What Happened to the Thiel Fellows
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I suppose if you view college solely as a means to an end (success), then sure; however, a liberal education has value in and of itself.
But I suppose the above thinking is what we get when we make college a prerequisite for secure employment. People go to college to be successful. If you're already successful, what could you possibly learn at a college?
I want to say the self-centered egoism of believing that there is nothing you could gain from attending a place of higher learning is shocking. But it's not. Not here.
First, few are so motivated that they'd devote years to self-learning at the same scale as university provide. Next, it would be difficult to put together a cohesive curriculum for yourself because you don't know what you don't know. Relatedly, understanding the arc/trajectory to pick it difficult, and to do it all alone with no guidance means there's no one qualified that you can ask questions from on the daily. It also ignores the value of mentorship, learning from your peers, and being inspired and pushed by your environment. It also is isolating and does not give you any social benefits, business or personal networks.
Career-wise this has been a terrible life choice for me and I advise people to go to college for precisely the same reason you do. On the other hand career and material gain are only one aspect of life, I can't say with conviction that I really wish I'd done anything differently.
So, yeah. It seems like a completely correct view. My guess is that it will only become more and more correct with time, as the internet provides all the building blocks that colleges provide currently. The knowledge is already there. Credentials are there for some professions (Github > sheepskin). Networking is probably the hardest part, but hardly sounds undoable.
It is difficult for most to self-motivate 4+ years worth of self-study in isolation. Few would do that on their own. Further, getting a random stranger to mentor you for any real period of time is a difficult proposition without anything in return. Typically this only happens in extreme cases such as if you are a superstar and "worth their time."
If all you do is stay in your dorm and never venture out, then you're not getting much out of what the university offers, so that's not particularly relevant. You can also just not attend any classes either but that's not much of a comparison.
You're also ignoring majorly important components such as opportunistic learning from peers, being motivated by your environment, and having others guide you through subject matter when you don't know what you don't know. The internet cannot replace any of that as effectively.
Regardless, as mentioned before, if you think colleges do choose the best textbooks, you can find what textbooks they're using very easily.
My experience is that the best thing you can do is sample many textbooks and keep the ones you like best and are most likely to learn from.
That few people are willing to self-motivate for 4 years doesn't invalidate the possibility of doing it. I would also question the necessity to study for 4 years to learn most subjects.
The point about staying in your dorm is that if you're studying (i.e. not going out with your friends), it doesn't matter whether you're doing it at home or in a college dorm. You can socialize in other ways.
Serendipitous learning happens outside of colleges too. Etc. Etc.
Having been through college, and having learned a lot of things on my own, the only thing I think (some) colleges provide is just sheepskin prestige. If you want to work for a company that screens based on what university you went to, don't make the mistake of skipping that part. Learning-wise? I don't think it makes much of a difference.
One enters college to better themselves and for the purpose of a collaborative education.
One enters college to improve their ability to interact with the world in a meaningful fashion.
For those in the former camp, college is a means to an end. Those in the latter value the aspects of a collegial environment that you can't get elsewhere when learning. I find myself in both camps, I'd love to return for a PhD but it's such an economically poor decision that I don't.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-10-17/the-david-ru...
He isn't talking against all kinds of education. He is talking against large parts which is mostly things that could be taught via self study.
* Many people talk about forgetting things as soon as the test is over, but why would they remember it even that long without a test?
* A formal course is more than just reading the textbook; it's a guided tour by someone who is a professional teacher as well as someone working in the field. (Yes, some are bad. Most are at least middling and some a very good.)
* And then there is the whole issue of things you wouldn't study on your own if you weren't required to. A CS degree, for example, is more than a bunch of CS courses.
>but why would they remember it even that long without a test? If you learn something that bores you, sure. But I claim that when you learn not for a test you would properly inspect things and their domains and try to get insights into them, their necessity to the object being studied and so on.
On the other hand I think a lot of people who promote the mentality described in this article seem driven mostly by ego stroking ("I'm so smart and motivated I don't need college I just learn on my own") and remain ignorant.
Still this is an obviously great opportunity for any young person and is well worth exploring. College is a fine fallback if you "fail."
That may sound funny because if I can afford that tuition without a giant lifestyle change (like selling my house)[1] it means I've already made it, so why do I need to even get the MBA? In fact the average salary for an MBA grad from one of those schools is not that much more than I make as a CTO.
For one, I enjoy the challenge, the joy of learning, and the feeling of accomplishment. In short, it's a trophy. A luxury. For me at least.
[1] It would certainly be easier if I was a early 20-something going full-time with no wife, no kid, and no house. But that is not the reality I live in. For someone with those things going back to school when your employer doesn't pay for it (in my case my employer is my own startup) is a big deal.
I happen to like business! Kind of like if I decided to go into Medieval Literature. That fact an MBA is useful to my career is second to that I enjoy it.
With that said, if it does help me grow my next company larger without having to hire a CEO, or if it gets me a CTO job at a fortune 100, just a nice bonus.
Also, a lot of MBAs are a little smug when they talk to Software Engineers. Like "You need me." It would be nice to throw that back at them. Granted I know us Software Engineer throw it the other way just as often. Every technical founder things they don't need a business founder. And every business founder thinks they can outsource the job of technical founder.
> “It’s really the worst when school comes up,” Backus said. “It’s offensive, the way people ask about it.”
"Offensive" is a loaded word, and I wouldn't choose it were I to make a similar statement. But I could make a similar statement, because I'm also familiar with the prejudice that a lot of people have toward those of us who have not completed, or indeed begun, a course of tertiary education.
I'm not a wildly successful entrepreneur, of course. I'm not even an entrepreneur, and I sure as hell don't have a billionaire in my corner. I'm just a redneck with some smarts who's had a whole lot of luck, and managed to parlay those things into an uninspired but solid software engineering career. It surprises me to see that people who are wildly successful entrepreneurs have run into the same prejudice that I've long since grown accustomed to encountering. The old saying is that "nothing succeeds like success", but apparently there are some folks with whom that's just not so.
1) Yes, college could teach me a lot, but my resources (time and prime years) are finite, and I'm willing to make a tradeoff that forgoes some valuable elements in favor of an arrangement that helps me achieve my personal goals
2) College is not an option for me because it's incompatible with the reward centers in my brain and things like entrance exams, prerequisites, and the rigor and structure of academia are environments in which I flounder, not thrive.
There are many experiences in life that have value, but it is up to each individual to decide for themselves what they should pack into a few short years. It could just as easily be argued that the egoism is on the other side of the table for being so dismissive of alternative paths to success.
I don't mean that as a challenge. I really do mean to pick it apart. You can argue that this one is more meritocratic. It's also blatantly clear that it had an admissions committee of one.
Edit: And as someone else pointed out, you don't get the hard skills training that you get in university.
For every one time I leverage my college network I have 10 where I leverage my network I built after college.
This article and the Thiel Fellowship are implicit admissions that it's not what you know, but who. And that entrepreneurs don't need to know things, only people.
Whichmay go towards explaining why they tend not to address fundamental problems.
The fellowship's community is one of the few places I've found people like me, my age, who are so obviously better than me that I feel out of place being in the same room.
As with all communities, the quality of people vary (regardless of how you define quality), but the fellowship has the highest concentration of smart young people that I've ever experienced.
I never went to university and don't have that as a point of reference, but I have a hard time believing I'd find a similarly concentrated group anywhere else.
But as someone who went to a non-Ivy school, and spent my 4 years getting an education that I truly feel has added a ton of value to my life, and to who I am... I just get offended at his attitude that college is for dunces. (And yes, it is my own problem if someone offends me, but that is a separate discussion). I will never claim that college is the right path for everybody, and I think that getting a job is the wrong reason to go. But the snide attitude that going to college actually makes you a lesser person, and recommending people drop out... that shows a deep misunderstanding of what higher education is really about.
Just because you need to educate yourself you don't need an education.
Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering alternatives an act of war?
That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online.
There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.
Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.
Education != college degree
Milo was sold to eBay, not Amazon.
I'm sure there is some meritocracy involved too, but I'm willing to bet that as a Thiel Fellow, you would learn faster than a university would allow (school of hard knocks?), while still accomplishing less than a more experienced entrepreneur. Experience matters, and being a Thiel Fellow is just a riskier but potentially faster way of acquiring it.
I am pretty sure Theil would agree that some things do require an education such as hard science, medical or engineering. (Although it's certainly possible without)
> It became one of the most elite credentials for young entrepreneurs.
Umm, really? "Elite" in the classical sense of "drawn out of the larger pool", sure, but in the sense of somehow being better than the run of the mill group, I don't see it.
> none of the successful dropouts ever went back to school.
Famously Michal Dell did to make his mum happy. Woz, under an alias.
Steve Wozniak went back to school (UC Berkeley, using an alias) and finished a degree. Though I suppose he's kind of a special case.
Can the institutionalized top down approach to education have room for improvement? Yes. The education to economic output per student ratio can always improve (I don't have a number for this).
But the role diploma, degrees, certificates play as social credits that gives preferential treatment over the have-nots in terms of opening doors is understated.
Rather, I think "sociopathic" is deficient in that it underplays the structural determinants of such behaviors, while placing judgment on the fellows themselves. That's not fair—they are basically high schoolers, often without the cultural capital and social analytical skills conferred by top schools.