Thiel's Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1. What stage was their company at when they received the fellowship?
2. What is their parents' career?
Every person who receives the Fellowship has already raised millions of dollars, sometimes even tens of millions of dollars. Raising millions of dollars as a teenager isn't something you generally do without exceptional fortune or parents in the finance industry. Usually it's the latter.
I once met a TF recipient who ran a successful property lending company. What was his father's job? Multimillionaire owner of a large and successful property investment firm. Not hating on the guy, he was pretty cool and nice and his business went on to be successful (and he was for sure a hard worker, intelligent and ambitious), but the Fellowship slapping their name on his back didn't really change how the cards were stacked. At the very least, it wasn't the thing that moved the needle to him dropping out. I would be greatly surprised if, in the last 5 years, the Fellowship was the tipping point for even a single person dropping out of college.
Full disclosure on the conflict of interest though, I am a mediocre college dropout who was rejected post interview. I wouldn't have and still wouldn't turn down the $100k if it was offered. Money is great.
The TF used to also be about all sorts of weird stuff. There were hardware companies, biotech companies, kids just randomly studying math. Now it's only software. To be fair those other pursuits are hard, but I don't think the TF really gave support besides $ in ways that are meaningful for those sorts of endeavors. And when they were funded the terms were structured like terms that make sense for software companies.
“As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.”
Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school."
Nothing inherently wrong with this. But it does explain why colleges might be nervous: He's piggy-backing off their selection process to poach young candidates.
The more obviously bad a business idea the more likely they would get funded (as long as it wasn't blatantly harmful).
They get money, they support from relevantly qualified people that will try make it work etc.
I'd be a billionaire so its not like i would care if it's a loss.
1) Fund a small pure research institution. Get a dozen or two academics who are promising but are hindered by publish-or-perish and related culture out of that mess, let them do their thing. Even if only one or two at a time do anything worthwhile and the rest just kick back and take the money, that’s potentially a pretty great outcome. No strings, long horizon, maybe even a lifetime-stipend kind of situation.
2) Buy the rights to some excellent textbooks in areas that don’t change fast enough to need major updates all the time (math, for example). Possibly whole curriculums, especially for lower grades. Put them in the public domain. Set up a small endowment to fund keeping them up-to-date (mostly just fixing errors). (This is 1,000% something the government ought to do, the ROI is crazy high, but they aren’t doing it, so whatever)
If you embrace the current "college is useless/too expense" fashion, you could (maliciously) argue that this shows that the selection process of the colleges is much more valuable than their study programs. :-)
In fact, the future may be increasingly different due to the role college plays in collapsing demographics as currently implemented.
A better future will probably normalize many age ranges of people in college getting educated when most appropriate.
If you take someone bright enough to go to MIT and instead put them in a bog standard state school, they will tend to have the same life outcome as if they had gone to MIT.
My sneaking suspicion is they would have similar life outcomes if they never went to college at all. The obvious exception being careers with regulatory requirements that involve degrees.
I'd argue that it depends on the person. Intelligence is certainly helpful, but it's not enough on its own, and it's not the only path to creating something valuable.
I initially intended to take the university path. I got a full scholarship to the university of my choice, but quickly ran into all kinds of unexpected roadblocks - the short version of that story is that I had undiagnosed ADHD that first manifested itself in a destructive way when I left my parents' home. I ended up with severe depression, lost my scholarship, and failed out. Though it took a few years, I ultimately recovered from it and have built a life I'm happy with.
This is relevant because I've kept up with many of the people I met in my short time in university. Most of the most intelligent people I met there have ended up in various "enterprise" settings. They make good money and I'm in no way slighting their accomplishments - but they originally intended to be entrepreneurs. They did very well in school, and got attractive employment offers upon graduation. Several of them said they were only going to work for others for a couple of years to built capital; almost twenty years later, none of them have followed through with that plan.
On the other hand, some of the "frat guy" types I know spent most of their time socializing. They performed adequately in their classes, but not well enough to attract six-figure job offers right out of school. Several of them started businesses immediately upon graduation. They drew upon their network of friends from school to make those successful, and today they're in a better place than their peers who were more defined by their intellect in school.
To put it another way - intelligence and academic success can be helpful, but it can also lay a subtle trap of moderate success that will prevent people who are otherwise capable of achieving ambition dreams from doing so. Meanwhile, having a strong social network composed of the "right kind of people" can multiply your reach.
In my experience people who tend to do excellent at school also tend to be high in agreeableness. Agreeableness means you will go along with the path laid out in front of you, which explains all your high IQ engineer friends who took those convenient jobs straight out of college and stayed at that relative level of success. Low risk tolerance is another factor that makes a great engineer but doesn't lead to entrepreneur.
My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted.
> My GUESS is that your "frat guy" folks had a high enough IQ that they could have gotten better grades, but understood that was not the path to the outsized success they wanted.
That's exactly my point!
To be clear, I didn't mean "frat guy" in a derogatory way at all. I meant it as a shorthand for "people in my social circle who immersed themselves in Greek life." I was on a full scholarship and lived in the honors dorms, so the people in my social circle were uniformly very intelligent and capable people.
If you want to optimize for "greatness" - whether that means financial success to you or building something of great value - then being willing to take risks is important. Being able to convince the people around you that the risks are worthwhile and that they should join you is essential.
A program for a select few works for them because a lot of resources can be channeled to a small group of bright people — but that system absolutely cannot scale.
The Thiel Fellow program “works” because not that many people get to be Thiel Fellows.
There’s a ton of smart go-getting kids across every country in the west who would have benefited from having someone tell them that there’s great options outside of college. It’s still going to be a niche but that doesn’t mean it’s a tiny one.
It’s not just tech startup’s and programming either, there’s a million entrepreneurial type skills that can be developed just by going out in the world at 18 and taking a risk.
This is more than just who Thiel invested in too, he’s still a VC, it was an idea (and marketing tool) as much as a specific investment program.
If a billionaire instead sets up a similar program for, say, parolees and sees higher-than-baseline success, then that's something to celebrate.
If the only thing you think is important is making society more equal, I guess I could see how you could come to that conclusion.
That's a pretty weird way to think, though.
I didn't say that equality is a weird value. I said it's weird if that's your only value.
My only complaint with the American university system is the insistence on general education requirements. Is there another country in the world that does not allow students to step directly into their major field of study?
I understand that the perception is that general education requirements build a "well rounded" student, but what if they don't want nor need those classes? The classes add to the cost of the education but amount to little more than memorization for tests, and students forget most of it afterwards. I question their value.
Which university did you attend? Almost every EE program i've seen has atleast some writing course requirements. Some social science reqs.
1. 2 freshman humanities courses, from 2 different divisions of the humanities. This will be 18 units [1] of humanities.
2. 2 introductory social sciences courses, from 2 different disciplines (e.g., anthropology and economics). That's another 18 units.
3. 18 units of advanced humanities.
4. 18 units of advanced social sciences in the same disciplines that you took in #2.
5. 36 more units of humanities and social sciences from any mix of humanities and social sciences you want, except no freshman classes).
That works out to 108 units of humanities and social sciences, which is 22% of your coursework if you do the minimum amount of other coursework to graduate. If you took a very heavy course load, petitioning to take an overload every term for 4 years, it would still be 17% of your time spent on humanities and social sciences. It's around 20% for the typical student.
Also Caltech has some breadth requirements for STEM outside your major. Everyone has to take calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, at least one lab course, and at least one other science course. Even if you go to Caltech to major in English (and yes, that does happen) you are going to have take those science courses--and they don't have some watered down versions of them for non-majors. You'll be taking the same physics for example that physics majors take.
I believe that MIT has similar requirements.
[1] A class that you are expected to spend N hours a week on (lectures + homework + labs) earns you N units per term, and there are 3 terms per year. Most classes are 9 units. 486 units to graduate. Normal load is 36 to 48 units per term.
And it shows.
I was recently at a training for $ELITE_HIRING_COMPANY and as part of this they asked us to discuss some liberal arts style questions. The international hires who had been answering business questions all day suddenly were extremely confused at the question itself and had nothing to add (and it wasn't a language problem).
You might argue that those skills are not substantive or valuable, and perhaps we just learned in school to parrot reasonable sounding responses, but it was a stark contrast.
> step directly into their major field of study
These need not be mutually exclusive! My (US) alma mater required a specific number of unspecific non-major classes, the only stipulation being that a certain number come from the broad categories of STEM, social science, and the humanities. Unlike other colleges, we could take them whenever we wanted to and could pick from basically the entire college's catalog. Some freshmen jumped into their first term with onky major classes (although they later regretted that).
> The classes add to the cost of the education but amount to little more than memorization for tests, and students forget most of it afterwards. I question their value.
They sound poorly designed and/or poorly aught. My non-major classes were some of the most fun and interesting ones I ever took!
As a CS major, I got to write and produce an EP, and research & write a report on the safety of campus nightlife, both for credit. I'm really glad I wasn't able to just fast-track myself through only CS classes and get out of there without any creative work or serious writing experience.
Outside the US, college education is not the place where you go to have fun and finding interesting stuff. It is considered to be your first professional duty as an adult. You can have all the fun you want outside classes.
I... don't think European youth culture is exactly known for that?
* being able to write prose well
* creativity
* genrally being interesting and fun to work with
Yeah, the mountainous cost of 4yr college sucks and I indeed was in a very privileged position being able to afford it. But I would rather that society lifts everyone else up by making a "well rounded education" (why is this term ironic now??) affordable than we just eliminate all nuance and exploration from college programs so that we can pump out grads with "marketable values" at the lowest possible cost.
It's complicated, for sure. Ideally both options would exist. You can get a bachelor's or master's degree fully online, now. Maybe that fits the need you see.
I do think they could speed up the time to get deep in your major courses. But I changed majors 3 times, each change cost me time since I’m just basically randomly guessing what I think I might have some interest in that might also provide a decent life/career. Trying to plan out your whole life at ages 18-20 seems ludicrous to me still and I don’t feel like I was equipped with enough information to really know what possibilities were out there in the real world.
There is some unique psychology at play when it comes to defending the status quo of the US college system as well, esp. from the college educated. There's almost a holy mysticism associated with higher education. Any push to change the system, is dumbing it down, and anti-intellectual. Its always been this way, we cannot change it. I suffered through 4 years and mountain high debt, so you must as well. But ... we can discuss making it free and/or cheaper, but we cannot assume any change to the system.
My guess is the systems are overly bureaucratic and corrupt - the administrators couldn't justify their compensation packages or tuition cost with smaller/less staff. The endowments would decrease. Senior roles at universities are places for executives and politicians to coast into retirement. Not very sexy when the system is neutered. Public colleges, and some private, operate large employee unions, which offer consistent kickbacks to political campaigns.
To be fair, it does seem extra challenging to identify 17 to 20 year olds who will go on to be entrepreneurial successes, and Thiel and his selection committee deserve credit for that. It doesn’t really confirm his broader ideas about college, though.
Edit: stuartjohnson12 claimed in their comment that many recipients have already received funding and started building their business and/or have wealthy parents. If true, that makes the fellowship’s ability to identify people who will go on to succeed less significant.
- you are well connected and affluent, with an implicit path to success already laid out, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus just leaning into the nepo
- you’re stupid and want to cope and seethe about it
It’s a zero sum game: the more people have Harvard degrees, the less valuable that degree becomes.
Recall the Thiel fellowship targets people who would have gone on to a top university. So neither paths are scalable.
Those same people would have no problem raising $1M+ in funding when they complete their 4 year degree and decide on building a startup, no?
Maybe that student had $100k+ in scholarship money? Maybe not.
This depends a lot on whether your talents cover a broad range of areas, or whether the they lie in very specific areas. In my experience the latter situation is far more common.
Even without the $100k, I struggle to imagine many people finishing college and starting their careers will be better situated than he is 4 years from now. Definitely some edge cases and it ignores the loss of college memories which could be significant to some but I do think this will become more of a trend considering the recent trajectory of higher education.
Not worth finishing it up if your goal is to fund a startup. The connection and notoriety from PTs program would be just as good or better.
Although half of the thiel fellows I knew ended with businesses that didn't pan out and they went back to school (most got into ivy leagues)
1. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=100%2C000.00&y...
2. https://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/young-entrepreneurs-rule-m...
Another in his long list of crimes.