Peter Thiel's $100k offer to skip college is more popular than ever
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/peter-th...
You get >50% of the value of the school (proxy for an IQ test, basically, although with the decline of testing this is less obvious -- still, even without rigorous testing, many people, especially those far from academia, consider "accepted to top school" to be valuable.)
I basically did this (out of necessity; I couldn't afford to pay for MIT), but it's worked out well, and it's worked out pretty well for other people I know. With dropout you need to distinguish between "dropped out to do X, or for decent extenuating circumstance" vs "too much drugs", though, when looking at stats.
I also think of it as a survivorship bias and some correlation/causation violations: Me and my successful friends (I don't hang out with unsuccessful people) have similar stories, therefore our choices are a pattern which can be followed to our successes.
I could say "every successful engineer I know either abuses drugs or has in the past" and it could fundamentally be true for me and the group of people I know. But would you agree with me if I said that abusing drugs is a smart strategy to succeed?
Unless you have a time-sensitive breakthrough idea, I think it’s better to take a pragmatic approach and at least finish college so you have a backup, or at least work on a startup in college, and then drop out if you become successful, not before.
The prestige is conferred by acceptance.
Comment is saying that many people know this and the prestige of acceptance is often good enough without requiring the time investment of completing the degree (which clearly isn't threshing out poor performers).
Choosing to be in the 2% shows intelligence to me!
There would also be value in getting a great job as a top-tier-school dropout ("intern who just loves this place and how fast everything is progressing, seems like a shame I have to go to school in September, but I'll keep in touch" "Now that I'm at school every day I miss..." "can you come back and start monday?")
I think you get an overall superior package from dropping out and doing 20 under 20, joining a top company, or doing other stuff at a top level (even if it fails) than from universities today -- particularly as universities have gotten dramatically worse over the past 30 years (and especially past 5 years), and the requirement for a degree doesn't really exist (absent immigration pathways) in cs/tech.
I'd take "my YC friends" over "my college friends" overall, too.
This all assumes a highly motivated and self directed student. I don't think university really saves "I don't know what I want to do, my parents are telling me to go to Harvard so I will"; IMO if you're 16-18 and have no idea what kind of things you enjoy you've already failed/been failed.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have rich enough parents to get a full ride, or to have poor enough parents to qualify for a free ride.
College friends are probably diverse. YC friends sounds like a bunch of similarly neurotic people.
It would not be that wonderful because of this burden, hence the comment.
Please. College is a chance to gain exposure to things you otherwise never would know existed. I knew what I enjoyed doing going into college, but I found a lot more.
I'm sorry, but that is narrow-minded to the point of absurdity.
Most undergraduates at top schools aren't going to come anywhere near paying $200-300k. The top schools almost all have very generous aid programs that cover most of the cost by scholarships. Here's some data for MIT [1].
[1] https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
Median family income for MIT students is $137k, per this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
Stanford considers everyone who has completed three quarters (equivalent of two semesters) of a degree program alumni, and they are eligible for `@alumni.stanford.edu` accounts. <https://alumni.stanford.edu/help/alumni-email-faqs/>
Energy is useless without the skills, knowledge, network, money, economy etc. Look at all the 25 year olds in India who never went to college and is having trouble even making 100$s a month.
Take care of your health, and maybe this mystical spark will last longer. Giving you the benefit of increasing knowledge and experience, to direct that energy most usefully (i.e., towards a viable business, not towards a ZIRP/hype VC investment scam powered by the confidence of coked-up 20 year-olds).
Avoid drugs, avoid bad stress, get good nutrition, good exercise, good sleep, keep learning.
especially when the first 2 are basically worthless, colleges earn the most money on the first 2 years because it take less resources and are incentivized to get people to drop out within that time frame.
plus most people had professions by the time they were 14 before the school system became normal, its actually humiliating and frustrating to not have any real skillset other than filling out worksheets by the time you're 21
plus with the cost being so high, the years feel much worse
Serf?
yeah and we as a society decided that child labor is bad and attempted to craft social conditions that would allow children to be comfortable and to learn instead of toiling in a mine.
prior to that children were taught things that genuinely didn't put their life in danger, because they needed to contribute to their family or community's survival
It really, really isn’t.
> its actually humiliating and frustrating to not have any real skillset other than filling out worksheets by the time you're 21
If that’s all you got out of college, it sounds like the problem was not college.
correct, college is a luxury turned bureaucratic requirement, the problem in some peoples life is their family or abuse or trauma. they have every right to want to get out of their situation without waiting 4 years to get something they could rightfully earn in 1 or 2, or even learn on the job
> At 22 you're still basically a kid.
22 is not a kid. 22 is a grown ass adult, and there are a lot of people who have their shit together long before that. We seem to keep trying to push up the age when a person gains the ability to make their own decisions and be responsible for their own actions. People were leading armies at that age not very long ago.
Back on topic: I'll just add that earnings-wise, due to compound interest, money saved earlier in one's career is worth far more than money saved later. "Sitting out" for your prime four earning years is only worth it if the education would provide a similar or greater boost.
No, we seem to keep trying to push down the age when a person loses the ability to acquire further education.
Thiel himself got not just one but two degrees from Stanford. Are you going to criticize him for not having his shit together? Let's be honest, he's opposing college now purely for ideological reasons.
> People were leading armies at that age not very long ago.
Ok, but have you considered that war is actually bad?
> ...
> ... he's opposing college now purely for ideological reasons.
But maybe his ideological criticisms are valid.
And maybe the college environment has changed since he was there.
And maybe the value proposition for a talented person has shifted.
And maybe the mere presence of offers like Thiel's also increases the acceptability and therefore the "signalling" value proposition of a first year drop-out strategy.
No.
> And maybe the value proposition for a talented person has shifted.
That much is true, since college costs have increased dramatically since Thiel attended. If he cared about that, maybe he should offer to pay for people's student loan debt or finance some scholarships. Or promote government-paid higher education for all, like with pre-college education.
> Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” because it believes the purpose is to challenge a student’s “fixed beliefs” and undermine “parental authority.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/07/01/texas-go...
I studied biochem and computer science in college. The biochem parts I absolutely could not have learned at home without a lab and domain experts teaching me. The computer science bits, not so much. I was already programming by college and was doing capstone-level work in my freshman courses. I suspect this is true of many students who get started with learning their field in high school.
I get the sense that for many degrees that are not hands on with labs and equipment, a university setting is unnecessary.
None of my "connections" from university mattered. I made it much further by making my own outside of classes. So, at least anecdotally, I can't buy that argument either.
It shouldn't cost so much!
Perhaps college aged kids could join something like the Peace Corps instead?
Community college costs need to return to <$10k/yr, too.
From a political standpoint, many colleges are "liberal" institutions, and people don't want to be involved with that.
> Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible", due in large part to welfare beneficiaries and women in general being "notoriously tough for libertarians" constituencies, and that he had focused efforts on new technologies (namely cyberspace, space colonization and seasteading) that could create "a new space for freedom" beyond current politics
A lot of kids walk out having lost quite a bit of money to tuition.
Worse, the degrees they paid a small fortune for won't provide them jobs to payoff that debt.
I also think there is a third way with open universities and new pedagogical material. For example, when cybersecurity started gaining tractions, a friend was concerned about having more people understanding how to develop exploits and put exercises online [1]. It started with relatively easy exercises and moved to advanced ones.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150123211322/http://community....
Thiel is a neo-nazi allegedly in minecraft who wants to attack the intellectual class, like every nazi before him allegedly in minecraft.
They know nearly all information is online now and taught even more effectively in many cases. And once inferior colleges and professors can also harness this and compete on near even footing on the knowledge front. That was not the case just 15 years ago.
So they now lean into an area that they think the internet and those who harness it cannot compete. They lace every discipline with philosophy and sell it as an ivy league education. But really they're just bamboozling people with an inferior education and destructive cognitive habits.
These will be immensely valuable forever as long as they keep the club largely exclusive. Everything else is just noise.
Never once did I lever this relationship or any others I have. I think the network thing is overrated. Wealthy and connected people mostly want to be left alone and very rarely do favors for people not independently at their level.
Also I’m trying to think how many close friends I kept from college or even in contact with. I think maybe 5 and none of them were well off or connected.
But yes, that is part of what is sold as well. Or at least the idea of it. There’s no question about that.
> Thiel says they “got way more out of it by going back” after launching their businesses.
> “The other 75% didn’t need a college degree,” he says.
I definitely don't think everyone needs a college degree and I definitely think it would do a lot of folks good to delay pursuing a higher education for at least a little while for them to figure out what they want to do. So many of my peers went to college without much of an end goal in sight. I certainly think employers should discriminate less when it comes to degrees.
I don't agree with Thiel on much but this maybe isn't as bad as it seems. However attacking the institutions and promoting successes where no secondary education was necessary seems disingenuous at best.
Everyone should be entitled to higher education. As a society I'm pretty sure it is not in our best interest to lower the bar here. Maybe if you're a politician you want ignorant constituents.
I definitely think more folks should consider community college as an alternative and that the stigma surrounding "inferior" forms of higher education is harmful.
A CEO straight of highschool that I'd want to work for would be a diamond in the rough to say the least.
very true; and CC captures the original intent of college which was to gain knowledge, whereas 4-year colleges are focused on a lot of other stuff (prestige, network opportunities, job opportunities, sports, college life, etc.)
this was the original purpose of college (and what liberal arts colleges still attempt to do today); but at some point (maybe starting in the 70s?) college became a place to get the skills necessary to enter the job market, until now it's basically become a prereq for almost any job that's not minimum wage so basically an extension of HS -- serves no real purpose but companies require the piece of paper so you have to have it.
(Yes there are exceptions -- tech, professional sports, acting -- but only if you are supremely talented at a young age, or very lucky, and therefore for the very very few.)
> Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
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links -dump 1.htmI'd argue the opposite: you need college to become a corporate drone (you're not getting in otherwise); forging your own path provides many more opportunities to learn critical thinking and social experiences (provided you have the guts to strike out and not stay at home working at McD).
My experience has been that even the lower half of Waterloo grads, in CS, are solid to good. I'd probably take the 20th percentile Waterloo grad over the 20th percentile Harvard grad absent other information.
Alternatives like the Thiel Fellowship might change this. The better students might choose these options instead.
This could break down traditional academia and legacy systems, leading to a more efficient society.
also, have we considered that optimizing for efficiency is not the best way to structure a society?
Efficient at what? Producing more highly-resourced sociopaths who share Peter Theil's values?
This presumes the context of able to be successful in business.
You may not agree with the values of Peter (I know I don't agree with all of them), but the graduates are often selected for being effective at business.
If those kinds of fellowships provide a better signal, then they would be more efficient by definition.
Your comment, though, seems to come from a place of political indignation. I hope you can reflect on how those kinds of comments reflect on your own values.
Is there a some other way to evaluate a normative discussion of social, business, and educational policy than by bringing values to bear?
To take Thiel's fellowship charitably, though, these people are both creating and extracting value. And programs like these might have a better track record of identifying, and accelerating these creators that somehow give the market what it wants. Markets aren't perfect but I'm not aware of a better system.
I am not sure Thiel's intention about talking so openly about monopoly, but I feel that effects that might align with your values are:
1. That people (hopefully regulators) are more aware of the value extracting monopolies. I know Thiel has talked very publicly against a few tech giants he doesn't like.
2. That people (hopefully creators) think more about creating tiny monopolies. The most common problem I see business creators make is that they attack a red ocean. So maybe he calls them monopolies, but I just use the term 'niche'. They're certainly a more likely way to succeed and they create value for other people.
Anyway, Thiel is also playing political games of 'us versus them' and trying not to look charitably on the others. I felt like your comment continued that sort of damaging perspective.
I don't think only sociopaths are succeeding - in fact, our world progress is proof that cooperation and trust work very well even against cynics that exploit it, overall. I also think that most people (including those that are vocal) really want good things for humanity. They might even have similar thoughts on how to get there. But the way they talk about it and their identity group seems to get in the way.
We just get stuck in narratives that focus on differences. When we do that, we don't move the other party to our side, they just dig their heels in. And we probably agree with them much more than we think.
> Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
It looks like it was in the context of his seasteading project idea. He didn't so much want another government as no government. And not to replace a current government but to live outside it. It does sound like a fantasy, but it was certainly not in the tone of what is implied by it out of context.
I don't know a lot about Thiel but what you said made me curious if I had it wrong and this guy was a monarchist or something. There is a lot written about him but trying to find what he actually says is harder. It seems like, right and left, people try to use him as a mouthpiece because he says a lot of crazy sounding things that are often taken out of context or not fully understood in his meaning.
He recently gave an interview in the Atlantic where he touches on his political views. It's an interesting read.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/peter-t...
Some things you might be surprised by in the interview:
1. He no longer supports Trump and sees his presidency as a disappointment. He says he is now a supporter of Biden. He also stated that he didn't think the election was stolen but did think the presidency was stolen from Gore.
2. Though friends with an authoritarianist, he says he does not believe it in. He thinks Xi and Putin types will not cause innovation or greater freedom. He specifically declined to meet with Putin on invitation and instead informed the US government of the contact.
It seems like his support of Trump in his first term was a cynical accelerationist-style idea wherein to get out of a bad cycle in government, you make it worse. This is an awful idea for a few reasons. It looks like he no longer believes it though.
Another thing I think he has been very wrong on is support of cryptocurrency. Though I admit I also thought it was a good and interesting thing over a decade ago.
I'd say the worst thing about Thiel is his pessimistic tone which is paradoxical given how very optimistic he is about the potential future.
Anyway, I don't think he's what the far right wants him to be nor do I think he is what the left makes him out to be.
I think he wrote some scary manifesto I was trying to find pushing technology as the solution to our problems, but I was unable to. Convenient he owns much of that tech. Also, if you consider the premise he feels burdened by government and paying taxes, and wants to dismantle democracy, he would almost certainly be discrete, as well as consider lying to get what he wants.
I had never heard of the term "Dark Enlightenment"[1] until recently, but it's rather concerning.
I went to a google campus for an automotive liaison trip when working at a BIG3… some smart people for sure, but a lot of kids that could barely tie their pointy elf shoes let alone had any common sense about things outside of programming.
Like… You are working on an automotive program and you have no idea which parts under the painted part are suspension? You don’t know what the transmission actually does? Guys, I just need this car backed out and the other one brought in, this isn’t concerning, you and you, swap these. Yes, there is a reason that cars have so many parts.
… it was really eye opening. Good programmers, but holy hell I wouldn’t want to be stuck on an island with any of them.
Plus on a desert island you’ll probably have bigger problems than what a transmission does.
Imagine if you took these two premises as true:
1) Harvard is the most selective and high level educational institution in the world, it's full of the absolute smartest people alive. That's how I ended up here.
2) Now that I am actually here, it appears that there's a bunch of people at Harvard that honestly aren't all that bright.
You then have to pick from one of two obvious conclusions:
A) Maybe Harvard actually isn't full of the smartest people in the world.
B) Wow, since we know the dumbest person at Harvard is smarter than the smartest person at a state school, people who went to state school must be total fucking idiots.
Guess which worldview your average Harvard student tends to gravitate towards?
or maybe your "competing ideas" aren't as compelling as you think?