually the three options. Many people do one of the three and most do some combination of the three.

It’s funny how it works. You can fail over and over again. No matter how hard you try.  But one day, it all changes. You succeed and things change. And sometimes all you need is just one HUGE success to build a really big career.

Like going 0 for 5 in law school applications but finally getting a BIG acceptance to your top school. Or like striking out with all your investors but then, one of them finally decides to invest after all.

If this is true, then the “neither” is the worst category. Because if you spend your time doing “neither”, then you won’t have a chance for success.  You’ll never have a shot at that HUGE success that you get if you can just survive the failing.

The interesting thing is that we all know this. But we still avoid failure at all costs.

Job Opportunity: Building Excellent Schools Seeks Chief of School Network

As you know, I often use my site to spread news about great organizations. Organizations that not only do well but that also do good. Ones that are doing what they can to make a dent in the world. And ones that value some of the same things I do.

A good friend of mine s recently passed the word about a job opportunity from a friend of mine and thought some of you might be interested. While I don’t typically use my site to post job opportunities or promotional reasons, I do like to use it to help non-profits, especially ones that I have some connection to. In this case, that organization is Building Excellent Schools.

See below for a description. See below that for more on the job role.  And drop me a line if you are interested in connecting with the school.

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Building Excellent Schools (BES) is a trailblazing nonprofit that raises the quality of urban charter schools by supporting entrepreneurial individuals to design, found, lead, and sustain schools in underserved communities.

Black Hole Of Emails

In business school, we live by our email accounts. We get emails all day, every day. Sometimes from professors and faculty. Other times from clubs and group members. And sometimes from friends and classmates on campus organizing social events. As a result, sometimes it can be really hard to get to all of you emails. And forget it if you’re in a joint program with two email accounts.

I have never ever been so behind on email as I was right before spring break. I can’t tell you the ratio but I’m sure I missed a big % of the emails I was getting. And another 20%, I quickly scanned, read and couldn’t fully respond to or comprehend.

Being in the joint JD/MBA program makes things a bit harder, with two sets of classes, two listserves and two friends from both schools. Likewise, having a blog, helping people with admissions questions and now starting a new website and company complicates things even worse.

To all my blog readers out there, I think I caught up with most of you but if it turns out i missed your email, please send me one again. I’d love to hear from you, especially all you long time readers.

And if you’re interested in participating in our new education campaign, the Education Matters Project, I’d love to hear from all of you as well.

I spend quite a bit of time managing my Inboxes. I could only imagine the life of a Fortune 500 CEO or politician who solicits feedback from their customers and constituents.

On the other hand, maybe once you start missing some emails, it all feels the same. Whether politician or blogger.

Someone has said, “Once you’re in water over your head, it doesn’t matter how deep it is.”

School is Expensive

Just today, we attended a financial aid information session at the law school. Every year financial office can give their obligatory talk about how student loans. During the session, we all pulled out our loan papers and saw how much debt we had to pay back. The average amount … well let’s just say it was a lot of money. Enough to scare just about everyone into being happy they decided to take big law jobs upon graduation.

The interesting part of the whole scenario is that we feel this way, even though most of us have REALLY great jobs to walk into in the fall.  MBAs that go into banking and consulting firms Law students into high paying law firm roles.  Jobs that not only pay six figures but also provide lifestyles that the average person never even dreams of. But in spite of that, we’re still all a bit nervous about the big $100K+ number at the bottom of our loan forms.

But imagine the student that attends an expensive grad school program but doesn’t have the options we have. Imagine the student that comes out with $100K in loans but only makes $40K per year. Or the student that also comes into grad school with $100K in loans form undergrad Or worse yet, the student with six figure loans who can’t find a job.

The school systems makes it very difficult for some students to get started after graduation. For most of us, it is nearly impossible to pursue our real interests – the ones we talked about in our applications.  And for almost everyone, it also makes it really scary.

Education Matters and we have to do something about this.

** See below for a short blurb about school being expensive from Seth Godin’s recent manifesto: Stop Stealing Dreams

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It’s also not very good at doing what we need it to do. We’re not going to be able to make it much cheaper, so let’s figure out how to make it a lot better.

Not better at what it already does. Better at educating people to do what needs to be done.

Do you need a competent call-center employee? School is good at creating them, but it’s awfully expensive. Do we really need more compliant phone operators, and at such a high cost?

Given the time and money being invested, what I want to know, what every parent and every taxpayer and every student should want to know, is: Is this the right plan? Is this the best way to produce the culture and economy we say we want?

What is school for?

If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.

Here’s a hint: learning is not done to you. Learning is something you choose to do.