Jake Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of General Assembly, a global education start-up with 20 campuses and 50,000 alumni worldwide. The idea for the company grew from Schwartz’s own experience of business school, where he began to question why he should spend two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train for a future career, at a time when he hadn’t yet figured out what he wanted to do with his life. In an exclusive interview with Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, Schwartz discusses how higher education institutions have been normalized as luxury brands; why the lines on your resume are actually “imperfect proxies” for job preparedness; and what the alternatives might look like.