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PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel says the key to quicker business innovation is skipping college. His foundation is handing out $100,000 to 24 people under 20 to drop out of college for two years and start companies. From the press release: "As the first members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, the Fellows will pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and begin to build the technology companies of tomorrow. During their two-year tenure, each Fellow will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. The project areas for this class of fellows include biotech, career development, economics and finance, education, energy, information technology, mobility, robotics, and space."
Has he gotten $2 million worth of publicity from this stunt yet?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I wonder how many people with college degrees they will hire
That's forward thinking right there! Why beat the competition if you can pay them a pittance to fail outright early in life?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
The fact that you become one of 20 people introduced to Peter Thiel's network, and get his support/promotion, is probably more valuable than the cash. Which is also why this isn't really a scalable replacement for college: he can do this for 20 people, maybe 50, but not thousands or millions.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Every time the college vs. no college debate comes up, examples of highly successful dropouts or people who didn't ever go to college are rolled out. The default assumption is that everyone is destined to be a successful entrepreneur. In his defense, he does mention further down in the article that not everyone is cut out for this.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up. Sending the message that everyone can do this if they just try is wrong in my opinion. It produces a lot of small business failures and subsequent bankruptcies as people keep trying to make their business float despite obvious signs it'll never work. It also produces a lot of rhetoric that standard employees are a bunch of lazy people who have no drive and can't cut it in the "real world." Also, there's only so many small businesses that the economy can absorb -- if everyone is out running a frozen yogurt shop or pizza place or small-time startup company, larger companies don't have a workforce. Finally, the entrepreneur class plays the rugged individualist card a little too much IMO when pushing for things such as reduced regulations on business. Example: States who try to enforce sick time requirements on medium-sized small businesses are labeled socialist and hostile to business.
I will be the first to admit I'm not an entrepreneur. I have a good job doing systems engineering work for a large employer, I work hard, and my contribution is valued (after all, they keep paying me.) A smaller company could run rings around this one, but there would be a problem making that transition:
- I can't sell. Period.
- I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be
- I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
For everyone else who isn't these things, the formal education route is the way to go. Just like your average unemployed factory worker would be ill-advised to cash out his retirement to go buy a Subway franchise, high school grads would be ill-advised to completely ignore the safer path to a decent living.
University/College is only an educational institute. It teaches you nothing that you can't learn yourself in your chosen field through self-study and research.
College gives you:
- A well stocked library
- A ready made peer group, with whom you can discuss the subjects
- A structured approach to the content
- Ready access to experts (tutors, lecturers and professors)
- time
Internet is a better stocked library. Where you can find a greater amount of peers with similar interests. With many levels of structure to match your own learning preferences. With actual experts amongst your peers in open source participation (maybe also in university but in colleges? no way). And you'll have plenty of time for all that when you drop out of college.
Indeed.
My first innovative idea: Band together with the other 19 people and make use of the $2m you've been given.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
First session of our orientation course in our first year, our professor from industrial engineering (our dept) dept, who was flying to m.i.t. to deliver lessons and back from time to time, (one of the youngest professors in this country back then) had told us that we would only remember 4% of ALL that we were going to learn during the course of next 4 years of academic education. and ALL of that would only serve the purpose of giving us a 'formation'. a formation of scientific/engineering mind.
he was right. despite we were studying in a university that sent academicians to teach in a lot of respectable universities of the world, despite we were a university that was geared more towards practical (applied) education, (a few of my classmates are in top 4-5 people of some fortune 10 companies now), the next 4 years of education was really in that manner. after a while, you come to learn - this is the reality of an education system that has descended from scholastic roots, and there are few universities and colleges exempt from these around the world, and these are considered radical.
so in short, even our education system, even if it is conducted with a 'modern' approach, is, 96% inefficient. we load 96% crap into brains of people, only to give a formation that is worth 4%.
it is stunning that, up until this point, noone was able to bring a method that would give 100% formation without loading 96% crap.
but hey - education and textbooks are lucrative businesses. so, our youth has to endure 96% crap.
Much better kids get some basic education in high school, then directly go about doing what they want to do, and learning in the process. times have changed. we had to shell out $50-90 on a single textbook to get to what would be considered advanced information back then - now we have google, and unfathomable amount of information that it indexed, thanks to what crowds put on the web. and yeah, what you can get from web, can be as good as what is put into textbooks. (and at times, more advanced and deep than you would want in a coursebook).
it is time to reform.
Read radical news here
That's precisely how most people see their degrees and why we need to get rid of the concept of most jobs needing a degree. Liberal educations used to be hardcore... closer to modern engineering majors in work loads than what we have today. 100 years ago, a liberally educated student could claim competence in classical languages, math, basic science, music, economics, rhetoric and writing. In other words, such a graduate actually was a good candidate for a serious career in government or the private sector because it took a "somebody" to make it through such a diverse and rigorous program. Today, they're a $50k+ second high school diploma (where a high school diploma back then was equivalent to a B.A. today).
As to this guy, he has a B.A. and a J.D. from an elite university. If anyone can actually comment on the wisdom of this more normal path (his choices in majors, if not university, is closer to what most Americans choose in college), it's him.
Lottery winner gives people money to quit their jobs and start playing the lottery instead.
I've been in the IT industry for about 12 years without a degree and let me tell you. All the BS about college not being important for programmers is just that...BS! What I learned in the first 2 classes, Discrete Math and Computer Architecture, almost makes it worthwhile alone. Can you code without knowing how to solve recurrence relations or Djikstra's algorithm? Sure, but it's damned nice to have those additional tools in your kit. It's also handy to address a problem with a tested solution some math geek wrote a grad paper on 50 years ago rather than spending a month trying to figure it out yourself.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Getting a college degree, regardless of the major, requires discipline, persistence, and dedication. Now, it may be that there are many people out there who "didn't leran anything" from college. But if you managed to get a reasonable GPA (3.0 or higher), then you probably learned something, and you actually had to take the time to study for your classes. When I interview someone who has a good GPA, this is evidence (although not proof) to me that they can be given work to do, and they will understand it and get it done. Someone without a college degree lacks that evidence. They MAY have that kind of discipline, but I can't guess that very well from a short interview. (An alternative might be good references from past employers.)
Some claim that it is theoretically possible to do well in classes and then promptly forget everything you crammed. But that's disingenuous and discounts the effects of (a) subconscious learning, and (b) meta-learning. Even if you can't recall things you learned at will, you are often able to recall them in context. You forgot that you learned something. And meta-learning is more of a mind-shaping thing, where spending the time to learn some new subject matter forces you to think about things in an unfamiliar way. Even if you forget all the facts, it creates a broader view that makes you more adaptable. (This is why I prefer interviewees who had diverse minors.)
After 9 years in industry, I decided to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I found the advanced core courses in the grad program to be challenging, but they were not a fundamentally new way of thinking. On the other hand, there were the grad courses I took in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive engineering. Each of those fields has a culture quite different from what I am used to in CS, and taking those courses introduced me to very different perspectives on things. In order to do well in those courses (I did get all A's), I had to learn to think like them. The CS courses made me feel like I had learned some things I didn't know before. The courses in other disciplines made me feel like I had grown intellectually.
As a side note, those aforementioned areas seem to attract more women. Indeed, psychology, at least in grad school, is _dominated_ by women. Now, I'm happily married, so I had no interest in finding anyone to date. But for someone else, this might be something to look into. For me, what I enjoyed was encountering yet another perspective. For various reasons (cultural, genetic, hormonal, etc.), men and women seem to have different perspectives on many things. And in grad school, most of the students are very smart. So taking psych courses had me interacting with women who not only have a different perspective but also have the IQ and meta-cognitiion to be able to convey that perspective well to others. (Some of the differences are due to the different field, while some seemed to be clearly due to gender.) So, I enjoyed very much the things I could learn from them, especially those things that they understood better than the males in their field. On a similar note, I also enjoyed working with women in engineering. The diversity they bring includes not just different approaches to engineering, but also a "softer feel" they bring to the workplace, like how they decorate their offices and interact with others. I would probably feel less of a need to focus on this if there weren't so few women in computer science and engineering.