Education in the Digital Age

Medium Changes Everything

We can use this platform to transform education and human society

By Jesse Rogers

I’ve been a full-time educator at an accredited state college in the United States for the past 14 years. I’m proud of that career. When so much is broken, overpriced, and corrupted in America, I feel blessed to work in a part of the system where it still feels like I’m doing a lot of good.

We’re open access and extremely diverse. We’re low cost and high value. Students leave with marketable vocational or academic skills. It really is a ladder to a better quality of life. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.

I’m not saying there aren’t any problems at the state college or community college level. I’ve written about them extensively. But I can’t tell you how many times a student has come back to the tutoring center after graduating to give us good news — they landed a high paying engineering job! Or an accounting job! They finished their master’s degree! They wrote a book!

Sometimes these students are immigrants who could barely speak English when they found us. Sometimes they are people who had been broken and alone and had to reinvent themselves. Sometimes they find more than an education — they find a home with us.

One of my favorite success stories comes from a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran that I’ve stayed good friends with. He has had serious drug problems, has attempted suicide, has been thrown in a mental institution, and had essentially been thrown away and written off by society. Today, our former student has gone much further than his doubters could have imagined. He’s flourishing. But it’s not just about him. He just finished a master’s degree in social work and is busy leading others towards healthy lives by drawing on his own experience of escaping hell.

I’ve consistently seen how radically a college education can transform students over a 4-year (or sometimes longer) enrollment, and at a cost of only a few thousand dollars of tuition.

I still think state college is well worth it. Depending on what field you want to go into it may be a necessity. But it is still too pricey for most people throughout the world. That’s why I believe Medium changes everything.

I consider Medium to be a disruptive platform that has the potential to do many of the same things a university education can do — perhaps even better.

I realize Medium is never going to replace college completely. There’s something unique about face-to-face learning, particularly for the demographic I’m used to serving.

But now that I’ve been on it writing for a few months, I really think “disruptive” is the right word, especially when Medium is used in conjunction with other free services like YouTube and Coursera.

Medium in particular levels the playing field not just across America or Europe, but the entire globe because it is easy to generate “small” amounts of income with it. But when it comes to payout, a dollar isn’t a dollar everywhere. For Medium to pay a beginner hobbyist like me $30 this month is gratifying, and I appreciate it. But there are places in the world where $30/month is a life-changing sum of money.

In the Central African Republic or in Burundi, for example, a single Medium article earning $1200 is more lucrative than what an average worker earns in a year.

The future of education is Medium: get paid as you learn

An English-speaking Sierra Leonean with internet access earning $1000 a year now has precisely the same access to the life-transforming heroes that I have. I might make 50 times as much as a middle-class professional worker in America, but our access to information is the same.

What Changed?

That tech isn’t new. That’s been the promise of the internet since its inception.

But the ability for just anybody to make a year’s salary on a single article is new.

Usually, you’d need contacts and a reputation to get published and earn that kind of money. The barrier to entry for professional writing is very high, especially if you have to work full-time to take care of a family or don’t live in a country with a strong publishing infrastructure.

By contrast, Medium lowers the bar to roughly the same level as Facebook. As long as you can type some words and press “publish” then you can participate and earn.

Medium puts more steps on the ladder, allowing more people in more circumstances to climb.

Instead of only a few thousand people in the world having reputations and networks that can give them access to high paying writing gigs, Medium’s payout structure gives accessibility to potentially billions of people.

Parents throughout human history have often sacrificed their children’s educations and sent them to the fields or factories so that the family can squeeze out a few extra coins and avoid starvation.

By removing barriers for novice writers, Medium turns the option of either education or work into a false choice.

Poor parents can send their children to facilities where they write Medium articles. As their skill grows this would in short order become far more lucrative to the family than sending them into the fields or factories. Once the family earns enough to own a laptop and electricity, they could do it themselves from home. Knowledge work can potentially be more lucrative than manual labor anywhere in the world.

Showing a quick return on education will induce investment in more of it. A lot more. That’s just how feedback loops work (positive or negative).

The money is there. It just has to be deployed in a way that will allow learners to also be earners.

Right now there is so much brainpower being squandered in the developing world because children in poor countries aren’t being taught to read. Even a small amount of income rewrites the equation by turning education into a moneymaker for the student/family rather than an expense.

The $5 per month fee for a Medium membership is clearly too much for those in destitute poverty. I’m not the best writer but neither am I terrible. Yet still, it took me 4 months and a few dozen articles to earn enough that the membership paid for itself. Obviously, it won’t happen overnight for most people.

But a subscription isn’t required to earn on the platform. The payout program will reward anyone who writes, not just paying members.

Moreover, coupled with microloans, scholarships, international aid programs, and non-profit organizations, the money for subscriptions, laptops, and electricity is there. It just has to be deployed in a way that will allow learners to also be earners.

I know some first-world readers are at this point thinking to yourselves “wait a minute, it’s hard enough for me to make my few pennies on Medium without millions of newly skilled African writers competing with me for views.”

As is often the case, the truth is the complete opposite of what we might fear. We’ll have millions of new viewers who don’t yet know how to do things that we can. Reading our articles will be a vital part of their education, so those of us who already possess writing skills will have much broader audiences to share our work with. The number of people subscribing to Medium in developing nations will hardly be zero, even if the subscriber percentage might often be lower than it might be in wealthier countries.

Seen in that light, there’s more than enough for everyone.

In fact, because of how network effects function, every additional person added creates more value to the system as a whole. Think of Facebook. The value to every other user increases when there’s an increase in the size of the usership. This runs counter to our evolved instincts about scarcity, but network effects are one of the most powerful multipliers of economic value.

The skill of writing and the value of owning content is only going to increase over time, even as the quantity of information balloons. Medium is a key pathway to making sure people in the developing world are not shut out from that.

I’ve spent my career as a learning specialist — training tutors, giving seminars, teaching classes, creating videos, and helping students overcome the fear of math. Ultimately, my job has been transforming lives. This is what I do. But despite having been in this space for my entire adult life, I am stunned and humbled by the potential opened up by Medium.

With this tool, we truly can change the world.

Please feel free to connect with me at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy the following.