What if We Stop Relying on the Government For Education? Some Ideas of How We’d Do That

Google offers schooling for the children of certain employees. I think its genius for a bunch of reasons:

(1) They have the pockets to ensure hiring some of the best teachers in the world.

(2) Those teachers would get many of the same amenities Google employees get, which is probably better than they’d get working at a public school

(3) As a teacher you’re almost guaranteed to get students who are intelligent, have supportive parents and who are predisposed to succeed

(4) It’s got to be an amazing recruiting tool for Google.

So let’s imagine more and more companies start doing this. What if Yahoo! starts offering schooling to the children of its senior executives? And what if it recruited former professors from Harvard to teach high school math? Would they be able to find an inexpensive way to recruit top talent away from companies that don’t offer schooling the children of executives?

And what if Goldman Sachs started doing the same thing? And they convinced Hank Paulson to teach a couple of courses on economics to a bunch of seniors in the Goldman Sachs sponsored high school? If I was torn between what company to work at, I’d pick Goldman Sachs for the sake of the education my kid would get! Especially if it was free.

But then let’s imagine if it became table stakes for these massive companies to offer education to the children of its employees as part of its compensation package? And soon, the kids of those employees were taken off the public school system, and private companies were able to further increase the gap in education quality between those “who have” and those who “don’t have.”

What if working at Goldman Sachs wasn’t just about getting paid well, and having meaningful work, but about getting your kids into a Goldman Sachs sponsored high school?

Imagine what that would do to employee retention if my kid would need to leave his or her school if I switched jobs?