Seven Ways to Get a ‘Cash Mob’ to Shop at Your Small Business
Posted by Carol Tice | February 6, 2012
URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/222738

Customers participating in a cash mob at a salon in Painesville, Ohio
You’ve probably heard of flash mobs — groups of people who use social media to plan to appear in person at a chosen location at a particular time to sing a song, hold mock lightsaber battles or take some other random action. Fun, but frivolous.

Another iteration of this meet up is of much more interest to entrepreneurs. It is the cash mob — a group of shoppers who agree to patronize a local business at a particular time and spend at least $20 apiece to support their hometown merchants.

Cash mobbers are usually advocates of the buy-local movement who don’t like how big chains have emptied some downtowns. So they’re voting with their dollars, mostly for small businesses.

Although these communal shopping events are oftentimes organized by individuals, cash mobs have been convened by companies looking to give back to their community. An example is candle company Scentsy, which celebrated its fifth anniversary by giving $100 to each of its 1,000 headquarters-based employees to spend in local shops in their home town of Meridian, Ohio.

Here are seven ways to get a cash mob to visit your shop:

Sponsor events. Businesses with high visibility in their town — the type that sponsor baseball teams or the 4th of July parade — tend to be the ones selected as the focus of a cash mob.

Attend events. The owners who invite cash mobs attend chamber of commerce events; they chat on the town’s listserv and they turn up at the firehouse pancake day to help out.

Tell your story. If your business is struggling, get the word out. Sometimes cash mobs focus on helping businesses that have fallen on hard times. For instance, after a number of merchants in my town appeared in a newspaper story about how they’ve struggled through a burdensome Main Street repaving project, shoppers organized a ‘give-back’ night to support the afflicted stores.

Communicate your values. If your small business supports the buy-local movement, let those shoppers know you’re with them. Post signs in your store and on your website.

Organize your own cash mob. If you’re active in community groups that promote shopping local, nominate another area business as the beneficiary of a cash mob. That could help make cash mobs a regular happening in your town, which could eventually draw one to your store, too.

Make an offer. Let the head of buy-local groups know that if their members participated in cash mob at your store, everyone can get a freebie such as $25 worth of merchandise for $20 or free appetizers during the meet up.

Partner with other local businesses. Get together with other local merchants and offer a group deal if a cash mob will schedule a trip to your neighborhood.
What tips would you add for attracting a cash mob? Leave a comment and let us know.

Read Chapter 3 of our textbook at: http://www.liebowitzentrepreneurprogram.org/textbook.html and write a paper no longer then two pages typed on what kind of a business you would like to start after your graduate from college and why? Each student will be asked to discuss his or her potential business venture in class (up to five minutes) one time during the semester, today we heard from Jeremiah, Pearl, Elan and KerryAnn.

Next week we will also be hearing from the following students on their future businesses: Ekaterina, Akiva, Mariami and Hugo. Please limit your speaking to five minutes. We will then open the class to questions and help you fine tune your thoughts in regards to the business.

Please practice your public speaking skills with your friends and family so you will be prepared to talk to the class. You can use Power Point or the Internet for your presentations as well.

Next weeks guest will be: Alan Hoffman, CPA who was a Brooklyn College graduate. He will be talking about his 30 plus years as a CPA and the opportunities in that area.

Students grades will be determined in the following manner:
Homework 25%, Class participation 15%, Public speaking 10% Selling/Buying days 25% and Final Exam 25%.

Please do not hesitate to e-mail me if you have any further questions or comments.

http://www.stevejobssecretsoflife.org/home

February 1, 2012
From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches
By NICK BILTON and EVELYN M. RUSLI
SAN FRANCISCO — The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year.

The social network company announced its $5 billion public offering Wednesday afternoon, which is expected to value the whole company at $75 billion to $100 billion. Ultimately, that offering will mint a lot of billionaires and millionaires.

Some of them are well known, like Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder, but many others are not household names. Mr. Zuckerberg, 27, has 533.8 million shares, worth $28.4 billion based on a company valuation of $100 billion, or $53 a share. He also has undisputed control of the company, a remarkable achievement since the company has received financing from some of the world’s top business minds. He owns 28.4 percent of the company outright and he controls 57 percent of the voting rights.

Facebook’s first outside investor, Peter Thiel, the billionaire contrarian, led a $500,000 investment in Facebook in late 2004. He has 44.7 million shares that could be worth more than $2 billion. Elevation Partners, the venture capital firm of Bono, the U2 frontman, paid $120 million for a chunk of Facebook’s shares in 2010 and could receive a payout that would help mask less sage investments in Palm and Forbes.

Accel Partners, whose principal partner, Jim Breyer, invested in the start-up seven years ago, holds 201.4 million shares. Accel could have a thousandfold return on some of its investment.

Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, holds 1.9 million shares, about 0.1 percent of the company. But she may ultimately collect 38.1 million additional shares, according to the filing, making her one of the richest in a tiny club of Silicon Valley women who are billionaires.

The wealth created by a technology company’s entrance into the public markets has long been startling. Netscape’s 1995 offering made millionaires of scores of people, including its founder Marc Andreessen, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who invested early in Facebook and holds 3.6 million shares worth nearly $200 million. When Google went to market with its $1.67 billion I.P.O. in 2004, hundreds of people joined the millionaire ranks, including secretaries, a company masseuse and a company chef.

Bill Gates controlled only 49.2 percent of Microsoft as it went public in 1986. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each owned about 15 percent of their company when it went public in 2004.

Two factors distinguish Facebook’s turn. For one, the projected value of Facebook is enormous — the largest on record for an Internet company, even several times greater than Google’s offering in 2004. The social network, founded in Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard eight years ago, is expected to be valued north of $75 billion. Shares of Facebook have already traded on the secondary market, where private shares are bought and sold, above $80 billion.

And unlike Google’s public offering, a large chunk of the wealth tied to Facebook has already been realized, thanks to the thriving secondary market and an eager pool of global investors. Even if Facebook hits only the low end of expectations for its offering, it will still yield some of the greatest returns in the history of venture capital.

“Facebook will return insane amounts of money to the early stakeholders,” said Alex Gould, a technology investor and instructor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, who has been studying venture returns for several years. “Facebook is not just a fund-maker, it’s a firm-maker.”

It’s a big winners circle. DST Global, the investment firm led by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, owns roughly a 7 percent stake in the company. It bought the bulk of its shares from 2009 to 2011 at valuations of $10 billion to $50 billion.

According to the company’s filing, Mr. Zuckerberg’s father, a New York dentist, was awarded two million shares of stock “in satisfaction of funds provided for our initial working capital.” Dustin Moskovitz, Mr. Zuckerberg’s college roommate, a fellow Harvard dropout and company co-founder, holds 133.8 million shares.

During Facebook’s early years, the company granted valuable options to about 250 employees, according to two former senior Facebook officials with knowledge of the matter. This club includes some of the largest stock packages, these people said.

In 2007, the company stopped issuing options and switched to restricted stock units. Still, a large number of employees hired after 2007 have millions in shares today. David A. Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, who was hired in 2009, has more than seven million in unvested shares.

The list of notable shareholders also includes some people who may be considered unwelcome at Facebook. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Olympic-rowing pair, Harvard graduates and former business partners of Mr. Zuckerberg, own about 1.2 million shares as part of their settlement with the company and their former classmate, who they claim essentially stole their idea for Facebook.

The company’s estranged co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, who provided some of the initial financing and later sued the company for cutting his stake, managed to cut an even larger settlement, worth 5 percent of the company. He has since sold a large block of his shares on the secondary market. He is not mentioned in the Facebook filing.

The payout to Mr. Choe, the graffiti artist, could provide more money from his paintings than Sotheby’s attracted for its record-breaking $200.7 million auction in 2008 for work by Damien Hirst.

In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars,” according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or stock then worth about the same.

Mr. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” nevertheless chose the stock.

Many “advisers” to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.

Although Mr. Choe initially led a rough life including run-ins with the law, he is wealthy even without the Facebook offering. (It is unclear whether he sold any portion of his Facebook holdings on secondary markets.) Now a very successful artist with gallery shows and pieces exhibited in major museums, Mr. Choe declined requests to be interviewed for this article; he said he wanted to maintain his privacy. He has, however, published an obscenity-strewn book of his art, “David Choe,” which includes images of the multimillion-dollar murals at Facebook.

Mr. Choe’s page on Facebook shows the life of a modern-day renegade artist. Among the images of his graffiti, there is a trail of images of him partying with scantily clad women and spending large amounts of money on alcohol. In recent weeks, Mr. Choe promoted photos of a $40,000 bottle of alcohol; a single shot, he boasted, costs $888.

He offers life advice in his book: “Always double down on 11. Always.”

Maybe the better advice is to take stock, not cash, from Harvard dropouts in Silicon Valley.

By MELISSA KORN

Less planning, more legwork. That’s the formula some business schools are using to overhaul the competitions they conduct each year to test their students’ mettle as entrepreneurs.

The contests, which have been an academic rite of passage for decades, typically involve teams of students submitting written business plans, then following up with a short presentation to a panel of judges. The winner might receive a cash prize of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars and even the chance to mingle with potential investors.

But most of the business plans emerging from these competitions never become full-fledged businesses. Critics say that’s because the competitions don’t encourage budding entrepreneurs, they just reward a well-written plan.

Enlarge Image

Rafael Ricoy
“You can write a beautiful 50-page business plan without ever talking to a potential customer,” says Janet Strimaitis, managing director of Babson College’s Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship. So, the Wellesley, Mass., school is launching a new competition this spring that emphasizes action over ideas.

Among the requirements: teams must introduce their ideas with a PowerPoint presentation and show the concrete steps they have taken to develop their proposed business.

Those steps might include identifying a market opportunity or interviewing potential customers to demonstrate their proposal’s viability. At no point would competitors submit a written business plan.

The school also will dole out prize money differently, with the top graduate and undergraduate each winning $20,000 and the runners-up receiving a relatively paltry $2,500.

Ms. Strimaitis says the top-heavy reward system is based on Babson’s research, which shows that the winners of its business-plan competitions are more likely to become entrepreneurs after they graduate than are other finalists.

Over the past 10 years, about 65% of the school’s first-prize winners launched their companies, though it isn’t clear how many of them became profitable ventures.

Since 2006, when the school started tracking runners-up, just 32% of undergraduates and 50% of graduate students who came in second or third place launched their ventures.

To be sure, those figures don’t reflect the many M.B.A. students who try their hands as entrepreneurs later in life, often after working in more traditional corporate roles that provide valuable experience, as well as salaries they might need to help pay off student loans.

The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is developing a new contest to judge how well students manage the unpredictable demands of starting a fledgling business.

The contestants all would receive a description of the same hypothetical business, including the product idea, target market and a problem it is trying to solve.

Each team would have to figure out whether the business would be viable by talking to potential competitors, customers and suppliers. If they determined that the business plan wouldn’t pan out, they would have to propose an alternative.

Darden says the contest would reward students for understanding and applying the steps necessary for starting a business, rather than rewarding students for coming up with the best—even if unproven—idea.

The school hopes the experience would put team members in a better position to launch their own ventures down the line.

“Business plans are useful in a world where analysis gives you control over the future,” but in a start-up, even the best-laid business plans often fall short and need to be modified, says Philippe Sommer, director of Darden’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership.

Not everyone is worried about the low real-world success rate among winners of traditional business-plan competitions.

Companies have continued to sponsor those contests in hopes of gaining name recognition, new partners or even a stake in an up-and-coming venture.

Houston-based venture-capital firm DFJ Mercury, for example, offers a $100,000 seed investment as a prize in Rice University’s Business Plan Competition, in part to connect with promising businesses before other investors pounce.

“It helps build out our Rolodex,” says managing director Blair Garrou. So far, the firm has given its $100,000 seed investment to two companies, both of which have since raised millions of dollars from venture backers.

But Mercury asks for more information than the competition requires, conducting weeks of additional due diligence on the teams and their proposed technologies before forking over any funds.

Taking the time to investigate companies that don’t make the final cut still is a valuable exercise, Mr. Garrou says, as it allows the firm to expand its network and keep an eye on promising team members or business ideas.

Overall, 37% of the 354 teams that have competed in Rice’s event over the past decade are still in business, the school estimates.

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

Did U.S. entrepreneurship grow last year?

A report released last month suggests there’s been a major resurgence in the number of start-ups operating nationwide. But some skeptics say that the study fails to take into account the potentially significant numbers of small businesses that shuttered last year.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 12.3% of the U.S. population was actively engaged in starting or running a new business in 2011, a staggering 60% increase from 2010.

The annual report defines new businesses as ventures less than three-and-a-half years old.

An increase in start-up activity is a good sign for the overall national economy because it will lead to more employment opportunities in the near future, says Donna Kelley, the report’s lead author and an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. “It’s indicating that we’re seeing a recovery,” she says.

The report, based on a combination of survey results and population data, shows that more than half of U.S. early-stage entrepreneurs—59%—expect to create up to four jobs within the next five years. Another 27% plan to create between five and 19 jobs and 14% plan to create 20 or more jobs during that period.

Some critics argue, however, that the GEM report doesn’t paint a complete picture of the nation’s entrepreneurial landscape. Though it does note that 4.4% of U.S. survey respondents closed businesses within the past year, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tell another story.

The government agency reports that the total number of self-employed Americans with incorporated and nonincorporated businesses declined 2% last year. As a result, the number of small businesses shuttered also must have risen last year, says Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies and economics at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management.

Using a bathtub as an analogy, he says: “If the level of water is going down, the amount flowing out has to be greater than the amount flowing in.”

To be sure, just because a business closes doesn’t necessarily mean it failed and that another person is collecting unemployment. The former owner could’ve decided to retire or even go work for someone else. “But every business closure eliminates the jobs of the people who worked there,” says Mr. Shane.

John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland, says he’s skeptical of the GEM report given that it claims such a dramatic boost in start-up activity. “Last year would’ve been a much more robust year in employment growth and we didn’t see that,” he says. “It was a pretty anemic year.”

But Ms. Kelley offers a possible explanation for the surge in U.S. entrepreneurship identified by the study. She says start-up rates declined in 2010 and 2009, so last year entrepreneurs were essentially making up for lost ground. “It’s very likely people were delaying starting businesses during the recession due to the fact that conditions weren’t favorable for entrepreneurs,” she says. “People that did start businesses during the recession were more likely to start out of necessity because they had no other sources of income.”

Another factor: many newly launched businesses won’t survive for very long. On average, 20% of start-ups fail within their first year, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which also conducts an annual study on entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. Its newest report, due out next month, is expected to show that start-up volume in the U.S. increased by just a few percentage points in 2011, just as it did in 2010, 2009 and 2008, says E.J. Reedy, a research fellow for Kauffman, a nonprofit in Kansas City, Mo.

Still, he notes that last year’s report indicated that U.S. entrepreneurship in 2010 reached its highest level in more than a decade. He reasons that this happened because many people saw new businesses opportunities resulting from the recession. For example, he says reduced commercial property rates may have prompted the launch of new retail shops and restaurants. Many people also likely started businesses in 2010 because they got laid off or their work hours or pay got scaled back. However, the latter types of businesses typically lack full-time employees, he adds.

Kauffman bases its entrepreneurial activity index on a monthly population survey jointly sponsored by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. It focuses on the rate of business creation at the individual owner level.

The GEM is a nonprofit consortium that was initiated in 1999 as a partnership between Babson College and London Business School. Today it consists of more than 85 research teams from around the globe. The 2011 GEM report is based on a survey of 140,000 adults in 54 economies, including 6,000 just in the U.S. Researchers looked at responses from a random sampling of participants, as well as population data for each of the countries represented, to draw conclusions about entrepreneurial activity in those nations. The 2010 GEM report was based on a survey of 175,000 adults in 59 economies, including 4,000 in the U.S.

This is a great mini documentary starring Benny Bianco the beats master behind some of todays biggest acts: http://vimeo.com/20104704

For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews
By DAVID STREITFELD
In the brutal world of online commerce, where a competing product is just a click away, retailers need all the juice they can get to close a sale.

Some exalt themselves by anonymously posting their own laudatory reviews. Now there is an even simpler approach: offering a refund to customers in exchange for a write-up.

By the time VIP Deals ended its rebate on Amazon.com late last month, its leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars.

As the collective wisdom of the crowd displaces traditional advertising, the roaring engines of e-commerce are being stoked by favorable reviews. The VIP deal reflects the importance merchants place on these evaluations — and the lengths to which they go to game the system.

Fake reviews are drawing the attention of regulators. They have cracked down on a few firms for deceitful hyping and suspect these are far from isolated instances. “Advertising disguised as editorial is an old problem, but it’s now presenting itself in different ways,” said Mary K. Engle, the Federal Trade Commission’s associate director for advertising practices. “We’re very concerned.”

Researchers like Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are also taking notice, trying to devise mathematical models to systematically unmask the bogus endorsements. “More people are depending on reviews for what to buy and where to go, so the incentives for faking are getting bigger,” said Mr. Liu. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

By last week, 310 out of 335 reviews of VIP Deals’ Vipertek brand premium slim black leather case folio cover were five stars and nearly all the rest were four stars. The acclaim seemed authentic, barring the occasional indiscretion. “I would have done 4 stars instead of 5 without the deal,” one man bluntly wrote.

VIP Deals, which specializes in leather tablet cases and stun guns, denied it was quietly offering the deals. “You are totally off base,” a representative named Monica wrote in an e-mail.

But three customers said in interviews that the offer was straightforward. Searching for a protective case for their new Kindle Fire, they came upon the VIP page selling a cover for under $10 plus shipping (the official list price was $59.99). When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation “to write a product review for the Amazon community.”

“In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free,” it said.

Anne Marie Logan, a Georgia pharmacist, was suspicious. “I was like, ‘Is this for real?’ ” she said. “But they credited my account. You think it’s unethical?”

While the letter did not specifically demand a five-star review, it broadly hinted. “We strive to earn 100 percent perfect ‘FIVE-STAR’ scores from you!” it said.

The merchant, which seems to have no Web site and uses a mailbox drop in suburban Los Angeles as a return address, did not respond to further requests for comment. As of last week, the company (as opposed to its products) had received 4,945 reviews on Amazon for a nearly perfect 4.9 rating out of five.

Amazon is expected to sell 20 million Kindle Fire tablets this year, making the market for cases potentially enormous. But it is also bitterly competitive, with dozens of models in Amazon’s Kindle showroom. With a modest investment, VIP pushed its product far above the competition, none of which had so much enthusiasm with so little dissent. Customers like Ms. Logan, who got something they had genuinely wanted for only a small shipping charge, were of course thrilled. And Amazon racked up more revenue.

Even a few grouches could not spoil the party. “This is an egregious violation of the ratings and review system used by Amazon,” a customer named Robert S. Pollock wrote in a review he titled “scam.”

He was promptly chastised by another customer. This fellow, himself a seller on Amazon, argued that he had both given and gotten free items in exchange for reviews. “It is not a scam but an incentive,” he wrote.

Under F.T.C. rules, when there is a connection between a merchant and someone promoting its product that affects the endorsement’s credibility, it must be fully disclosed. In one case, Legacy Learning Systems, which sells music instructional tapes, paid $250,000 last March to settle charges that it had hired affiliates to recommend the videos on Web sites.

Amazon, sent a copy of the VIP letter by The New York Times, said its guidelines prohibited compensation for customer reviews. A few days later, it deleted all the reviews for the case, which itself was listed as unavailable. Then it took down the product page itself.

Asked why Amazon did not seem to notice that at least a few consumers called into question the VIP deal on its own site, a spokeswoman declined to comment. Nor would she say exactly what happened to VIP’s other products, like the Vipertek VTS-880 mini stun gun, which also disappeared from the retailer.

The gun, like the Kindle case, received nearly all five-star reviews. “I bought one for my wife and decided to let her try it on me,” one man wrote in a typical display of the sort of effusiveness that VIP inspired. “We gave it a full charge and let me just say WOW! Boy do I regret that decision.”

What You (Really) Need to Know
By LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS
A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society’s cutting edge.

And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, stem cells or the rise of China. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs.

Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery. With few exceptions, just as in the middle of the 20th century, students take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department.

It may be that inertia is appropriate. Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation. Certainly anyone urging reform does well to remember that in higher education the United States remains an example to the world, and that American universities compete for foreign students more successfully than almost any other American industry competes for foreign customers.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate: Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different? Here are some guesses and hopes.

1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. This is a consequence of both the proliferation of knowledge — and how much of it any student can truly absorb — and changes in technology. Before the printing press, scholars had to memorize “The Canterbury Tales” to have continuing access to them. This seems a bit ludicrous to us today. But in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.

2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.

For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on individual effort. One leading investment bank has a hiring process in which a candidate must interview with upward of 60 senior members of the firm before receiving an offer. What is the most important attribute they’re looking for? Not GMAT scores or college transcripts, but the ability to work with others. As greater value is placed on collaboration, surely it should be practiced more in our nation’s classrooms.

3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to incorporate audio and visual effects. Think of a music text in which you can hear pieces of music as you read, or a history text in which you can see film clips about what you are reading. But there are more profound changes set in train. There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.

Similarly, it makes sense for students to watch video of the clearest calculus teacher or the most lucid analyst of the Revolutionary War rather than having thousands of separate efforts. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students — not to mention the cost savings — and material will be better presented. In a 2008 survey of first- and second-year medical students at Harvard, those who used accelerated video lectures reported being more focused and learning more material faster than when they attended lectures in person.

4. As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did. We are not rational calculating machines but collections of modules, each programmed to be adroit at a particular set of tasks. Not everyone learns most effectively in the same way. And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning. Students listen to lectures or they read and then are evaluated on the basis of their ability to demonstrate content mastery. They aren’t asked to actively use the knowledge they are acquiring.

“Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences. Still, with the capacity of modern information technology, there is much more that can be done to promote dynamic learning.

5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.

English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).

As the “Moneyball” story aptly displays in the world of baseball, the marshalling of data to test presumptions and locate paths to success is transforming almost every aspect of human life. It is not possible to make judgments about one’s own medical care without some understanding of probability, and certainly the financial crisis speaks to the consequences of the failure to appreciate “black swan events” and their significance. In an earlier era, when many people were involved in surveying land, it made sense to require that almost every student entering a top college know something of trigonometry. Today, a basic grounding in probability statistics and decision analysis makes far more sense.

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could. Think, for example, of the widespread use of the e-book, or the coming home to roost of debt problems around the industrialized world. Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.