I’ve been saying that college is obsolete for a very long time. I dropped out in 2000, because even back then I could see that it was a really poor value proposition. I didn’t predict this because I’m some crazy genius, but because I’m willing to discard emotional attachment and stare plainly at the facts.

School is oturageously expensive, leaving graduates with a debt (or net expenditure) of tens of thousands of dollars— sometimes even one or two hundred thousand. There are some things that are worth that amount of money, but for many people school isn’t one of them. In fact, apart from very specific cases, I think that school is a bad thing, not worth doing even if it was free.

That’s not to say that school has no benefits whatsoever. It does, and although I left with zero additional skills after my three semesters there, I had a good time and benefited from the social aspect. The problem is that you can’t just compare college to doing nothing at all. You have to compare it to what you COULD have done.

Let’s say that when you turn eighteen, it’s a good idea to take four years to develop yourself. College is one way to do that. If we were to construct an alternative way to do that, what could it look like? One of the biggest weaknesses of school is how inflexible it is, so one of the greatest benefits of designing your own curriculum is that you could come up with one that uniquely suits you. That said, here’s a plan that I think would benefit many people MORE than school would. Let’s call it the Hustler’s MBA.

1. Learn poker. To an outsider, poker seems like a form of degenerate gambling. It can be, but that’s not its nature. One of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in life is how to assess hundreds of factors, choose the important ones, evaluate them to make a decision quickly, and then execute that decision. Poker teaches this extremely well. So does pickup, incidentally. Poker develops your logic like nothing else I’ve experienced, and it develops your math skills to a lesser degree. It also teaches a skill I can’t quite define, but would best describe as learning how hard you can push. I’ve found all of these skills to be very useful in life.

Poker will cost you money at first. Let’s say $5000 in the first year. After that you’ll be able to make between $45-60 per hour for the rest of your life. That’s about $85,000 per year, which adjusts for inflation because as money is inflated, the stakes to keep the game interesting will go up. You will also receive “raises” because you’ll always improve as a player and be able to play better stakes. If you’re dedicated to poker, getting this good is virtually guaranteed. I’ve been through the process and it’s not particularly hard. Can school guarantee you a job that pays this well?

Besides being able to make $85k/year, you could also play for six months and make $40k a year. Ultimate flexibility. I don’t think that poker is the best career in the world, because it doesn’t give back to society, but I do think that it’s an excellent backup plan. Knowing that I can always support myself playing poker gives me the freedom to work on big projects without fear.

2. Travel a lot. For the first year, learn a foreign language that interests you. Start with three months of Pimsleur tapes, then get a local tutor. That should cost about $1000 for the first year, and will yield results FAR greater than a class in school. After the first year your self-education will be paid for by poker, so start traveling for three months every year. That should cost around $8k at the most, probably more like $5-6k. When traveling, education comes to you in the form of perspective. You understand other cultures and other people, and will get to practice your foreign language in its native setting. I would also combine travel with watching documentaries about the history of that place. I learned a lot about Rome after visiting, and now I’m kicking myself for not educating myself first.

3. Read every single day for at least an hour. Books get lumped in with other reading like magazines and blogs, but they’re actually far more valuable. The amount of value an author compresses into a book is often astounding. There are books I’ve paid $10 for that have completely changed my life. If you read for 1-2 hours on average, you’ll read around a hundred books per year. I do this now and find it to be one of the most valuable uses of my time. Read at least 50% non-fiction, but fiction is good, too. In school you would probably read 12 books a year at most.

4. Write every single day. Write blog posts, work on a book, write how you’re feeling, or write short stories. I don’t think it really matters. Writing every day helps you develop and refine your thoughts, as well as learn to communicate with others. Almost any field you’ll go into will require communication, so you may as well get good at it. After you write, record a video yourself explaining what you wrote. This will help with public speaking and conversation. After the first year at the very latest, start publicly posting your work. This teaches you to ship and to integrate feedback.

5. Learn to program, even if you don’t want to be a programmer. Programming develops logic and efficiency, amongst other things. Even an intermediate understanding of programming will allow you to be a creator. Programming languages are the languages of the future, so even if you aren’t a programmer yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll be working with them. Speaking someone’s language is nice when you’re working with them, right?

6. Do something social. College is really excellent for making people social, and it’s the one aspect in which don’t expect my plan to exceed school. If you’re a guy, consider getting into pickup. If you’re a human, take group art classes, yoga, dance, or go to meetup groups. Social skills are some of the most important skills you can learn, and they can only truly be developed through social interaction. This interaction has to be in person, too… online chatting can be beneficial, but it’s not enough. Traveling will help you be social as well, especially if you stay in hostels.

7. Eat healthy. When you eat healthy, your brain functions better and you’re safeguarding its longevity. Developing yourself is at least as much about good habits as it is about learning skills. And like all habits, the earlier you start, the better. I’d say that the minimum to shoot for here is cutting out all sweeteners and refined grains. Besidses the obvious health benefits, eating healthy will help you build discipline, which is an absolutely essential life skill.

8. Follow curiousity and spend money on it when necessary. These things that I’ve included so far are the baseline— the new liberal arts education. They leave you plenty of time in your day to follow whatever you’re interested in. Don’t force it and try to learn investment banking because you think it would make a good career. If you’re interested in butterflies, learn about butterflies. The rest of the curriculum is enough to make sure that you’ll always be able to provide for yourself and will be a well rounded person, so consider this section your speculative learning. Maybe you’ll find something you’re passionate about, which will become your career, or maybe you’ll just become a really interesting person who knows a lot about a lot of things. Either way is fine. Don’t be afraid to spend money on tutors, classes, equipment, seminars, or travel.

9. Start a business after two years. With a full two years of self-education under your belt, you should have something useful to contribute to society. School makes you go from sheltered learning mode straight into real-world career mode. I think a better way is to have a transition, and to couple productivity with learning. Having that habit will ensure that you continue to perfect your craft as you get older. Your business can be anything— a tech startup, publishing books you’ve written, giving speeches, making clothing and selling it online, whatever you’re into. Read some business books before starting it and try to make money. One of the most common complaints I hear from graduates of traditonal school is that nothing they learned was actually applicable to real ife. Everything you learn from starting a business IS.

This is a modern curriculum that, on average, will produce people better prepared for real life than college. Obviously, it won’t work if you want to be something that requires certification like a doctor or lawyer. The beauty of it is that it has a negative cost (you will make money due to poker, and hopefully your business), and can be funded initially with $5000 for poker. A few months into the second year, you will have paid off the poker debt and begun to self fund your life.

Will this work for you? There’s no guarantee, but I see people work pretty hard at school, and if that same effort were put towards the Hustler’s MBA, I thnk the chance of being self-sufficient and prepared for “real life” is about 90%. I’d estimate that non-laywer/doctor college is somewhere around 50-70%. So, like anything, this plan is not totally foolproof, but I think it’s a lot better and cheaper than the alternative.

There’s a big taboo around telling people not to go to college. I find myself adhering to it, not ever suggesting that younger members of my family should drop out or skip school entirely. But maybe the time has come for us to look at college objectively, really quantify what goes in and what comes out, and evaluate it on its merits alone, rather than its historical value or its societal aura.

By David Barboza
NY Times: Monday, January 15, 2007

HONG KONG — Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge Caravan minivan, begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper.

She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper-trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China’s chronic paper shortages.

“I remember what a man in the business told me back then,” Zhang Yin said. “He said, ‘Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.’”

Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, she is now richer than virtually any other woman anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and the chief executive of eBay, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more.

Her companies take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ship it to China and recycle it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that are packed with toys, electronics and furniture that are stamped “Made in China” and then often shipped right back across the ocean to Western consumers.

After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.

Late last year, Forbes magazine named Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the Italian clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband.

Most of the world’s richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton sisters of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L’Oréal cosmetics and BMW.

But not Zhang. She started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world’s paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan, just outside Hong Kong, and the other based in Los Angeles.

“She’s a visionary,” said Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her large paper company list shares in Hong Kong. “She doesn’t mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company.”

That company, Nine Dragons Paper, is now the biggest paper maker in China. It raised nearly $500 million when it went public in Hong Kong last March.

Since then, shares of Nine Dragons have quadrupled, giving the company a market value of more than $5 billion. The Zhang family controls 72 percent of the company, which makes it one of the richest families in China.

Zhang’s smaller venture, America Chung Nam, which is based in Los Angeles, is one of the world’s biggest paper trading companies, with ties to recycling yards in New York, Chicago and California.

No other U.S. company sends so much material to China, in as many containers, as America Chung Nam, which was named the top U.S. exporter to China by volume for the fifth consecutive year in 2005, according to Piers Global Intelligence, which tracks import and export data.

Now, with the paper industry shifting to China, where labor and land are cheaper, Zhang and Nine Dragons are vowing to take on the world’s global paper giants, like International Paper, Weyerhauser and Smurfit Stone.

“My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards,” Zhang said emphatically during a short interview in her Hong Kong office. “My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.”

Zhang rarely grants interviews, and when she does, they are brief and controlled by an army of handlers.

Zhang does not go into detail about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, “I’m an honest businesswoman.”

Zhang was the oldest of eight children born into a military family from northern Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian border. During the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, her father was sent to prison, like millions of others who were branded “counterrevolutionaries” or “capitalist roaders.”

When the Cultural Revolution came to a close in 1976, her father was released from prison and “rehabilitated.” She went to work as an accountant.

After economic change got under way in China in the early 1980s, she moved to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, one of the first areas in China allowed to experiment with capitalism. There she started working for a foreign-Chinese joint venture paper trading company.

In 1985, she ventured to Hong Kong, which was then still a British colony. Ng Weiting, who was her partner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, says Zhang was driven and tough and had figured out how to get the best performance out of those who worked for her.

“When her employees asked for a pay raise, she would grant it if it was reasonable,” he recalled. “But when her employees made mistakes, she would criticize them severely. She made it clear when to reward and when to punish.”

Analysts say Zhang’s ebullient personality made her a great saleswoman and a savvy deal maker.

There were occasional threats from competitors, but being a woman was not a problem, Zhang said.

“Actually, I didn’t find it difficult,” she said. “I found men respected me.”

After Hong Kong’s paper market proved too small for her ambitions, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and married for the second time, to Liu Ming Chung, who was born in Taiwan, grew up in Brazil and is fluent in English.

Together, they formed America Chung Nam. At the time, China’s fast- growing economy was suffering from shortages of raw materials, and the country began looking overseas for scrap metal and used paper. Zhang Yin was one of the first to sell scrap paper to China.

China’s own paper products are poor quality, often made from grass, bamboo or rice stalks. Most paper made in the United States and Europe is derived from wood pulp.

America Chung Nam quickly made deals with American scrap yards and began shipping huge containers of paper back to China. The demand grew so fast that in 1995, Zhang (who also goes by her Hong Kong name, Cheung Yan) returned to China to found Nine Dragons, opening her first paper making facility in Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub in the bustling Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong. Liu now is the chief executive; Zhang is the chairwoman.

A decade later, the company has 11 giant paper making machines, 5,300 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and a huge new facility under construction in the country’s other booming export hub, the Yangtze River Delta area near Shanghai. Reported profit last year rose 349 percent to $175 million.

Nine Dragons is now one of the fastest growing paper companies, and yet it says it cannot keep up with demand for container board, the material used to make boxes, because of the booming growth in the Chinese economy and exports.

Foreign paper companies have been slow to build a sizable manufacturing base in China, Analysts doubt they will catch up any time soon. And Chinese manufacturers have advantages. They burn cheap coal rather than clean but expensive natural gas. And they are capitalizing on less expensive labor and the newest machinery, while paper makers in the United States and Europe are often using less efficient machines from the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s very difficult for U.S. companies to get into this business now,” said Woo at BNP Paribas. “I heard five or six years ago they looked at opportunities but they didn’t do anything.

“Right now,” Woo added, “the largest globally is Smurfit Stone. Weyerhauser is No. 2. By 2008, Nine Dragons could be No. 1.”

Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors.

But Zhang vigorously defends the appointment, saying her son is qualified and Nine Dragons is, after all, a family company. She has a second son in high school. And her younger brother, Zhang Chang Fei, is the company’s deputy chief executive.

Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing.

She has not lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the Queen of Trash, she doesn’t disown the title. But, she said, “Some day, I’d like to be known as the queen of containerboards.”

Is it bad that I want the real Jawnzilla logo to be a godzilla wearing shades balancing a brick of hundreds on his head?

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that.

Wired: You talk a lot about wares that are sold through tiny kiosks, street stalls, and little informal markets. Where do those goods come from?

Neuwirth: The biggest flow of goods is from China. It’s no secret that China is the manufacturing engine of the planet. In a lot of ways, they’re more capitalist than we are. If someone wants something made—even if that person isn’t licensed—a Chinese factory will make it. It’s also easy to deal with China. You can go to the local Chinese consulate and get a tourist visa within a couple of hours. You can’t say the same about coming to the US. So African importers, for instance, travel to China and commission Chinese firms to make goods for them to sell in Africa.

Wired: But it’s not all Chinese manufacturers, right? In your book, you write about how huge international corporations want to get their goods into informal markets.

Neuwirth: Sure. Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive: They sell lots of products through the little unregistered and unlicensed stores in the developing world. And they want their products in those stores, because that’s where the customers are.

Wired: How does that work?

Neuwirth: Basically, they hire a middleman. Procter & Gamble, for instance, realized that although Walmart is its single largest customer, System D outposts, when you total them up, actually account for more business. So Procter & Gamble decided to get its products into those stores. In each country, P&G hires a local distributor—sometimes several layers of local distributors—to get the product from a legal, formal, tax-paying company to a company willing to deal with unlicensed vendors who don’t pay taxes. That’s how Procter & Gamble gets Downy fabric softener, Tide laundry detergent, and all manner of other goods into the squatter communities of the developing world. Today, in aggregate, these markets make up the largest percentage of the company’s sales worldwide.

Wired: You write that there are even street-vendor-specific brands.

Neuwirth: Absolutely. A good example is UAC Foods, which is based in Nigeria but active throughout West Africa and traded on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. It’s a highly formal company that was originally incorporated by the British more than 100 years ago. UAC Foods owns hotels and restaurants, but it also has this product called the Gala sausage roll. You never find Gala being sold in normal stores. It’s sold only by unlicensed roadside hawkers and at roadside kiosks. Basically, UAC recognized that this product wasn’t going to sell well in a normal store. But sausage rolls are in demand where people are on the go, when they need a quick snack on the side of the highway or in a traffic jam. So UAC relies on this informal phalanx of thousands of unregulated hawkers who sell Gala sausage rolls all over the streets of African cities. This is UAC’s distribution channel for this one product.

Wired: Some of the biggest street-market businesses are based around mobile phones. How does this work?

Neuwirth: Most of the world outside of Europe and the United States doesn’t have the option of a monthly mobile phone plan. The companies just sell airtime in the form of rechargeable cards, and customers pay as they go. And the best way to have these cards available everywhere, at any time, is to seed them among the unlicensed street vendors and roadside kiosks. In fact, to advertise their services, mobile companies produce these colorful umbrellas adorned with their company logo, which they give to street vendors. In Lagos, street markets are sometimes called umbrella markets, because there are so many of these umbrellas.

Wired: And this is pretty lucrative for them?

Neuwirth: Oh yeah. When the cell company MTN launched in Nigeria in 2001, it thought that it would replicate the mobile phone market of Great Britain or the US. It didn’t do very well with that. So it retooled and came back with this System D-oriented approach, and now it has more than 40 percent of the market. Its profits are around $2.4 billion in Nigeria alone. So you’re talking about a truckload of money being generated by a totally informal sales force.

Wired: But, of course, many products in these markets aren’t so legit. There are a lot of knockoffs and counterfeit items—clothing, handbags, electronics. The Chinese even have a word for these goods: shanzhai.

Neuwirth: Literally translated, shanzhai refers to the mountain hideouts of bandits in the Middle Ages. But it has come to mean cloned or knockoff-branded goods. Usually these knockoffs switch a letter in the brand name. I’ve seen phones that say Motolola instead of Motorola. I’ve seen Hogu Boss or Guuucci spelled with three U’s. In some ways, it’s not even a real attempt to deceive; everyone knows that Gucci is not spelled with three U’s. Often they’re actually great products. The highest-end knockoff Puma soccer jerseys or sneakers are indistinguishable from the genuine items. And indeed, word on the street is that the same factories that subcontract with Puma and Adidas and other companies are sometimes the ones making the knockoffs.

Wired: But how do people get those illegal goods from China to the underground markets?

Neuwirth: They massage the manifest for the shipping containers. Or send them to ports where there’s less supervision and reduced customs fees. Sneaking things into a country is itself a huge source of System D employment. There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. Then there are the guys who get it across the border. And there are the truck drivers and the loaders and unloaders. It’s a fantastic number of people—all of them working under the table.

Wired: You also say that System D is a source of innovation.

Neuwirth: That’s true. Chinese phones were the first to offer dual-SIM-card capability, for example. It was a reaction to a need that wasn’t being met by the formal market. In many countries of the developing world, different mobile companies have the best service in different regions. So, if you’re in the big city but your mom is out in the country and your brother is in another city, you might need separate services to talk to both of them. With a dual-card phone, you can keep two SIM cards in your handset and switch services as easily as you answer call-waiting. There’s a big market for that, and the System D entrepreneurs figured this out long before the legit world did. Nokia makes one now, but the underground Chinese manufacturers had them back in 2007.

Wired: So System D companies can move faster than more formal businesses.

Neuwirth: System D merchants are the ones figuring out what people need. As I said, it’s these merchants who go to China and place the orders. Chinese manufacturers didn’t figure out that a dual-SIM-card phone would be a really good thing. Some folks from Africa and elsewhere said, “Hey, this would be a popular product. We want it.” And the Chinese were happy to make it.

Wired: Merchants drive the innovation?

Neuwirth: Yes. I’ll give you another example. In many places in Africa, there’s no municipal water system. You have to buy drinking water. In West Africa, System D came up with something called Pure Water, which is water in a baggie that’s filled and sealed by a special machine. You get half a liter of water for a minimal price on the street. This has become the way that people throughout West Africa get their drinking water. System D entrepreneurs produce it, and System D hawkers sell it. Together they’ve created a new kind of product that serves a vital need, and they make money doing it. The government in Nigeria even figured out a way to work with the unlicensed Pure Water companies to monitor the purity of their water without forcing them to get registered or regulated or to pay taxes. Every baggie now has a stamp showing it’s been approved by the Nigerian equivalent of the US Food and Drug Administration.

Wired: Why aren’t established companies taking advantage of these opportunities?

Neuwirth: Formal companies are wedded to a business plan. It’s much easier for System D companies to turn on a dime. If conditions change—if Nigeria develops a water system, say—yeah, Pure Water makers will suffer for some short time, but then they’ll figure out the next thing to do. They’re just much more nimble.

Wired: Are there things that the US should be doing to take better advantage of the realities of System D in the developing world?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. For starters, if we really want to engage in true, ground-level economic development in these countries, then we have to begin looking at these markets. These are the places where the bulk of people are being employed. And we have to listen for these markets to tell us what’s needed in a community. It’s not a bureaucrat in Washington or Nigeria who can best establish what’s needed to help the poor in Lagos. It’s the people who are working in these markets and living on the streets who can tell us that. And maybe more US companies can begin acting like Chinese firms, recognizing that there’s a market there and a niche to be filled. In the future, it’s going to be a very lucrative and important niche indeed.

By JAMES ATLAS
NY TIMES: October 1, 2011

A brochure arrives in the mail announcing this year’s winners of a prestigious fellowship to study abroad. The recipients are allotted a full page each, with a photo and a thick paragraph chronicling their achievements. It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking.

Let’s call this species Super Person.

Do we have some anomalous cohort here? Achievement freaks on a scale we haven’t seen before? Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts? And if so, what convergence of historical, social and economic forces has been responsible for the emergence of this new type? Why does Super Person appear among us now?

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary cause, and these robust intellects reflect the leap in the physical development of humans that we ascribe to better diets, exercise and other forms of health-consciousness. (Stephen Jay Gould called this mechanism “extended scope.”) All you have to do is watch a long rally between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to recognize — if you’re old enough — how much faster the sport has become over the last half century.

The Super Person training for the college application wars is the academic version of the Super Person slugging it out on the tennis court. For wonks, Harvard Yard is Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Or maybe it’s a function of economics. Writing in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, John Quiggin, a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, argues that the Great Academic Leap Forward “is both a consequence of, and a contributor to, the growing inequality and polarization of American society.” Nearly 25 percent of the annual income in America goes to 1 percent of the population, creating an ever-wealthier upper class. Yet there’s no extra space being made in our best colleges for high-achieving students. “Taken together,” Professor Quiggin points out, “the Ivy League and other elite institutions educate something less than 1 percent of the U.S. college-age population” — a percentage that’s going to shrink further as the population of college-bound students continues to grow.

Preparing for Super Personhood begins early. “We see kids who’ve been training from an early age,” says Charles Bardes, chairman of admissions at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The bar has been set higher. You have to be at the top of the pile.”

And to clamber up there you need a head start. Thus the well-documented phenomenon of helicopter parents. In her influential book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” Judith Warner quotes a mom who gave up her career to be a full-time parent: “The children are the center of the household and everything goes around them. You want to do everything and be everything for them because this is yourjob now.” Bursting with pent-up energy, the mothers transfer their shelved career ambitions to their children. Since that book was published in 2005, the situation has only intensified. “One of my daughter’s classmates has a pilot’s license; 12-year-olds are taking calculus,” Ms. Warner said last week.

REMEMBER the Dumb Kid in your math class who couldn’t understand what a square root was? Gone. Vanished from the earth like the stegosaurus. If your child is at an elite school, there are no dumb kids in his or her math class — only smart and smarter.

Even the most brilliant students have to work harder now to make their nut. The competition for places in the upper tier of higher education is a lot tougher than it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when having good grades and SAT scores in the high 1200s was generally sufficient to get you into a respectable college. My contemporaries love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today. This is no illusion: 19 percent of applicants were admitted to my Ivy League school for the class of ’71; 6 percent were admitted for the class of ’15.

Graduate and professional school statistics are just as daunting. Dr. Bardes told me that he routinely interviewed students with perfect or near perfect grade point averages and SATs — enough to fill the class several times over. Last year 5,722 applicants competed for 101 places at Weill Cornell; the odds of getting in there are even worse than those of getting your 3-year-old into a New York City private school.

“Applicant pools are stronger and deeper,” concurs Stephen Singer, the former director of college counseling at Horace Mann, the New York City private school renowned for its driven students. “It used to be that if you were editor of the paper or president of your class you could get in almost anywhere,” Mr. Singer says. “Now it’s ‘What did you do as president? How did you make the paper special?’ Kids file stories from Bosnia or El Salvador on their summer vacations.” Such students are known in college admissions circles as “pointy” — being well-rounded doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to have a spike in your achievement chart.

AND it doesn’t hurt to be from an exotic foreign land. “Colleges are reaching out to a broader range of people around the world today,” says William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “They go to Africa and China. If you want first-class mathematicians, try looking in Bulgaria.” In case they miss someone, many colleges now have recruiting agents in other countries who are paid commissions — by both the parents and the college — to help “place” those students. Globalization comes to the college admissions world.

Just as the concentration of wealth at the very top reduces wealth at the bottom, the aggressive hoarding of intellectual capital in the most sought-after colleges and universities has curtailed our investment in less prestigious institutions. There’s no curricular trickle-down effect. The educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. has pointed to a trend he labels the Matthew Effect, citing the Biblical injunction: “ ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ We’ve lifted up rich kids beyond their competence,” he says, “while the verbal skills of the black underclass continue to decline.”

Affluent families can literally buy a better résumé. “In a bad economy, the demographic shift has the potential to reinforce a socio-economic gap,” says Todd Breyfogle, who oversaw the honors program at the University of Denver and is now director of seminars at the Aspen Institute. “Only those families who can help their students be more competitive will have students who can get into elite institutions.”

Schools are now giving out less scholarship money in the tight economy, favoring students who can pay full freight. Meanwhile, Super People jet off on Mom and Dad’s dime to archaeological digs in the Negev desert, when they might once have opted to be counselors in training at Camp Shewahmegon for the summer. And the privilege of laboring as a volunteer in a day care center in Guatemala — “service learning,” as it’s sometimes called — doesn’t come cheap once you tote up the air fare, room and board.

Colleges collude in the push to upgrade talent. “It’s a huge industry,” Mr. Breyfogle says. “Harvard has a whole office devoted to preparing applicants for the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.” At its worst, this kind of coaching results in candidates who are treated as what he calls “management projects.”

“They’ve been put in the hands of makeover experts who have a stake in making them look better than they are, leveraging their achievement,” Mr. Breyfogle says.

“We are concerned about that,” confirmed Jeff Rickey, head of admissions at St. Lawrence University, whom I tracked down at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference in New Orleans. “If they joined a club, when did they join it? Maybe they play 15 instruments, but when they list them out, the amount of time they spent on each isn’t that much.” Mr. Breyfogle is also on the alert for résumé stuffing. “They’ve worked at an orphanage in Katmandu, but it turns out it was over Christmas break,” he gave as an example. “It’s easier to be amazing now.” All you need is money.

O.K., so maybe some Super People aren’t so Super. But the fact is, they do a lot of good. When I read about a student who has worked at a mental health clinic in Bolivia or founded a farmers’ market in a low-income neighborhood in Washington, I’m impressed. (All we did in college, I seem to recall, is smoke dope and play pool.)

And it’s not as if the Super People get to slack off when they graduate. There’s too much competition.

In the end, the whole idea of Super Person is kind of exhausting to contemplate. All that striving, working, doing. A line of Whitman’s quoted by Dr. Bardes in our conversation has stayed with me: “I loaf and invite my soul.”

Isn’t that where the real work gets done?