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Tuition schmoo-ition.
I WOULD consider myself intelligent and .css-16acfp5{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.125rem;text-decoration-color:#d2232e;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-16acfp5:hover{color:#000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;background-color:yellow;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}successful, but when it comes to the economy, I have no clue.
What I usually do when I have a financial question is ask my family, all of whom have M.B.A.’s. But because they’ve been taking more and more time to respond to my emails asking them to explain NFTs (again), I knew I had to gain more intellectual independence.
I knew I should probably head back to school.
Luckily for me, online learning has boomed during the past two years. Covid pushed face-to-face university courses online, while shelter-in-place measures made people want to learn again.
In fact, U. S. searches for online learning, e-learning, and massive online open courses (or MOOCs; more on those later) increased up to fourfold between late March and early April 2020, according to a 2020 report. Part of that might have been lockdown boredom, but you can’t ignore availability, either. The pandemic also increased enrollment in online courses by 93 percent, according to 2020 data from NC-SARA, a nonprofit helping distance-education programs.
Despite all this, I still had my reservations about reenrolling. The last time I had to attend an actual class was the spring of 2004 as a broadcast-journalism major. Since then, Tom Brady has won five Super Bowl rings, eight new Supreme Court justices have been appointed, and Twitter has become a thing.
And then there was the whole ordeal of what kind of class to choose.
Every scholastic entity from the University of Phoenix to Harvard Business School offers online courses and degrees. Sites like MasterClass, Skillshare, Mindvalley, and LinkedIn Learning all offer multi-unit programs. And MOOCs hosted by organizations like Coursera offer free college-level classes—from English Com-position I to Game Theory—to students across the planet. After considering all this, I felt like I needed to take a class on how to take a class. So I contacted Becky Klein-Collins, author of Never Too Late: The Adult Student’s Guide to College.
“My advice to someone interested in returning to learning in some way is to be very clear about what the person’s goals are,” Klein-Collins says. If you’re a guy looking to climb the corporate ladder (or switch to a whole new ladder), Klein-Collins recommends asking your employer what kind of skills or credentials are needed for your goal.
“More and more, employers are open to alternative credentials—not just a bachelor’s degree—especially if they are credentials that have cachet in a particular industry,” she says.
But then there are guys like me, who just want to advance their understanding instead of their career. For those people, Klein-Collins recommends what she describes as “minimal-commitment, user-friendly online options [that cover] some basic material.”
I was never a fan of school, but I’m all about “minimal commitment,” so I followed Klein-Collins’s advice and enrolled in Paul Krugman Teaches Economics and Society on MasterClass.com. Krugman, for the unfamiliar, received the Nobel in economics in 2008 and is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. MasterClass costs $180 for an annual membership, which gives you access to its vast bank of classes. (Bill Nye on science and problem-solving! Cornel West on philosophy!)
My Krugman-led class included 22 lessons, each under about 15 minutes. Although I fully intended to start from the beginning and watch every single session, after the second day, I started to episode-hop, fast-forwarding to the good parts. (How great would this trick have been back in college?)
Krugman assigned me no homework, he didn’t demand I show up at a specific start time, and he didn’t give a single test. Relieved of pressure and restrictions, I found that I actually retained more. I was watching to develop instead of simply regurgitate.
And I was surprised that I was finally able to comprehend topics like taxes and the Great Recession of 2008. Maybe it was that MasterClass broke up complex topics into bite-sized nuggets. But I couldn’t help thinking there was something more important at work: Maybe it was that I didn’t have to learn.
Whether you’re watching an expert-led video series or enrolling in a subject-driven global online course, that enthusiasm is key. Research backs this up: A 2021 study found that students participated more, were more engaged, and felt better able to understand complex concepts when their teachers got them excited to learn.
There’s a snowball effect at work, too. The more you learn, the better you get at learning, according to the work of Ulrich Boser, the author of Learn Better. And a life of learning has benefits beyond just knowing stuff. It can lead to a resilient brain, a stronger social life, a bigger paycheck, and a potential off-ramp to a better paying and/or more fulfilling next gig.
After taking Krugman’s MasterClass, I began poking around the websites of my local colleges and checking out Coursera. While I still don’t understand NFTs, I’m okay with that.
Taking a class for fun also made me realize that I don’t have to know everything about everything. For curious “minimal commitment” guys like me, it’s less about who you want to be and more about understanding who you actually are. Which, coincidentally, will be the first line of my opening MasterClass session, whenever they decide to sign me on.
A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of Men’s Health.
Kevin Swan is a brand architect and a senior copywriter that types with his eyes.
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