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Comment by kevinalexbrown | Hacker News Reader

The last line sums up most of what I disliked about this piece: "where only big ideas flourish and school's out for everybody".

Safer tries to suggest that Thiel is advocating against college for everybody, or any field. What I take from Thiel's stance is that college has become less of a place of learning, and more of an inefficient credentialing mechanism.

Safer makes the interesting point that most startups will fail, but what he seems to miss (or Thiel doesn't point out): Thiel Fellows also have a credential of a kind, and even in failure, an extremely lucrative one.

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I have a degree in computer engineering and have founded a struggling startup. My one year doing my failed startup was immensely more valuable to me than my 4 years at university. But that's just one anecdote.

I have similar experiences. I feel that degrees are only relevant to employers as a means to thin the pack of applicants and only relevant to students as a way to better network and fill that check box putting them into the thinned herd.

I have degrees from a good university and I've also been working on a startup for a couple of years, I'm not naive enough to view life as anything other than a series of contiguous events that influence each other though...

But both are still valuable, aren't they? Perhaps school and startup experiences are in combination worth more than the sum of the parts.

Jumping in here... I'm a college student and a frequent TA. I've TAed in CompSci (which I started learning as a kid), Chemistry, and Biology. Most kids don't want to be there. They see it as a continuation of high school. I even go to a pretty awesome school. But most entering freshman go because their family and their society tell them its required. If even half of those folks didn't go, it would give college classrooms and communities a more academic, productive, and positive atmosphere that encouraged hard work and learning. Instead our country has a pathological relationship with higher education. Its a place where rich and middle class folks bump their heads against academic subjects in the day time and binge drink in the night.

Certainly not everyone's like that. Certainly college is a really useful tool for many people. Its also an good tool to climb the social ladder. But the assumption that its right for everyone in a certain social class... that's whats fucked up.

Did you apply yourself equally at both? Without making any assumptions, many people do sail through college hardly putting enough effort. If people half-assed startups the same way, starting work on the prototype two days before an investor pitch, say, that wouldn't be much of a learning experience either.

In your own startup, it feels like every stroke counts, and you are doing something you find exciting and meaningful. It's likely not that startups offer more teaching experience, it's just that you're bound to get more out of something you really dive into.

Having said that, most (all?) college curricula do not cater for people intending to do startups, but they still have a lot to offer.

Yes, I probably worked harder at my startup than at school. For people that love school, maybe that's a better choice for them, it wasn't necessarily for me.

That's the whole point: you _want_ to apply yourself more at your startup.

Not necessarily. I have seen people apply themselves well at school and also seen people half-assing through startups.

To be fair, I think we tend to hear what we want to hear.

Peter Thiel occurs to me as someone who sees the world in stark terms. He holds a libertarian approach to society and government. Considering this, I don't think it's a stretch to assume he truly means college is mostly, if not altogether, pointless.

That said, his opinion doesn't seem to be the prevailing opinion in Silicon Valley. By and large, people (even in SV) realize that not everyone has the chops to start a company or follow their ideas to fruition, and it's essentially still a success touchstone in the minds of most.

Even if one doesn't hope to start their own company, a college degree's value is mostly in its sheepskin effect. Forgive me for not citing sources, but I've read polls that suggest that up to 63% of college graduates are in jobs that don't even require a post-secondary education.

>a college degree's value is mostly in its sheepskin effect

Then how do you explain the mathematical maturity effect that most STEM students go through in a four year program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_maturity

There are industries for which it would be impossible to innovate or even participate without this, and it's unlikely someone will develop this on their own time.

Your post doesn't address not debunk the sheepskin effect, which is the observed phenomena where, among people with equal years of education, a person with a degree is paid much more than a person without.

I don't think you're incorrect about mathematical maturity, but we should tie it into the theme of the thread here: the returns to a college education. In technical fields, college is akin to job training. Consequently, it's not surprising that engineering degrees have the highest out-of-college return. This is unlike obtaining a degree in the liberal arts, where the on-the-job training supersedes the importance of a college education.

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