Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
First he is going to select the brightest kids in the best schools. These kids already have higher than usual chance of success. Then he is going to give them 100k each. That will also increase their chances of success. Then he is going help them with advice and networking as much as he can which will also increase their chances of success.
This is all good and well. I have no problem with Peter Thiel helping a bunch of kids with money advice and networking.
But THEN he is going to say "look, my dropouts succeeded therefore education sucks therefore you are better off dropping out." A lot of kids will drop out when they are not the best in the class, when they do not have the help of Peter Thiel, and they will be fucked.
Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college.
Again this is usually not a problem (not all charity needs to be a social experiment) except for the fact that Peter Thiel obviously wants to use his scholarships as a social experiment. He wants to use them as something to criticize colleges and education with.
Peter Thiel is a very smart person (and ironically also very well educated) so he knows very well this is a rigged experiment. He designed it this way. He has an agenda, and this is to bring out some kind of libertarian utopia to the US. He thinks that academia stands in the way of this political goal and he wants to attack and destroy academia by destroying academic institutions. None of this is a conspiracy theory, he is actually pretty open about all of the above.
And again, I do not have a problem with that in general, any American has a right to be politically active, and to work to bring about what he believes are positive political changes to his/her country.
But again he is using a rigged social experiment in his fight against academia. As bystanders we should be very well aware that this experiment means absolutely nothing and resist his urges to conclude that it means that education is worthless.
What do you mean by state's religion?
I don't even oppose Thiel's initiative, I just don't think it has particularly broad implications. If the non-college-attending kids in his program do well, a reasonable conclusion to draw is: if you have someone willing to give you $100k and introduce you to good business connections, in lieu of attending university, then that is quite possibly a good opportunity to take.
If you don't have such an offer, on the other hand...
I personally view this as a publicity stunt. I imagine it cannot be replicated in fields such as mathematics or biochemistry.
It may be fun to watch...
I'm not sure that needed demonstration.
It'd be a whole lot more meaningful to test an alternative education program - maybe get people learning online or doing apprenticeships, something people could actually do without massive sponsorship - and create a credentialing system that's actually selective and credible, so those people aren't at a disadvantage in the job market. Something like that would actually take aim at the prestige of higher education.
There already exists a control group: the class of students starting elite schools in 2011. The question Thiel is asking is: What would happen to an exceptional kid who, instead of attending a top-tier college, entered a entrepreneurship program instead?
If it turns out that Thiel's kids are more successful than the average Harvard grad, then Thiel will have demonstrated that, at least for exceptional kids, going to an elite college may not be the best option.
Yeah, that's not going to be contested by too many people.
He is against the existing institutionalized education system that we have.
If anything he is a huge supporter of education, trying to find a new, more efficient way to do it than the current bureaucratic mess we have right now.
Now, I loved college, and it certainly did a lot for me. But would I be better off today if someone had offered me the same money on the same terms to start my own business? Almost certainly.
There are definitely some good reasons to stay in school, but this article rubbed me the wrong way. Take for example, a couple of the arguments presented:
Argument: You get a lot of valuable social connections from being in school. Counterargument: You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university. Why not connect with smart ambitious people of all ages that are working in your field? If the main value of elite colleges is that they screen bright students and bring them together for 40K a year, the students are getting ripped off.
Argument: Mark Zuckerberg was successful because he was vetted and educated by Harvard. Counterargument: This seems highly unlikely. No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated. And, Zuckerberg was an accomplished hacker before he came to Harvard.
Argument: Most successful entrepreneurs are not drop outs. Counterargument: That is because most people who try entrepreneurship are not drop outs. A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed. An even better question, is whether the same person is more likely to succeed if he/she drops out. Unfortunately, the last question is impossible to answer.
I've always felt like FB's success was due more to good timing and marketing (using recursive network effect) than anything else.
Create that community. I fear that is harder done than said, given that none really exists.
No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated.
I don't know if Mark can do Facebook at Harvard and get traction w/o being a Harvard student. At the very least Facebook probably doesn't exist w/o a Harvard -- a collection of young exclusives who are technically saavvy. No Harvard means no Facebook, one way or another.
A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed.
A better question, IMO, do we need more startups than are currently being created? Imagine if college enrollment is cut in half. And we increase the number of startup companies by a factor of 20x. Is that net good? Will innovation and goodness increase as a result? I'm not sure it will.
It's almost as if the self-selection of having to choose to leave Stanford/Harvard is a good funnel for founders.
This is an ad hominem, dressed up nicely. And from the article that I just read (maybe we're being A/B tested for ideology?), nearly all of the deans made clear exceptions for exceptional students. What a bunch of higher-education zealots.
You also got the "arguments" wrong. All of them. None of the deans made an argument for greater success due to social connections (Wadwha makes fun of this idea at the top of the article!), none claimed that Zuckerberg was successful "because" of his time at Harvard (one made the argument that he "needed it for vetting", which is a different argument entirely), and none made the argument that "most" entrepreneurs are college grads (...or anything at all, for that matter; except for the rather uncontroversial argument that "most entrepreneurs fail", very few generalizations were made).
The most important arguments were the ones that you ignored:
1) Thiel's "experiment" isn't actually an experiment. It's a vanity exercise that will prove nothing, because it has no controls.
2) Most entrepreneurs fail, but you can easily point to the exceptions to make (fallacious) arguments about the value of education.
3) An engineering degree improves the average outcome for students, even if it doesn't help the exceptional cases.
4) At the companies founded by famous college dropouts, you'd be incredibly hard-pressed to get a job without a college degree.
I think we're talking past each other to a certain extent. The deans do make some good points. 1-4 are generally true. I just don't think they are sufficient evidence to show that students shouldn't drop out. They are saying that colleges are good social networks and send important signals to employers. My argument is that something is wrong when we are spending 100K on a screening/networking mechanism. Notice that none of the deans said stay in school because of the things you'll learn in the classroom.
That said, your initial statement doesn't necessarily follow because it could also be the case that the deans became deans because they earnestly believe in the system they're helping to further, and that's why they became deans. Claiming the possibility of bias doesn't entail the presence of bias.
The second-to-last paragraph of Jim Plummer's response seems to say so. Example: "A university education gives the large majority the tools to become innovators and entrepreneurs throughout their lives." He then goes onto extol the benefits of an engineering education even for careers outside engineering.
He's right that students will take Thiel's message very seriously. His message is emotional, inspirational, anti-authority, and anti-establishment. And it's impossible to counter with those kinds of responses.
Also, the experiment that the Stanford dean describes is impossible to run, and the closest possible thing has already been realized. The people who want to drop out to take responsibility and start a venture are self-selecting. You can't just randomly assign roles like "you'll stay in school" and "you'll go to a startup" because the students would be emotionally invested in either decision. And many of them do already receive huge no-strings-attached financial assistance to stay in school.
That would be a really interesting and exciting experiment. I wish someone would do it.
I would be very interested in this experiment, but subsidizing a student's education in the US doesn't give you a 'control' group, but a very privileged group.
"Vivek Wadhwa is .. a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University."
Wadhwa is a beneficiary of the college fees he is advocating paying. He's doing it under the guise of promoting education in general and has conflated Theil's argument with an anti-education argument.
The title of the article he's refuting is:
"Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education."
One of Thiel's best points in the original article:
If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates? It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.
Universities are a result of Theory of The Firm, since a university is generally restricted to small geographic region, it can decrease the transaction costs between the various components of higher education. However if you franchise a university across multiple locations, the net transaction costs go up.
E.g. University of California system can be considered as an affiliate system. However you would still find one UC e.g. Berkeley more reputed than other e.g. Santa Barbara.
Peter Thiel incorrectly assumes, that a University system can share a lot of resources between distant geographic locations. However most of the resources such as faculty, labs cannot be shared. Thus you are better off increase capacity of students rather than branching out.
Bullshit. There are plenty of people at those companies that never got a degree but proved themselves in other ways (open source, made popular apps ... etc).
It would seem like minor league basketball is what Thiel is advocating, yet no one is interested in going to it, nor recruiting from it. The best players are recruited from college, and that seems to be the way everyone likes it.
There are always the occassional superstars at a young age -- Gates/Zuckerberg...James/Bryant, but they are clearly rare and imitating them is almost certainly folly. No one would suggest recruiting directly from high school is a good idea on a scale of more than a couple of athletes per year (at most). Just thoughts.
Entrepreneurship is extremely different because experience holds much more weight and can easily overcome a lack of natural talent (in a skill like programming, for instance), or open up a new role. Someone who drops out of school to join the NBA and then gets laughed at by recruiters is basically screwed. Someone who drops out of school to build a prototype and gets laughed at by VCs or customers now has much more practical experience than his friends who are still in school and is in a good position to either try again or look for a job with the valuable skills he's gained through his failed attempt.
All this talk of 'superstars' and 'lottery winners' completely misses the point. If you want to be an entrepreneur, trying to be an entrepreneur, regardless of how badly you fail, is guaranteed to teach you relevant skills. Expensive colleges are not.
1) The best colleagues. The best US ballers not in the NBA play NCAA ball. Not the NBA farm league. Colleges, from the Ivies to the UCs, are where the best students are. The benefit of going to college is you're around the best CS students AND the best physics, bio, literature, econ, and math students.
2) It's a hedge. While college degrees aren't on the forefront of the minds of college players, especially D1 players, it is something that is in the equation. There is a belief that they can be spotted for the NBA by playing college ball, and if it doesn't work out, they still get a college degree (unless they go to USC).
The only thing that twists this up is athletes get a full ride scholarship. And many here complain that college costs too much. But recall that the best students will have their college paid for them (and in some countries college is free). Cost ends up being inversely proportional to perceived potential (with need factored in too).
This ends up being almost exactly the scenario that Thiel is advocating. Top students get lots of funding. Less good students get a little. Average students get none, and rich students with average potential fund things out of their own pocket. Those who are poor with average potential are just screwed. Welcome to college in 2011.
Along those lines, I can't be the only one who was surprised that one of his closing examples was Steve Jobs, the famous Reed College dropout. After all, Jobs has stated the importance of his dropping in to calligraphy classes and how it exposed him to the issues of typography, etc. I don't think I've ever heard Jobs talk about the importance of a visual arts degree from a prestigious university, however.
As for the argument that Microsoft or Apple won't look at applications that don't have degrees, well, yes. But in this forum how often have we read of startups choosing their original teams based on prestigious degrees? If you can make something new and useful, are you really worried about HR liking your resume or are you more concerned with finding ways to make your own company happen?
Ask HN, is it really an unbiased article when you take their responses, and not for example, students or recent graduates ?
As to whether it is an unbiased article, I don't think it ever claimed to be. It seemed to me to be clearly the author stating his opinion and presenting the opinions of some engineering school dean.
As a side note, I applied Facebook for internship when I have taken no CS classes in my college at all, and they accepted me. I am not sure how "true" his last paragraph about applying job in Facebook without a degree would be.
Four years and $200,000 for a piece of paper and a false understanding of where you fit into the world.
If you spend $200,000 on undergrad, you're making a mistake. That does not make college a bad idea; it makes spending insane private-school money on college a bad idea.
A lot of the rest was paid for by working during school--I had the lame little jobs during school, but I also participated in Google Summer of Code and had a pretty healthy consulting company that I started and operated, employing friends of mine when I had more work than I could handle. Like I said--less than $25,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle, thanks to what really amounted to not a lot of work to make that happen. (It also had the nice side effect of giving me a really nice resume.)
In-state tuition is about 14-15k. Room and board is 5-6k. That's easily 20k a year (I paid north of 22k my first year) leading to 80-100k over four years. Not exactly something you can work through on a <$10/hour job (of which I have had many).
I left school with $9,800 in debt. Most of the amount paid off before graduation (at least 60%) was mine, the rest my parents'.
No, you can't work through it on a sub-$10/hour job. But I had those jobs, too: they were beer and social money. I set up my own consulting company and I did GSoC and made more than enough to put myself in a really good position coming out of school.
College isn't as affordable for most as it was for you.
I would, however, say that the majority of people in the startup world who seem to have a clue have had some college at the least, and that it's very valuable in and of itself for those people--which makes me think Thiel very misguided.
The local state school where I grew up runs about $1600/quarter. When I applied as a backup, they offered to basically waive my tuition because my grades and SAT score were good. Bright but poor kids should at least be able to get into state school for extremely low tuition.
Unless you're exceptionally bright, poor, or unique, it isn't affordable. The vast majority of kids (read: average, middle class folks) get stuck paying 85% of the bill.
I ended up going to a private school with tuition of around $30k/year. I got $16k/year in merit-based scholarships based solely on my work in HS... as a white, middle-class male. So I got stuck with 50% of the bill; my parents were kind enough to help with half of that. School-mandated co-op jobs (total of 1 year of them, in my case) definitely helped with the rest--that's part of the trade-off. By going to a well-known but more expensive school, I probably had an easier time getting good internships, which in turn helped pay off the higher tuition.
I think university is entirely worth it if you can realistically afford it. I met amazing people, learned some very interesting things that I would not have been exposed to if I were self-taught (Mentor Graphics software licenses are not cheap), and yes, got a piece of paper that says I hung around a certain school long enough to be given a Masters degree. I've got about $30k in debt. It's doable.
This is my experience as well. Admittedly, it was probably closer to $80,000 after everything, but it gave me exactly that environment.
I'm 4 years out of school, and I've made back the cost of my piece of paper.
People get so wrapped up in their college's ranking in US News that they don't bother to find out which colleges are good enough. It's kind of a silly rule, but I usually tell people that, as long as their college has a basketball or football team (no matter how horrible they are), it's probably good enough.
I feel like I got good value from the money we spent. There were other students, professors, events that I would never have encountered at another university. Unless something unforeseen happens, everything will be paid off in a few years.
There is a price where Harvard makes sense, however $250K isn't it.
Sorry, but I just don't believe I need to go to a university to find out "how I fit into the world and what it means to be human." Isn't going out and actually building something useful for the world also a way to find your place?
A university education certainly has value, and may help you find "what it means to be human", but can the author really assert that it's the only or even the best way?
Perspective students need to research colleges more. A lot of kids think that just because they did well in school and were told they were smart their whole life that they have to go to an Ivy League school or some other very expensive prestigious school. There are many universities that offer an as good or better education for a much better value. Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will. And even if they did, they would be teaching you out of the same text books as the adjunct professors at your local community college uses. Do people think that if they go to undergrad at Princeton a Nobel Prize winning professor will personally mentor them or something?
I’m currently a senior taking a break from cramming for finals, and when I graduate I will graduate with a degree from a school that has high job placement in my field (CS) and that I feel has prepared me very well. And I will do it without going in to dept at all. Not a dime. I’m going to be able to do this because I went to community college for my liberal arts, tested out of classes, lived off campus, worked part time, took advantage of transfer scholarships for high GPA, grants, tax rebates, etc. In short I PLANNED things out and worked hard in all aspects of my life not just school. I know countless students who will be graduating with ridiculous debts because they didn’t plan at all. They got out of high school and just hopped in to college never thinking about the dept for a minute. What’s really sad is that many of them will have degrees that aren’t worth shit unless they go to grad school, or they will get jobs that pay horribly for the amount of initial investment. I’m not as pessimistic about higher education as a lot of people on here, but I definitely have my issues with it. I just think that people are diverting a lot of the blame from the students/parents/mentors to the colleges.
Is this actually true? I don't attend Harvard, but I do attend a private university in the top 10 of the US News and World Reports rankings, and I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student (although some are taught by "lecturers". Some of the classes from the core curriculum are taught by grad students, but that's not actually necessarily a bad thing. Both of the grad students who have taught courses I've taken have been excellent teachers, which can be much more important for a teacher of introductory calculus or such.
Actually, this is incorrect. Although I'm not aware of any courses taught by grad students this year, I now recall that one of the lecturers also taught while a Ph.D. candidate. However, only a small minority of CS courses here seem to be taught by grad students.
Any English or history major has access to the same loans that an engineering or biology major has, but on average, they are likely to make far less in income. Should what you are studying be a factor in loan applications? I think so.
Another side of the same coin on income inequality (pure numbers, not social justice) is that most universities (that I am aware of) charge the same for all degrees, regardless of earning potential. Someone majoring in elementary education will almost always have a smaller return on investment than an engineering major.
Katsouleas just makes a lame rhetorical point. Surely he can do better.
Eisenstein speaks the truth: college is not always the best option. "Getting an engineering degree reduces the variance in your career outcomes. You might not get the billions, but you also won’t get into poverty." That's the best way to understand it. In most financial contexts, cutting your variance also reduces your expected outcome--and levering up to buy low-variance assets is a good way to gear yourself for negative outcomes, whether those assets are degrees or CDOs.
Is there any point more boring than noting that two people who finished school a decade or two ago now think that school isn't such a good deal? It would be pretty craven for Thiel and Arrington to believe the things they believe but lie about it because they'd gone to Stanford, so I'm not sure Wadhwa has a point.
Modern universities are cargo cults. They do not educate, they select. The value is solely in colocating smart people, which can be done in far less expensive ways.
Conveniently, perceived controversy is the part that benefits Techcrunch the most.
2. We are in a bubble, sort of. It's not like the tulip bubble or a housing bubble where the product can be sold to a "greater fool", unless you consider the bump in hiring a degree provides to be a "sale". The education bubble is something different: panic-buying fueled by parents who are terrified that their kids will end up insignificant, taking orders rather than giving them, if they don't attend the right schools.
It's actually a bidding war over educational cachet and access to limited resources, coupled with much, much higher expectations of the "college experience" (that drive costs up even in the cheaper schools). My grandfather paid $300/year ($4000 today) to go to CMU in the early 1930s. There was also no expectation that it would provide a state-of-the-art, 25000-SF gym, a cafeteria serving better food than most restaurants, and an expensive blow-out concert with free beer every spring.