Peter Thiel heads to campus | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel heads to campus

reuters.com

64 pointsconnorlee18 comments

I notice the writer doesn't actually quote any specific things Peter has said that would make this a hypocritical move.

The writer certainly doesn't quote Thiel's actual views:

"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college."

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe...

"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-...

I suspected as much. This is someone attacking a straw man to generate controversy.

Thanks for finding those quotes.

> are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college

And he presumes he and his staff are uniquely qualified in identifying those 20 out of 60,000?

He isn't saying "There exist exactly 20 people out of 60k who should not go to college and I have oracular ability for identifying them." He is saying "It is arrogant to assume that, out of 60,000 people attending college, it is impossible to find so many as 20 of them who would be better served by another alternative." Presumably, he thinks the actual numbers is substantially higher than 20, but he doesn't have to get locked in to the extremist position of saying "60,000 of 60,000 people should not go to college" to believe that. It could plausibly be that 99% of people are served perfectly adequately by college and identifying only 20 of the remaining 600 isn't really rocket science compared to the actual rocket science that other Paypal alums are doing.

When has he ever said anything about being uniquely qualified?

But did give him a chance, in person and directly.

> Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.

Which is a bit better that quoting other comments that might be construed as out of context.

I haven't followed everything he has said about college education, but I do believe he doesn't hate universities so much as their current value proposition.

The amount of debt students have to take on now to get a degree, in contrast to what a motivated person can learn and do on their own now with alternative educational sources and a cheap computer, means that most of that debt is paying for just the credential, whose value is being increasingly undermined while its cost continues increasing.

So he believes student loan debt is the next big financial bubble due to collapse, given that there is more of it than credit card debt [1], and that it's being loaned for any major regardless of its expected ROI, among other things.

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student...

A few things:

- Thiel really hates that college puts undergraduates in serious debt. Stanford doesn't -- take a look at its financial aid.

- When someone decides to drop out to pursue a startup or stay in school, it's often not just about the "value" they think education has. Travis Kiefer is the entrepreneur's entrepreneur: he can survive on the adrenaline of his company until it succeeds. He lives for this. I considered senior year with my best friends a once in a lifetime opportunity and didn't drop out. I live for this.

- This startup class shouldn't surprise anyone from Stanford's perspective. It has encouraged entrepreneurship forever -- there will even be an entrepreneurship themed dorm next year -- and Thiel is as good as any to teach it.

- Zuckerberg routinely appears as a guest lecturer in CS106A, the introductory CS class.

- As an aside, Stanford can sell out a football game, and the stuff about Khosla's daughters is way exaggerated (I was quoted).

  "Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? 
  No, because that's where people buy their books." 
  - Tom Morello

Seems like Thiel is finally willing to work within the system to bring about change, rather than quixotically working outside of it.

He doesn't hate college, he just wants us to think more deeply about whether we should go to college. It's gotten more pricey over the years, yet enrollment has increased. College has become the default option for anyone who has the intellectual or financial ability and he questions whether that is good

Maybe he will convince a few Stanford students to focus on their startup before the end of their graduation and drop out! What is for sure is the more you spend money on your education (with college, an MBA, etc...), the higher the opportunity cost of starting a Company (vs. getting a well paid job). When you drop out, you have nothing to lose, and so you are "all in", which allows you to take bigger risks.

the higher the opportunity cost of starting a Company (vs. getting a well paid job)

I know that my education, and work experience will payout huge when I start a company. The emotional and intellectual development learned in school and working for companies afterwards will be an amazing asset and would be for anyone.

When you drop out, you have nothing to lose, and so you are "all in", which allows you to take bigger risks.

Using the poker example, when you have nothing to loose you are effectively playing "on tilt". When I was broke (limited commissions coming in), and I didn't know what to do I started a wedding photography business. I made a profit, but I wasn't making real money and there was no real big opportunity. The next thing I work on will be massive in ambition since the opportunity cost would be leaving my insanely awesome job.

Having nothing makes most people focus on survival, having some income and confidence that there is another job out there if it doesn't work has to help people more than it hurts them.

And, as you read this, you are probably thinking about your friends working at big companies that would never leave to start a company. I would argue that the vast majority of people are not entrepreneurs and not going to school wouldn't change that. They would just have a worse job.

"Which allows you to take bigger risks", reads as if risk taking is an good thing in itself. Presumably you meant to write "necessary risks"? I was going to point out that rationality would alleviate the reluctance to jump off, post-education, but that supposes that doing a start-up is typically a rational act...

Generally, I think education allows you to lower the risk of achieving a given return. Or, it could be seen as allowing a higher return for a given amount of risk.

Maybe that's the definition of a start-up: a company that sets a level of risk, then tries to maximise the returns on that risk? A "normal" company does it the other way: sets a level of return then minimises the risk required to achieve the return.

I'm a little confused as to why this is offered as "Computer Science 183". Is "Computer Science" used as a heading for anything computer-related at Stanford, or is this an exception?

Classes at Stanford are offered by a particular department. They also have a course number and a title. They can be described as "DEPT ### - Title". In this case, it will be "CS 183: Startup".

A lot of misinformation in this article regarding Peter Thiel's position on higher education in America, but the posters here have addressed that. What I find surprising is that this course, at least from what I read, will not be available online. I know that an online option would require a greater effort on his part, and that he would also have to be a little less personal/direct in his lectures to make it work, but if Peter Thiel believes that self-learners using online educational resources are the future, he should do his part to contribute to that future by doing something like this (a class on startups) in the future for a virtual classroom, perhaps through Udacity.

He doesn't like universities because he thinks they're too costly and not good at preparing students for the real world. He now intends to teach a class that prepares students for the real world and will not increase the marginal cost of their tuition. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction.

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