I’ve come up with these five skills that, I believe, virtually guarantee success in life.

1. Writing

This doesn’t mean you need to write beautiful, eloquent prose; in fact, if misused, that’s often a negative. Good writing means that you can communicate your point clearly and concisely. You need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what information is and isn’t essential. And, of course, you need to be able to write with correct grammar and spelling.

2. Communication Skills

By communication, I am including not only public speaking, but also one-on-one or small group interactions. Like written communication skills, you need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what’s important. You also need the confidence to not get nervous in front of large crowds. Many people struggle with the last one, but fortunately, practice will largely solve this.

3. Confidence

Confident people do better in life. You don’t need to think you’re better than everyone else; you just need to believe that you are good enough to achieve what you want. Confidence will help you push for your goals and to ask for what you want in life.

4. Quantitative Skills

Being able to sort through information and make data-driven decisions will help you make better decisions. It will also set you apart from the crowd, as far too many people are intimidated by numbers.

5. Programming

This isn’t essential, but it is a skill that, if you have it, will help you tremendously. The U.S. has a severe shortage of qualified programmers. If you’re smart and can code, you’re basically guaranteed a great job out of college.  But if you don’t want to dedicate your life to coding (and even most Computer Science graduates don’t), knowing how to write code will still be a very valuable skill. Businesses are increasingly built on technology. If you can understand computers at a deep level, you will open yourself up to fantastic jobs at tech companies — and many, many jobs elsewhere.

What do you think? What skills do you consider to be the most valuable?

From what the people we met told us, the impact of Millennium Villages has been striking. The impact of One Laptop Per Child, which aims to put an ultra-cheap ($165 + training and maintenance costs) laptop in the hands of each child (not family, and not school), has been a bit more questionable. This is particularly true when you look at its per-dollar impact.

The School

It was around noon on a Tuesday when we arrived at the rural school. Today was a half day, which they do twice a week to keep costs low. The morning students were returning home as the afternoon students were arriving to take their places. Each kid was carrying his or her papers or books. No one had their laptop. Where were these $165 laptops? Left at home. Even if they wanted to use their laptops, they couldn’t do much with them. As is common in this town, the internet hadn’t been working for several days.

The teacher who showed us around was proud to show off the gadgets. Apparently the kids love taking pictures of themselves with the built-in camera. That was as far as the “impact” he mentioned went.

The school lunch program, however, he praised. By giving otherwise hungry students free lunch at school, attendance had increased dramatically. You want kids to get an education? Feed them.

The Hospital

The true lost opportunity for OLPC funds really hits you when you go to the hospital. This town, as a beneficiary of Millennium Villages, was one of the lucky ones. They had adequately trained nurses. Refrigerators to store medicines. Equipment to test people for malaria and HIV, and the drugs to treat them. And, perhaps most significantly, birth control.

Our guide was nearly boastful about the family planning clinic, and he awkwardly  pushed us through the crowd of women awaiting treatment. He whipped out a packet of birth control pills and explained to us how they worked: “Green pills for three weeks. Pinks pills for one. Don’t get them confused. Is very bad.”

In just a few years, the usage of birth control pills had increased from non-existent to over 60%. When families have just two extra mouths to feed, instead of seven or eight, children have more food, more clean water, and more medicine.

Healthcare premiums are just $2 per person per year (true cost is $10 – $20), but most people still can’t afford that.

The Impact

No doubt, OLPC has added value to the students it has reached. The question though, is how much? Is this really the best use of limited resources?

Education is critical to reducing poverty, and certainly, technology is a means to access nearly infinite educational resources online. But if we give one laptop per family, or set up a computer lab in each school, we would touch far more people for far less money.

The choice comes down to this: do you give a family with six children six laptops? Or do you give them one laptop to share, and then cover the healthcare premiums of another 500 children?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument on a case where a 13 year old girl – an honor student who had never been in trouble – was strip searched at school because she was suspected of having ibuprofen. Now, if that doesn’t infuriate you already, listen to the facts of the case:

Redding says she was then asked to strip down to her underwear and stood there while the nurse and secretary inspected her clothes and shoes.

“Then, you know, I thought they were going to let me put my clothes back on, but instead they asked me to pull out my bra and shake it, and the crotch on my underwear, too,” Redding says.

Redding says her whole body was visible to the school administrators. She kept her head down so the nurse and the secretary couldn’t see her fighting back tears.

And all this for what is basically Advil. Ugh.

This was more than a strip search. This was assault:

1. A young girl was forced to show her private parts.
2. The school did not search the girl’s locker or desk, but they did search the girl’s crotch.
3. The harm in traumatizing a girl far outweighs the harm of a couple of students from taking ibuprofen.

When you look at these facts, you see that the school’s search was not conducted in a way to find the ibuprofen (since they didn’t search the girl’s locker or desk), nor did they balance the harm of an invasive search against the risks of mild pain killers. Thus, it seems that the administrators were on a powertrip that ended in assaulting a girl.

I hope that the Supreme Court makes the right decision. While there is a time and place to do strip searches (eg, in jail), school officials are not trained to do so. If you think a student poses that much of a danger that an invasive search is required, then call the cops. Strip searches should never be conducted by school officials.

The authorities will be able to track San Antonio students with a history of skipping school using ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring. Linda Penn, a justice of the peace, said she expected that some 50 students would wear the devices in a six-month pilot program. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the plan, but Ms. Penn linked truancy with later criminal activity. “We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on life,” she said. “I don’t want to see the latter.”

You’re going to give kids ankle bracelets? To do what, exactly? It’s not like you don’t know if they skip school – the morning roll call already does that. It will, however, ensure that they’re treated like criminals.

Let’s look at how the Ivy League – the group of schools America loves to hate – fared in the newest contest:

College	US News	Forbes
Princeton	#1	#1
Harvard	#2	#3
Yale	#3	#9
Columbia	#9	#10
Brown	#14	#27
Penn	#5	#61
Cornell	#12	#121
Dartmouth	#11	#127

Yes, that’s right – Wabash College (#12) and Centre College (#13) are all better than half of the Ivy League.

While I firmly believe that one can get a great education anywhere, something is just not right about these rankings.

It becomes quite apparent when you look at Forbes’ methodology:

(1) Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who’s Who in America (25%)

Ironically, Forbes’ itself wrote an article (“The Hall of Lame“) criticizing that it “appears to contain a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves…” Apparently, the majority of those who apply are selected. Anyone want to be in Who’s Who? Think of how you’ll help your college!

(2) Student Evaluations of Professors from RateMyProfessors.com (25%)

Students’ input about professors to RateMyProfessors is limited to four criteria: Clarity, Easiness, Helpfulness and Hotness. Nowhere in there do the students provide information about how much they learned. And this accounts for a whopping 25% of Forbes’ rankings? At least Forbes decided not to include “hotness” as a criteria.

(3) Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

This criteria appears a tad more fair. But still, what about a school which has a large number of students pursuing double majors, simultaneous masters degrees, etc? Some school encourage these sorts of academic challenges which would drop their four year graduation rate, while other schools effectively prohibit it.

(4) Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

For once, I have no complaint about this criteria. Ok, ok, maybe just one: is the sample statistically size fair?

(5) Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

For the 64% of students who do borrow money for school, leave it to them to decide if going into debt is worth it.

This is like ranking cars based on the average debt of its owners.

Forbes should be embarrassed by their list. 50% of the rankings are derived from extremely unreliable sources, and another 16.6% is a financial consideration that is best left up to each individual student. If you took their list seriously, you would be led to believe that a small, liberal college is the only place to get a solid education in this country.

What’s really shocking about this list is that no one at Forbes took a glance at this list and said, “Hey, guys, did we really mean to put Hampden-Sydney College over 250 spots above NYU?”

Shame on Forbes. I’d expect better statistics from such a source.