Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
In recent months, much has been made about the dubious value of a college education for which students and their parents pay upwards of $200,000 (see Paul Rahe's "Higher Education: A Scam?" and Troy Senik's "Defining College Down", for starters). The arguments for why college may not be worth the hefty price tag range from finding fault with the student (i.e. many of our high school seniors are simply not "college material," whether due to lack of preparation or motivation, or both) to finding fault with institutions of higher learning themselves (i.e. very little knowledge is actually imparted to students in university classrooms). And the complete cynic employs both arguments: higher education is a system whereby we send off our lazy, unprepared youth to go study underwater basket-weaving and human sexuality for four years.
On the other hand, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel -- who, I hasten to add, holds both a Bachelor's and Juris Doctor from Stanford -- has very different reasons for opposing the notion of higher education. Firstly, Thiel believes that the college environment stifles innovation and binds otherwise talented minds with the shackles of groupthink. And secondly, Thiel is thoroughly convinced that higher education represents yet another bubble that's just about to burst.
At PayPal, [Peter Thiel] hustled $100 million in venture capital just ahead of the dot-com crash, which he anticipated, and he made another well-timed bet for his Clarium Capital Management hedge fund against the housing market in 2007. In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy— hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
Doing his part to dissuade the nation's most talented youths from making a perilous investment decision, Peter Thiel has introduced a philanthropic program called 20 Under 20.
The program, also known as the Thiel Fellowship, will award twenty students 19 years old and younger $100,000 each and the mentor ship of some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The catch? The winners have to stay out of college for two years. They are to be announced this month.
I've always found it peculiar that the biggest detractors of higher education are those who have participated in it, and arguably benefited from it themselves. But there's something awfully refreshing about Thiel's putting his money where his mouth is in incentivizing some of the nation's most talented youth to pursue a path of innovation and entrepreneurship.
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Aug '10
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
The value of college totally depends on the program (and the school).
Will this program prevent young adults from wasting four years of their lives getting a B.A. in Sociology or Musicology, etc?
Or will it prevent promising students from getting a start on fruitful careers in Engineering, Computer Science, Medicine, etc?
Jan '11
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
To debate whether colleges provide an adequate education (or one that's worth the investment), you start with what counts as an adequate education.
If your definition of education is "technology job preparation," then you're in trouble. Technology evolves, too fast for an institution to respond. A traditional four year college has prepared you for the jobs that were available four years ago, but those jobs aren't worth the $200,000 you spent on the education.
A classical liberal arts education works on a different principle. It hopes to train the mind in well-grounded, historically-tested disciplines, so that at the end of four years, the educated mind can handle anything you throw at it. It will be prepared for an evolving workforce. It will also be prepared for life, because the same disciplines that succeed in work will enrich your life.
Notice I said "classical" liberal arts. Too many colleges these days don't want to be technical schools, so they call themselves liberal arts. That's where you find "Rolling Stones 101" courses. Not all liberal arts schools are classical.
But there are some out there, and they're usually cheaper. They're worth it.
Dec '10
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
KC - Thanks you said it best. I think there's a fine line between higher education that promises to create "tomorrow's future business executive" yet leaves them clueless to current events, politics, art. Conversely, there are many institutions that fill a lot of students a lot of leftist bilge. In his recent interview on NRO, Thomas Sowell stated (paraphrasing) that all too often, places of higher education focus on the students views and feelings rather than encouraging them to seek out the evidence and weigh the facts.
Nov '10
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
KC Mulville:
Notice I said "classical" liberal arts. Too many colleges these days don't want to be technical schools, so they call themselves liberal arts. That's where you find "Rolling Stones 101" courses. Not all liberal arts schools are classical.
But there are some out there, and they're usually cheaper. They're worth it. · May 26 at 1:34pm
Indeed. I think for a lot of people--or maybe just liberals-- the idea of "liberal arts" is to produce people who vote for Chuck Schumer and attend performances by Karen Finley.
Apr '11
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
From my experience, the best way to attend college from an economic standpoint is to attend two years of community college to get all of your math, english, science pre-requisites out of the way on the cheap. The courses themselves vary little from the CC to the massively overpriced private universities.
After two years, seek admission at a public institution in your state as in-state tuition is about half that of non-residents. The degree you get from this institution will be on par with that of a so-called Tier 1 university. Getting your undergraduate degree from Stanford simply means you overpaid for your education and may carry some political value, but little else.
The difference between the run of the mill state university and the Tier 1 institutions is in the value of post-graduate degrees, so, if you're going to pursue a post grad degree, then you need to be selective and be ready to shell out the big bucks or sign up for big debt. The good news is that you'll make more when finished, so you can pay it back relatively fast.
Apr '11
Re: Billionaire Pays Youths to Stay Away from College
More to the point of Diane's post; we are becoming a nation of functionaries, and that means less value should be placed in higher education. Being a functionary is more about experience with performing a given function than understanding the background/science/history of said function.
Sadly, less and less students choose engineering and the applied sciences, while that is exactly where more talent (a.k.a. any talent) is needed.
Edited on May 26, 2011 at 4:21pm