Slashdot Mirror
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.
College stifling innovation? Is that the feeling here? There are schools that do encourage innovation and project type education. Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass. is one of them.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
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?
When I first saw this on Fark I got excited that he was going to give people money to do an apprenticeship or maybe start their own hands on company. No, he's paying people that he hopes will be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. We need a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the latter.
Seems like a gimmick, to me. You know, as opposed to an innovative idea.
For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
100,000 dollars really isn't that much money.
I would go back to college! I wish I had money to continue my education...
The net present value of a college degree in the U.S. is greater than $100,000 plus the two years of tuition saved. However, if you were going to drop out anyway, it's a good deal. Or, if you can drop out for a minimum period of time, take the gamble, then go back, it might be a somewhat good deal.
This is just stupid. Yes, some people will do better starting a company instead of going to college (myself included), but that is not the rule, that is the exception.
The vast majority will do worst if they drop college to start a company. Heck, most will crash and burn starting a company even after college.
The numbers of factor determining "success without/instead of college" is staggering, and it is not about $100k (heck, I did it with a quarter of that).
morcego
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.
But if you do choose to attend later, after you gain some real-world experience, you have a much better capacity to understand and learn what it is you are being taught.
That has some real value.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I mean, some of these kids already have degrees. One of them I read attended classes at a university since he was 10. Or how about this one:
"Andrew Hsu started doing research in a pathology lab when he was 10. By the time he was 12, he had matriculated at the University of Washington. Soon after, he graduated with honors degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. He was a 19-year-old 4th-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University when he left early this year to pursue his start-up, Airy Labs."
So this kid is under 20, but he already had 3 Bachelor's degrees and was a year from finishing a Ph.D. These kids are all smart and highly motivated, and it seems they're going to receive a significant amount of mentorship through this fellowship.
But just considering the failure rate of new startups, how would the Thiel Foundation look if 18/20 of their proteges are out of business in a year? My guess is the Foundation will be injecting money and talent into these ventures to avoid such a PR disaster.
I dropped out of University in 1996. I've never regretted anything in my life more than this. I'm happy with my life now, I have a good career and a family that I love, but I still think that dropping out was the biggest mistake I ever made. If I had the money, I'd go back, but it wouldn't be the same experience now.
Don't go to "college". Come to our "fellowship" and take "classes" where we will mentor you and teach you things. That doesn't sound like a university at all...
The main difference is that they will probably dedicate more time an money for these students which will somehow prove it is better not to go to college... and they'd be right. It is probably better to get taken under the wing of a billionaire and get a free education than go to college.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
As we're talking about superstars here it's probably not going to affect them much either way. Self-starters generally know how to teach themselves anyway. Would would be better is if there was a tight bond between the grant and the school they're dropping out of and, perhaps, instead of dropping out for a period of time the University in question could give them credit or grant a different form of degree.
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.
Skipping it can be just fine if someone has the right idea and the capabilities to transform into a product. However, because it is a mean to an end, it can provide knowledge and inspiration to achieve the same goals. I see a very demagogic move here, that doesn't take into account the numbers. The very few that made it without college cannot be compared to the thousands that did it BECAUSE of college. Besides, I have seen many of the startups that Peter Thief is sponsoring, and while there are good ideas flowing, most of them work in a completely disoriented, uncoordinated way. These companies (I cannot name them) are run by people that do not possess the rigour and the focus that will ultimately lead them to fail. The same lack of rigour and focus were the same reason for them to drop out from college. Furthermore, while you can easily establish a software company with no training (in fact training may be going against you), I just don't see how you can do it in the bio- or nano-tech, with completely no exposure to basic concepts or science and technology.
So giving away 2 million dollars to the the top twenty applicants with a good idea is not really going to tell us anything. First, many of the innovations we see today were created using college resources. Bill Gates dropped out of harvard to do software, but it is alleged that he used campus resources to start. 100K is not going to get you campus resoureces. Dell sold computers out of his college dorm.
My thought is that people who want to drop out of college and go out and change the world do it. Some stay to maintain access to university resources. In any case the university will continue to be a basis of training for innovation. I have never had access to the equipment in the real worl that I had in University, and familiarity with that equipment has transferred to many other projects.
What would make me impressed is if there were 2 million dollars for high school students who start a tech firm prior to graduation. That woud accelerate innovation.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It does make for an interesting experiment because going to college gives you a formal, theoretical background but doesn't actually prepare you for the workplace nor does it make you necessarily a better employee or manager. There are poor managers that have business/managerial degrees. I have a decent career in a field totally unrelated to what I studied. I was a Criminal Justice major that ended up in IT. I am entirely self-taught and I am running my own part-time business to supplement income. To be successful, you must be willing to have an attitude of "life-long learning." I remember my first IT job was a low level help desk job that basically involved taking tickets and routing them so I spent time on my own to learn and improve. I learned basic networking by building one in my house. I also made use of the internet to read up on networking technologies and TCP/IP. If we were slow, I asked questions of the engineers to learn more. Due to my own motivation to be a "life-long learner," I quickly got out of that low level help desk position and on to desktop support and beyond. I have seen many people come out of college with degrees in Information Technology and I can run circles around them. I would hope that Peter Thiel would also encourage learning.
I agree with his points suggesting education is hinted at far too strongly, especially Universities. I abandoned my degree in the second year feeling that there is far less market for them (not just degree-dependant jobs, but jobs that a degree can help you with). And when you see the value of a degree declining when education is mainly a way to give you skills to work, to earn, to make money and keep capitalism rolling, it makes you think. To get a suave job nowadays you now benefit more from side projects, work experience and the things you do besides the degree. If everyone has a degree in computer science, you cant define yourself with it. So I say, good on him, but giving kids money to start businesses won't go far. It pushes ideas-for-profit over ideas-for-innovation...and many things these days aren't innovation, they're rebrands. Oh, and kids? Good luck getting around all the patents... *chuckles*
I discovered the internet in the 80's, at university, and totally fell in love with the whole concept of special interest news groups, email, and using ftp to get freely available software. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to create a "BBS" (the only term I could think of to apply to it at the time), which would provide a number of dial-up lines to allow the general public to connect to it. I began doing some research to figure out what the cost of running such an operation would be, starting with 16 phone lines, and working my way up from there once the company started to make a profit. I also inquired with the university about out how much it would cost to lease a connection from them, situated relatively close to the campus, and calculated the cost of laying down the necessary cable, and the start up costs worked out to be in the many tens of thousands of dollars. I wanted the service to be affordable, and was hoping to charge 5c per minute, or preferably even less. I didn't expect the phone lines to be in use all the time, so I estimated how busy I expected the phone lines to be, based on an amount I figured was reasonable from my experience with multiuser chat BBS's, and calculated that near the start of the 2nd year of operation, while making enough money to cover all of its own ongoing costs the whole time, it would have made enough on top of that to completely pay for the start up costs, and at that point would be completely self-sustaining and could start to grow.
I approached someone I happened to personally know who worked in the loans department for a bank to give him an unofficial pitch for my idea. I wanted to approach it as a business loan, and that seemed reasonable to myself and the other fellow that I had recruited into helping me do the research.
He thought it was really innovative, but he thought that my estimates on usage were very high, since this sort of thing was wholly unproven, and said that I would probably not be able to get a loan for the amounts that I would have needed to start up.
*sigh*
If only...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Big deal.
I had a girlfriend that made more than that when she was 18. Brought home $900 a night on average. Worked as a drinks girl at the sands and had GIANT boobs. She had the brains to get over the stupid "they look at me like 'im an object" objection because she knows that men stare at a hot chick with giant boobs... So she cashed in on it.
Too bad she went crazy and went all religious on me....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
or does this just smack as another attack on Education. It seems everywhere I go I keep hearing how poor kids don't need college, books, classrooms, teachers. They just need to work. I'm reminded about how robber barons in the 1800s used to argue against the 40 hour work week, saying the working classes would just use it to drink (idle hands... devil's play thing).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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
He already has 2 patents before he was accepted by Stanford, and has already opened more than 10 companies, and his current company already has significant backing. Peter Thiel's award is only given to people who don't need college.
For many private colleges, $100k is about what it costs to go to school for 2 years (incl room/board).
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.
Does the world need 20 new pot dispensaries, record labels, and social media copycat companies? Why not just hire 20 people who didn't go to college for jobs that would otherwise require a college degree? Then he can tell us in 6 months how well that worked out for Paypal.
Lottery winner gives people money to quit their jobs and start playing the lottery instead.
It is rare for people to drop out of college and start a successful business. If students at least wait to get a degree, they will have something to fall back on in the likely event that their companies fail.
It would be better use of the money if they pay off student loans of the top students so that they can pursue entrepreneurship instead of relying on getting corporate jobs to pay back their loans.
I have an idea for a website, its like Twitter but we make you pay for it
Getting paid to drop out of college? These kids are going to need that $100,000 just to pay back the loans they've already taken, only now they'll have nothing to show for it. Now, if you're already about to fail out this is a great idea, but otherwise, I think it's really dumb. College is not just about learning, it's an experience in of itself, where we learn who we really are, what we really want to do in life, etc. Coming out of high school I thought I knew it all, I thought I could start my own company, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, blah blah blah. How wrong I was - I could not handle a company with the limited experience I had at that point in my life, and I ended up figuring out I really didn't want to be a doctor, but rather go into IT. And I'm much happier for it! Had I dropped out of college, and taken this guy's deal, I would've had no degree, and a failed company with a lot of debt. I'm not saying nobody can do it, there's many cases of those that did, but they are a vast minority - most people would fail miserably and then have no degree to fall back on, not to mention missing out on the whole college experience.
:-)
Only idiots would take this deal, and shame on this guy for offering it - unless his intent of course is to eliminate his future competition now
Please... go read about the people who got the 100k before assuming they're just your average 19-year-old:
http://thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=19
There're people who're already in PhD programs by the time they're 19, and then people who'd founded venture backed companies before they got accepted by Stanford. These guys are not your average 19-year-olds. They're given the 100k precisely because they don't need the education any more. And very probably also because they don't really need the money.
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!
For me? Yeah, probably a good 40K, maybe more. Every single year.
..but if PayPal existed in the 80's, so would ISPs and your idea for dial up internet wouldnt seem to smart and innovative..
This is another example of how markets are usurping all facets of society. Though I’m sure there are logically valid (but not sound) arguments to be made for skipping college from a market perspective, higher education is about a lot more than technical or job training, or at least it should be. Higher education is about becoming a better-rounded human being, not about being an entrepreneur, tycoon, cog, or what have you.
I know that’s overbearing of me to say, and I don’t really mean to dictate why people should or shouldn’t seek a higher degree, but this kind of thing just smacks of a direct assault by the ‘market mentality’ on competing bastions of social structure. This is a good springboard into a much wider discussion about how we are becoming a market dominated society, but I don’t have the time (my market duties call).
There's one thing I've learned after having borrowed and spent nearly $100,000 to get an MBA; about 90% of new companies fail within 5 years. So, if he's spending $2 million to allow 20 semi-educated people to try to start new companies, maybe 2 will succeed. Still, it's an interesting experiment.
Maybe he just watched this video: College Conspiracy.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
As a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel benefits from a larger pool of potential innovators to work from. Even better if they're college-age whiz kids who will work for pizza and beer. He's very skilled and knowledgeable at identifying winners, but he's also operating under a huge capital blanket that allows him to spread his bets and mitigate his losses.
The other side of this equation is the kid who takes him up on the bet. For every one that's actually successful, there may be 10 or 100 grant recipients who fail, and hundreds of thousands of grant applicants who take up Thiel's challenge but don't end up qualifying for the grant anyway. So, this is ultimately a losing proposition for many, as is often the case.
It is really important that young people recognize that the handful of startups that succeed enormously, distorted by the myopic lens of the media, are vastly outnumbered by the carcasses of miserable failures, many of which were well-planned, well-executed, but simply not in the right place at the right time with the right connections. And here's the rub: The two most talented pools of business innovation fellows come out of Stanford and MIT... which not only teach the necessary skills to make successful ventures, but also put those students in an environment conducive to building the right networks of people with fresh ideas that they can get off the ground before anyone else. Notice I didn't say "get there first"... Many get there first, and then don't know what to do from there, and never get truly off the ground.
Consider on a smaller scale the movie review websites Cinemablend and Ain't It Cool News... There are seas of film websites that come and go, but these two were able to monetize successfully simply by virtue of being among the first to get there, and they both rely on a relatively endless supply of free labor. But even they are working constantly just to stay in place. I know a guy who runs a film website with huge traffic and he can barely pay himself, let alone his 50 tireless volunteers.
Apple was there early. Google was there early. Facebook wasn't there first but they were in the right place (both Harvard and Stanford) at the right time, and they made some key innovations that no other social networks had thought of (most people who want to find former classmates go to Facebook. It's funny what one single field of data can do... but Facebook thought of it, and implemented it well).
So it's really critical to have a backup plan because the fact is, the market is so saturated that statistically most of you will never be a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, etc. It would be great to see it, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Peter Thiel is another story... because no matter how many of you lose, he still wins.
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.
As usual, you get to pick two of them. Quicker and cheaper (less out-of-pocket cost for you) usually sacrifices quality.
Personally, I doubt this would work for anyone except for an entrepreneur; I certainly know I learned a lot in college and I don't think I'd take that trade, definitely not to start my own company - I'm not cut out for it. Whether or not I'll use all of what I learned in college, I still realize that more than anything else college is a place to prove yourself and show that you're able to learn. If you're able to learn, you're able to succeed, both in college and in the real world.
I've pretty much been doing what I wanted to do while in college and afterwards. Money was never the main goal - just doing interesting and cool technical stuff. And adequate money has appeared on the sidelines.
"key to quicker business innovation is skipping college"
I would agree with that.
From what I has seen by the time people are done with college they are far to tired and drained to have much enthusiasm and innovative juices to actually accomplish something neat. And that is not even mentioning that they will likely be swimming in debt.
College is for getting jobs, if you want to innovate and/or own your own business then I cannot see it helping.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Aha, now I understand why PayPal's customer service sucks!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
a pedestrian grasp of social inequality recognizes the chances of his investment "paying off" are remote. the donation is the whimsy of a rich and powerful man who obviously read a few social science or crowdsourcing articles and became incensed to offset his tax burden through some form of experimental donation.
100,000 dollars is alot of money, certainly, but it isnt anywhere near enough to build and sustain an innovative technology company. startups typically work with around 1-2 million dollars. afterwards you'll need to take into account your level of social "power." How well are you connected with bankers, lawyers, and the technology industry as a whole?
Good people go to bed earlier.
You know the old saw about those who know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. I can't speak to the situation today, because for a whole host of factors there seems to have been a general, across-the-board decline in standards and quality for undergraduate study. Suffice to say I did not complete my first round of college (I quit after 3 years), but went on to get a degree in another (somewhat related) discipline much later in life. Perhaps I was fortunate to encounter a few stellar teachers, and I mean world-class, in both situations. I owe them everything. Maybe you can teach yourself coding and/or business at home. Pity if that's all you'll ever learn....
I think it is possible for many people to be successful in business. In my very humble opinion, the businesses that have a high rate of failure are trying to do something too innovative or hair-brained to be brought to market. Seven years ago, I learned that lesson the hard way to the tune of 20,000.00. Since the United States' economy is essentially one of goods and services, you can make a decent living by offering a service. It isn't necessary to have some innovation to be successful - just look at the number of cleaning services and computer repair services where the owner(s) don't strike it rich but they have a modicum of financial stability in their lives. The key in whatever you do is customer service and it often differentiates the fly-by-nights from the professional. I don't patronize a business if I don't get good customer service and I don't mind parting with my money if I really felt welcomed. I am employed full time and have recently started a part time business doing computer repair but I've made a name for myself by treating every customer with respect, and honesty, as if they were friends of mine. I don't make a killing and I could certainly charge more money but I don't. I get business by word of mouth and my customers have said, "Oh I have a friend - oops- I meant I know someone who will do reliable fair work." So on my days off, I usually have two or three people drop off computers and I get a repair assembly line going in the comfort of my own home. It is easy work and I get satisfaction from customers telling me that their one or two hundred dollars has been well spent.
Hey, I have a innovative idea. How about a website where whistle blowers can send information, this information can then be verified and published online. Want to help me out?
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. -Mark
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.
Besides the fact that he makes it sound like everybody makes it big ... and I thought NPR had a good analogy comparing it to all local bands going on to become rock stars (even considering the 80s/90s), it is the fact the fact he makes college all about ROI. That's the FUCKING problem! You don't always do things for financial reasons, but just to know life, to help others, and try to see the world a little better for what it really is.
Don't get me wrong, I support my family alone on my income and understand the power of money. Maybe it's growing up in a pedagogical family (Mom-public school special ed teach; Dad-engineer and part-time University professor), but for me one of the greatest things that can be purchased is an education. I wish that it could be free and equal to all, but that isn't going to happen. The fact is knowledge is the one thing you can possess that is difficult to remove (short of brain injury of some fashion). Knowledge is the flaming torch given from the serpent to the proles to keep their masters in check. Who watches the watchers? An educated public.
So, go on .. chase that lottery. Drink your Victory Gin. You're doing exactly what they want you to do.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
So the Thiel Fellowship is like a private school/club then? So like...someone 18 hangs with other 18-19 year old peeps and gets $100k?
Sounds like yet another reason why I was born too soon.
Ave Molech Setting
And look at me now! I'm a Sr. Software Architect and the author of dozens of hit games like Bard's Tale III. :)
Most 4-year degrees are not worth the price of admission. In our necessarily employment-focused world, most liberal arts degrees are totally worthless. Instead, completing a certain college with a certain GPA acts as an indicator of your potential worth to an employer. It's a $100,000 standardized test. The stuff you learned may help you on Jeopardy, but not in your job.
Even with focused disciplines like Computer Science, about half of the courses are useless for employment sake. Learning programming, design, teamwork, project planning, management, etc. are useful. Chemistry and calculus are not.
At some point people will realize this and stop paying $100k for college.
Thiel doesn't think college is worth the time/expense because he majored in philosophy. Of course philosophy degrees aren't worth anything, but biotech and engineering are not the sorts of things you pick up by reading a couple of books, and you can't start a biotech company or do any engineering R&D for a paltry $100K. If you're an art history major and you want to drop out to start an ad agency or become a life coach, then by all means, take the money and drop out; but I will bet all takers that none of these people will make a meaningful contribution to a technological field without first receiving a formal education. However, we may see one or more contraptions which claim to defy the laws of thermodynamics as that is the sort of thing that people without fundamental understanding of scientific principles tend to do.
Well, regardless of right or wrong, it will be interesting to see the outcome of the people who take him up on his offer...2 yrs out...10 yrs out...20 yrs out. It's a good social experiment.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
First thing that those not going to college will do when they start their companies is go out and hire people who went to college.
Except nobody is getting career-level positions these days unless they're super-lucky or ubermensch. Good looking finding a decent job in this economy.
I'm 100% sure I read about this (well 99% sure it was this EXACT thing, with the 1% being someone else paying for kids to not go to school and start a business) RIGHT HERE on slashdot about a year or two ago. I want to call dupe, but the search function isn't really working too well for me right now...
I'd also add that whoever has a "college degree required for this position" job generally also hopes that because somebody managed to get a degree, they probably (hopefully) have the worst of the immaturity out of their system. The degree holder would have had to have lived away from their parents for a few years and been exposed to The World and not completely succumbed to booze, laziness, drugs, etc. to get that degree. I personally think college is an awfully expensive and wasteful method to try to have people grow up a little before starting a Real Job (I'd prefer to have seen people worked full-time at some place and have a decent work record), but that's certainly a mindset of HR people.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Sounds to me like he's giving them a scholarship w/generous stipend to the Thiel College of Business...
Sure, he will give you $100,000. But then after three months he will take it all back and refuse to explain why. Eventually he will send you this email and declare the case closed.
Thank you for contacting PeterThiefIsYourPal. We apologize for the delay in responding to your service request.
After review, the decision has been made to keep your account locked. This decision cannot be appealed.
If you have any further questions, please go stick your head in a bucket of water.
The purpose of College is not to learn how to do coding, although most people in CS or Engineering will undoubtedly pick some up along the way. College is not about how to do stuff, but learning how stuff works, learning how to learn, and learning a little bit of a wide variety of fields (thus the need for the electives and first couple of years of prerequisites).
If you really just want a code monkey, you should get someone from a trade school. Someone with a college degree in Engineering doing coding is being underutilized. They should be creating specs, engineering a solution, perhaps building a working model and then handing it down to the junior techs to develop.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
When I read about this idea, for some reason, I just can't help imagining it being the brainchild of Cave Johnson...
"Those eggheads say we're falling behind in science because we don't have enough college graduates--well, I say we have too many college graduates! Everywhere you look, college graduates! It's getting so you can't pick them out of a crowd. What we need to do is take away those cushy scholarships we keep handing out--hell, we should be giving kids money not to go to college! Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea... Caroline, take a memo..."
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I can imagine pulling off a successful IT start-up without formal education, but a biotech company (which is among the fields listed)?
You won't even get (legally) access to microorganisms and chemicals without excellent professional standing ... and I really do not see how you could get sufficiently self-educated for anything in this field beyond running a microbrewery....
Just wait until your grant account is frozen by PayPal...
in a sense. Not an accredited one, they are not going to get a degree from it, but that's exactly what the "mentorship from the Foundationâ(TM)s network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators" will be.
The difference is that they will not have to go through the painful part of American college education that's called "general education requirements". Since these people will presumably be selected in some way, we can assume that they will already be reasonably well educated from high school. Such students, in many other countries, would not be taking any "general education" classes anyway, and would go straight to studying the subject they are interested in. It seems like that's exactly what's happening here, except the studying will be more hands on that in a regular college. In addition, it seems like they will actually be paid for it, rather than paying for it themselves.
AccountKiller
As a side note: The lowest grade you can achieve in Graduate School is a B. Getting an A at a graduate level in your chosen field is far easier than getting an A in your requirements where you have no experience to understand the scope and requirements necessary to achieve that aim. Example: When one takes Differential Equations or Modern Physics you don't walk in with a foundation already aware of what to expect. You do when you are in Graduate School.
and an excuse. "I dropped out of college to start a business and it failed." Then you can say you learned a lot from it in job interviews and go back to college while working another job. Hey I would do it if I were 20. I'd start a business in something I like. If it failed in 3 years you are still only 23 and could go to finish college by 25/26.
Only 'flamers' flame!
One of the points made, as if it is a positive, is that the intellectual property would not go to a university. The U.S is very a sad place these days.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Thank you very much.
As an individual holding a master degree, I found that university teaches you to be analytical, and either expressive or introverted. It does not teach you to really be innovative. How can you be innovative when you are deeply analytical. So, who succeeds in business when you look at the population at large? It is rarely the University grad.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Why under 20?
I'm sure there's plenty of 45yr olds that are out of a job and have some real spanking new ideas.
On reason it's harder for older folks if they have responsibilities (kids, house, car, family, etc...) where as 20yr olds can just forget everyone.
Degree costs are going up. Does it make sense to acquire a $50K college degree for a job that pays $30K, then purchase a $20K car loan, then add the standard cost of living to that amount? There are people in their late 40s and early 50s who are still struggling with the undergrad student loans, never mind the almost-mandatory master's degree loan. Gen X, Gen Y, etc all have increasing levels of personal debt at younger ages. Our public debt exceeds GDP and that won't change for the next 30 to 50 years. How much debt can a nation stand before we collapse USSR style?
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato