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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."
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?
No, but he'll prevent some of his future competitors from being more educated than him.
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.
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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
These days, you don't go to college to get an education. You go to college to get a piece of paper that gets you a job.
When that's the mentality, everyone has the assumption that you have to go to college to get a job, everyone goes to college, and college standards have to be lowered to give everyone an equal opportunity. At the same time, colleges have realized what a cash cow "educations" are and have been jacking up rates like no man's business. Let me tell you another secret. I went to GT for my bachelor's degree. Everything that I learned came from my own studying. I could have sat in my basement with textbooks and a computer, table, and desk lamp and learned the same materials because I was always either in the classroom or library anyway. Nothing special about these places. The only "special" thing required is to have a curriculum designed which amounts to little more than having a syllabus. Trade secrets from the professor? Didn't learn any. The lecturer's PowerPoint slides? Please. The few lab resources that I actually used? Sorry, but I had a more capable lab built by the time I was a sophomore with funds from my summer/part-time jobs and purchasing old equipment on eBay.
I'm still $42k in debt, and the wife is going crazy about it. I think that Pete Thiel is trying to make the statement that this whole college process is completely haywire and that you don't need a college degree to be successful. Just some intelligence, creativity, some books, and a desire to learn on one's own and a drive to innovate. But what would I know having been through this twice already?
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.
Maybe he feels like student loans hold people back from starting new businesses... compelling people to get a full time job as soon as possible. Just a thought.
I agree about the pointless brain-dead professional manager types that turn up everywhere. However:
If you want to be a productive citizen that actually does things? College is a good idea.
Education is a good idea. College is fine but it's only one way to get an education.
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
Lottery winner gives people money to quit their jobs and start playing the lottery instead.
As a blanket statement? For the IT field? Bullshit.
You can be very successful in technology with no degree whatsoever. You just have to be willing to put in the time and the work yourself.
If you're computer literate, can write basic code, have a reasonably broad exposure to different OS and hardware platforms (enthusiastic hobbiest), you can get an entry-level job. You'll spend the four years that you would have spent in college in the field, doing grunt work. At the end of that time, chances are good that you and the recent college grad may be competing for the same jobs. They'll have skipped the cable-monkey/printer-minder stage, and you'll have skipped out on OS theory. However, you as an enthusiast are probably hanging out in the same community of user groups and nerds that they are, and that's where a lot of the real practical learning is - in the sharing of new information amongst peers, not the dictation of established doctrine in the classroom.
The hard part for the non-degreed is establishing credentials, and it's all up to you to do that. Your degree is a certification that you're (supposedly) not an idiot, and it's tangible. As someone without that piece of paper, you have to establish that cred yourself - by contributing to FOSS projects, writing your own tools, getting your name known in the community. I'm more likely to hire the guy with no degree and five OSS projects to his name than someone with a freshly minted BS in comp-sci, to be honest.
I've no degree - all my credentials come from my body of work, professional network and peers. I did my time as a field tech, parlayed my experience with my hobby pursuits into a systems management job, learned all I could in the process, then moved into systems analysis and engineering, picking up skills as needed on the fly. Now, I'm sitting nicely in a position with a solid six-figure salary and 17 years of an established reputation backing me up.
A BS is an ante into the game, but after that both the academic and the street-smart have to play their cards well to advance.
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
I went to GT for a BS and an MS. Could I have learned about 80% of what I learned there by getting some syllabus off the internet and hunkering down in my basement? Maybe. Would I have been motivated to do so? No, especially when I was 18. Would I have had a network of people around me for moral support and to answer questions? No. Would I have been in an environment which helped me stay focused and learn what I needed to? No. Were there times when I asked myself if it was worth it? A few. Would I have done it again? Absolutely. I have an awesome job and a great resume of education and employers and I really don't know what things would have been like if I had dropped out of high school. I am pretty sure I wouldn't be where I am now. I didn't have the wisdom or maturity when I was 18 that I do now.
Just a caveat: I was an instate resident and I got out of school without a single cent of debt.
I think most people who have been through college and are working in the field where they got their degree have no right to say anything against it. It's easy to deny one's reality in hindsight and talk about how things "could have been different" but we really won't ever know...when starting college most people are pretty "green", and that needs to be taken into account when thinking back on it as well. People are bitter right now because the job market sucks as well...imagine being in this job market without a degree at all. Yeah.
The answer is to recruit as many wannabe Zuckerbergs as you possibly can, throw money and some guidance at them, and if any of them show promise, you're in a position to invest heavily in them and get in on the next FaceBook or Google from day 1. It's a long-shot bet, sure. But long-shot bets are worth taking, if the potential payoff is large enough and the amount you wager is low enough. Imagine a lottery where it costs 1$ to play, and the odds of success are 1%, but the payoff is 4000:1. What would you do? You'd buy as many tickets as you can. Spending a modest (by Thiel's standards) $2 million dollars for a 1% chance of making another $2 billion dollars is a damn clever investment. The downside is fixed (2 million) and not enough to hurt, but the potential upside is virtually unlimited.
If you're one of the people applying for Thiel's grants, however, the risk:benefit calculus works out a bit differently. Thiel is hedging his bets, he's got 24 grantees, if he runs the program for four years he would have almost 100 startups. He only has to have one modest success to break even, and if every single company is an abject failure, he hasn't really lost much. Heck, the whole thing is a foundation, so I assume it's even tax-deductible. He has a reasonable shot of winning and can hardly lose. The grantee is in a very different situation. I'm totally pulling numbers out of my ass, but I would guess that 90% of these companies will fail to ever break even, 10% will make some profit, and 1% will be real successes. So you're trading 2 years of your life, and 2 years of college, for a fairly modest sum of money and an extremely remote chance of starting a major company. It's kind of like dropping out of college and a conventional career path to run off to L.A. and become a rock star or an actor. Sure, you could win huge, but odds are you won't. On the other hand, the real-world experience gained in starting and running a company, and the mentorship, are arguably more useful than what you'll learn in college and would probably be attractive to a lot of companies, especially if you could show that you did manage to produce and learn something in those two years. And hell, maybe one of them will even invent the Next Big Thing.
And of course, this kind of gambling is probably stupid at the individual level but it's vital at a societal level. If everyone took the conventional path then we'd have a nation of actuaries, doctors, bankers, management consultants, and lawyers, and no movie directors, rock stars, artists, novelists, or visionary CEOs. If nobody took these kinds of risks, you wouldn't have companies like Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Microsoft. You wouldn't have the Beatles, Tom Hanks, or Harry Potter, either. For most people, you'd be a fool to take Thiel's wager, you'll be safer and happier staying on the safe path. But for a small percentage, it's a hell of an opportunity and an experience, and encouraging this type of risk-taking could produce a lot of benefits for the whole of society, for all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and management consultants and actuaries. Overall, I think that Thiel is probably right, that a lot of our best and brightest are being encouraged to play it too safe, that we're probably squandering a lot of talent pushing really smart kids into safe career paths in management consulting, investment banking, and medicine. And at the same time, I hope he's encouraging these kids to have some backup plans.