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Drop Out and Innovate, Urges VC Peter Thiel
An anonymous reader writes "The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their ideas. 'Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation,' Thiel says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies.'"
"Piece of official paper" helps you clear some hurdles in placing you for that first job in your chosen field. It usually establishes what group of lowest common denominators you belong into. Without it, the other route is climbing the career path from menial jobs (e.g. tech support).
Now...certifications are a different thing and come in all kinds of flavors. I'm a CCIE. Even if I had cheated my way through all the tests and wouldn't in reality know jack about routers, it's still valuable for almost any business who uses Cisco stuff - if you employ someone with the cert you get better discounts. So with that in hand I can basically say in the interview "if you hire me, your infrastructure investment costs drop by X%, I require Y EUR of salary a month. Consider if it's worth it".
Now, that's a very vendor-specific thing. Highly-ranked but more generic ones like CISSP certification are in the same category as that university degree - helps you clear some hurdles and maybe helps convincing that you actually have some skills. Then there's of course all the entry-level stuff that are completely pointless (Microsoft certified solitaire experts come to mind)...
not irresponsible if this is the only way to get true innovation, it seems once people get through college, they lose the ability to innovate.
Uh, you must have forgotten about all those grad students and researchers in the world, who are busy pumping out innovations that actually are changing our lives. The people who developed transistors had graduated college. So did the people who developed the Internet. So did the people who developed plastic. These are technologies that have been so innovative and ground breaking that they have permanently changed our society, and they were not invented by drop-outs.
Palm trees and 8