Peer to Peer College/University Admission Insurance
Although it was a MPAA-produced, silly movie, Accepted, it's got me thinking.
I remember being in the spot the main character found himself -- nervous about getting into university. I was lucky, in that there was a lot of choice available to me. I was accepted into 5 universities (without applying further), but I'm pretty sure some of my peers were not so lucky. And in retrospect, it seems like University was just as important to my long term success, what success I've eeked out, anyway, as I thought it would be(ie very). The grain of truth in the movie is there are a lot of opeople who are both nervous about getting accepted into university who have a hope of getting into the ones they desire, and also some who are nervous who will be turned down.
At least as of 2007, there was some discussion on making a futures market for this situation, to help students offset the risk of acceptance, but from the perspective of the student the important aspect of this is really that it functions as insurance.
That was in 2007, we're in 2013: Peercover has fundamentally disrupted insurance(although like Bitcoin and Napsters's affect on finance and music, respectively the effeccts effects are still being widely distributed) -- to the point where it is now possible for classes of people, such as "people desparate to get into university" as I was, at one point in my life, to organize temselves into insurance pools on a global scale.
Now peercover is a javascript heavy website, so is giving my poor netbook zaph0dn00blebr0x a hard time loading but here's the idea as i try to implement it --
If you're a student who is serious about your worries of how much your life would suck if you did not get into university, you join the pool [link forthcoming] to the extent you are driven to succeed, you choose a premium level and I belive your premiums go into escrow. If you go on to get accepted, you lose the money but gain acceptance. If you are accepted, you gain the consolation of some capital to help you invest in yourself so that you can meet your goals.
Of course the university acceptance insurance pool is going to accept some lemons. That is OK -- because there's going to be a fee that accrues as profit to the ones administering the pool. Half of this fee will go to a fund to invest in hackerspaces and startups that seek to disrupt the education system, democratizing it so that maybe if you can't get accepted -- at the very least you have the additional consolation of chipping away at the base of the ivory tower, making it easier for everyone to be educated, free from the constraints of social stratification. Bonus: you'll be doing your part to enable the intelligence explosion
Let's do this, students.
I remember being in the spot the main character found himself -- nervous about getting into university. I was lucky, in that there was a lot of choice available to me. I was accepted into 5 universities (without applying further), but I'm pretty sure some of my peers were not so lucky. And in retrospect, it seems like University was just as important to my long term success, what success I've eeked out, anyway, as I thought it would be(ie very). The grain of truth in the movie is there are a lot of opeople who are both nervous about getting accepted into university who have a hope of getting into the ones they desire, and also some who are nervous who will be turned down.
At least as of 2007, there was some discussion on making a futures market for this situation, to help students offset the risk of acceptance, but from the perspective of the student the important aspect of this is really that it functions as insurance.
That was in 2007, we're in 2013: Peercover has fundamentally disrupted insurance(although like Bitcoin and Napsters's affect on finance and music, respectively the effeccts effects are still being widely distributed) -- to the point where it is now possible for classes of people, such as "people desparate to get into university" as I was, at one point in my life, to organize temselves into insurance pools on a global scale.
Now peercover is a javascript heavy website, so is giving my poor netbook zaph0dn00blebr0x a hard time loading but here's the idea as i try to implement it --
If you're a student who is serious about your worries of how much your life would suck if you did not get into university, you join the pool [link forthcoming] to the extent you are driven to succeed, you choose a premium level and I belive your premiums go into escrow. If you go on to get accepted, you lose the money but gain acceptance. If you are accepted, you gain the consolation of some capital to help you invest in yourself so that you can meet your goals.
Of course the university acceptance insurance pool is going to accept some lemons. That is OK -- because there's going to be a fee that accrues as profit to the ones administering the pool. Half of this fee will go to a fund to invest in hackerspaces and startups that seek to disrupt the education system, democratizing it so that maybe if you can't get accepted -- at the very least you have the additional consolation of chipping away at the base of the ivory tower, making it easier for everyone to be educated, free from the constraints of social stratification. Bonus: you'll be doing your part to enable the intelligence explosion
Let's do this, students.