Did she major in a) philosophy, b) drama, or c) applied mathematics?

Problem: a college’s engineering students have futuristic ideas, but no clue how to monetize them. That same college’s business students have grand capitalistic designs, but nothing to market.

You can probably figure out the solution.

We’ve said repeatedly at Control Your Cash that formal higher “education” isn’t an absolute good. And we’ll continue to put the word “education” in quotes if people are going to classify Montclair State’s “How to Watch Television” as no less worthwhile than MIT’s Atomistic Modeling and Simulation of Materials and Structures. (No dismissive quotes required for that course description.)

State legislators and impressionable parents throughout the country transfer far too much taxpayer money into the pockets of directionless adolescents looking for a place to drink, protest and sleep late while deferring productivity. The tangibly beneficial college and university courses continue to get outnumbered by dross like everything listed here.

And then there’s the Cambridge of the Mojave, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Indulge us with some time for a little local content.

To most people who think about this kind of thing, UNLV is a punchline – a basketball factory, a commuter school for unambitious commuters, the kind of institution that’s emblematic of the same faux learning that we’ve spent the last few paragraphs deriding and whose only redeeming feature is its world-renowned hotel management school.

Not quite. UNLV is also home to a groundbreaking program that should revolutionize post-secondary education: a partnership between the two most crucial schools at the college, engineering and business. (UNLV doesn’t teach medicine.)

(Note: Control Your Cash co-founder Betty is also a co-founder of UNLV’s Center for Entrepreneurship, known colloquially as the “E-Center”. Betty attended Northern Arizona University for one semester, realized her fortune lay elsewhere, and sought and achieved it. With no student loans to worry about paying off. Years later, she realized that the common financial sense she implemented in her own life barely existed in academia. But rather than dismiss the typical university education as largely pointless, she committed resources to finding a way to make it meaningful.)

The UNLV engineering/business partnership began as the fusion of two separate but easily unifiable ideas. Since 2000, the curriculum requires senior engineering students to form small teams and enter a design competition. Simply put, the teams have to invent something practical. And their brainchildren have been not just feasible, but inspiring: a cane that uses sonar (for blind people), motorcycle headlights that see around corners, etc.

A few hundred yards away, business students were doing something similar: creating plans and projections for potential businesses. The last couple of years your humble bloggers have had the pleasure of serving as judges for the business students’ contest, and we’ve seen some impressive proposals. They include the group that was going to import and distribute a revolutionary weatherproofing compound from South Korea, and the “micro-farmer” team who wanted to grow vegetables on abandoned urban lots. Some of the other ideas were less marketable than they were creative, still others were quite the opposite. But the very act of conceiving and developing these ideas did and will do far more good for the world than the nearby English class looking for meaning in the short stories of Jack Kerouac.

The trouble was that none of the engineering projects ever got off the ground. (Figuratively speaking, particularly in the case of the dolly that lifts 300-pound payloads 3 feet in the air.) Meanwhile the business projects, while some of them had potential, weren’t exactly recalibrating the boundaries of human endeavor.

So the deans of the departments got together and meted out a little interdiscipline. For full credit, the engineering students had to partner with the business students (and vice versa) to develop a viable plan. For the engineers, it meant developing an appreciation for normally mundane tasks like securing warehouses, filing paperwork, and learning how to market. For the aspiring MBAs, it meant gathering the requisite technical knowledge about how moneymaking gadgets make money. (Dr. Andrew Hardin, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, got the inspiration for this from a similar program at Washington State University.)

You need both the yin and the yang. This is just one of countless examples, but there’s a $500 Universal Corporation all-in-one remote control at Control Your Cash headquarters that contains 43 buttons and 6 screens, most of which never get used. The device is supposed to control the TV, the DVD player, the satellite radio, the AM/FM, the CD players, the iPod and probably one or two other things. Three years in we still haven’t mastered this leviathan of overengineering, because we can’t be bothered to spend the necessary couple of days decoding its indecipherable user’s manual. Seriously, we don’t need 80 equalization pre-settings (“Classical”, “Bass Reducer”, “Sports”) for the tuner. We’re not Jimmy Iovine.

A competent business management team would have simplified the remote while maintaining its primary selling feature – the ability to control every electronic component in the house. The team would have hired an erudite technical writer to translate the instructions into something a layperson will want to comprehend, and packaged the remote as something more necessity than luxury. We can only wonder what engineering breakthroughs never make it to market, for lack of marketing.

When teachers’ unions in your state complain that you need to fork over more tax money for education, ask them if and how they’re prepping kids for crucial programs like UNLV’s engineering/business partnership. And making a legitimate difference in the world, not a theoretical one.

TONIGHT, the winners of the 2011 competition do a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming tri-state competition. If you’re in the neighborhood, swing by and see how the future doesn’t merely appear.

**This article is featured in the Totally Money Carnival #21-Memorial Day Edition**

**This popular post is also featured in The Carnival of Wealth #42**