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Inside Peter Thiel's Genius Factory (backchannel.com)
In 2011 the Thiel Fellowship "was created to prove that a college degree doesn't matter," writes Backchannel, saying it's now evolved into something much more Silicon Valley. mirandakatz quotes their article:
What began as an attempt to draw teen prodigies to the Valley before they racked up debt at Princeton or Harvard and went into consulting to pay it off has transformed into the most prestigious network for young entrepreneurs in existence -- a pedigree that virtually guarantees your ideas will be judged good, investors will take your call, and there will always be another job ahead even better than the one you have.
This year's class are all established entrepreneurs -- some of whom have already graduated from college, according to the article, although having at least "stopped out" at some point remains a requirement for the program. "It's offensive, the way people ask about it," one fellow tells the reporter, who summarized his belief that "To go back [to Stanford] would imply personal failure. Why would he ever do that? He had his network started already, and clearly the opportunities came through the network... This network, he contended, was far more valuable than any he could build in college -- even at Stanford."
This year's class are all established entrepreneurs -- some of whom have already graduated from college, according to the article, although having at least "stopped out" at some point remains a requirement for the program. "It's offensive, the way people ask about it," one fellow tells the reporter, who summarized his belief that "To go back [to Stanford] would imply personal failure. Why would he ever do that? He had his network started already, and clearly the opportunities came through the network... This network, he contended, was far more valuable than any he could build in college -- even at Stanford."
So there are more entrepreneurs, creating more IOT gizmos and more Googles and more plastic that ends up in landfills, pushing us faster towards the Singularity. Is that being a successful person? A successful society? I didn't go to college and grad school to get a job or create a network: I went to become educated. I learned things that I could not have learned on my own because formal education provides rigor and a support structure that forces you to continue through it. Today, at 60, my biggest regret is that I did not finish my PhD and I am thinking about going back to school to study what I love - physics. Besides family, knowledge is all that has meaning to me at this point.