It all started when Jeremy C. Wilson read an article by Peter Thiel that said going to college didn’t matter. It was the spring of 2011 and Wilson, a joint law and business student at Northwestern, was bothered by the article. Education had been very important in Wilson’s life, so he didn’t agree with Thiel’s argument or the growing UnCollege movement, which said higher education was essentially useless.
He talked with other people about the piece and Thiel’s ideas. Suddenly, an idea: Do something about it.
Now, Wilson, along with a team of Northwestern students and a host of graduate and undergraduate volunteers, has started the Education Matters Project, a non-profit organization with a pretty big mission: “To change the way humankind views the benefits of education and to help fund a better education for students who need it most.”
Modeled after the It Gets Better campaign, the Education Matters Project website uses videos of role models and students who tell their stories and why they believe education matters in their lives.
The project’s aspirations are three-fold. At the organization’s core is changing how the world views education. If everyone had equal access to receive a good education, the Education Matters Project posits, the world would be a better place.
Secondly, the Education Matters Project wants to inspire disadvantaged junior high and high school students to continue their education. “It’s always going to be easier to quit,” a blog post by Wilson says. “It’s always going to be easier to say no, to stay home, and to stop trying. The problem is, it’s also easier to fail than it is to succeed. That’s what makes it success. We here at Education Matters want to help you understand that working hard and getting the best education you can is critical to becoming the best version of yourself.”
Of course, it’s not that easy: Even if disadvantaged high school students stayed in school and were accepted by a college, attending college is costly. Wilson and the other Education Matters Project team members understand that.
Their third objective reflects that discrepancy: The organization wants to give underprivileged students much-needed funding for their educations. The Education Matters Project will eventually crowd-fund scholarships for students from low-income families who cannot afford it. Donors will be able to give money to specific students through the website, and will be updated on their student’s success.
The website officially launched a few weeks ago, with at least over 100 videos from people who say that education does matter. And those numbers are growing more every day. Wilson’s video was the first one.
Education is a very personal subject for Wilson. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where the poverty rate was nearly 50 percent and very few people considered going to college. Wilson’s parents were the ones who pushed him through school.
Wilson says, “They imagined me and my sister getting a good education and attending the best schools in the world, even though nobody gave them the same opportunity.” He said that they jumped on a Greyhound bus to flee Youngstown and moved west to Arizona in search of opportunity.
They were right. Wilson ended up going to Stanford University, where he majored in anthropology. Now, as a graduate student who knows how difficult it is for students from low-income families to go to college, he’s made it his personal mission to inspire and fund college-bound students.
For the short term, Wilson wants the Education Matters Project to target junior high and high school students to show them the potential they can achieve if they pursue a higher education. Although the national high school drop-out rate has slightly decreased since the early 2000s from 11 percent to 8.1 percent in 2009, it is imperative that adolescents today finish high school. While in the 80s it was true that someone who dropped out of high school could still make a living, now, especially in this economy, it is almost impossible for that same person to live over the poverty line. Wilson wants to make sure that kids stay in school, and that wish factors into his long-term goal of making education more equal. He wants all students, whether from high-income or low-income families, to be able to go to college if they want to.
As for what the start-up organization needs right now, Wilson says that they need to get as many stories as possible on the website. From there, they need the world’s attention, which will lead to more fundraising.
For now, however, Wilson wants to interject a very personal note into such a large vision.