

Peter Thiel Believes the Future Belongs to College Dropouts - pkarbe
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/04/peter-thiel-believes-future-belongs-college-dropouts/36561/

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lichichen
My first post on HN =]

Let me weight in on what I think are the pros and cons to higher education. (I
go to a Canadian University so this is related to my experience in Canada)

Pros:

Life goals/direction - Growing up, going to university has definitely given me
a direction and goal to peruse. How dangerous would it be if the younger
generation had no direction, but simply just aspired to be an "entrepreneur"

Networks - University has given me access to a huge network of professors,
established industry professionals (through events/networking sessions etc),
role models and up-and-coming talents

Exposure - Exposure in terms of being exposed to different types fields,
career options, co-op program is a +

Career Opportunity - Whether we like it or not, going to higher education and
advertising that you go to a reputable school is a criteria for HR to weed out
good candidates from the bad. Just showing that you can get into a better
university says something about you.

Fundamental thinking/critical thinking skills - While uni has not taught me
what I needed to know for my career it definitely has built the foundation.

Fun + social experiences

Cons:

Cost - ridiculous, in a recent convo with my friend he describe it to be a
$40,000 party

Career learning - not there, I learned more from on-job training, reading
blogs and interviewing industry professionals

Like-mindedness - esp with the management program, I find that the teaching is
based on measuring units, quantifying experiences and not giving people the
room to grow as artists. In the marketing field, you can't quantify
everything, we are training too many scientist and not enough artists

Overall, I can't generalize that without higher education the younger
generation will be lost for directions. There is definitely a lot of young
talents who are already well developed into the senior years of their high
school or even prior. But remember this is a confusing time and chaotic time
for us. teens now days have so much more to worry about. Not everyone is made
to be an entrepreneur, you have to give the opportunity to the right people.
For the rest, it is just like giving wings to Icarus, he will fly too close to
the sun and be burned.

Your thoughts?

Lichi

~~~
zachallaun
First, welcome to HN! As a quick aside, it's generally taboo to sign comments
with things like your Twitter handle or personal URL -- feel free to throw
them in your profile :).

Re: your comment, you're absolutely right that entrepreneurship is not for
everyone, and that many people will benefit more from college than without.
However, Thiel doesn't argue that everyone should dropout of college. Rather,
he claims that the best and brightest don't necessarily need it, and would be
better served with "freedom" from education.

Should we burn down Harvard? Definitely not. But you don't need it to be
successful!

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chrismealy
Peter Thiel also wishes women couldn't vote.

[http://gawker.com/#!5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-
cou...](http://gawker.com/#!5231390/facebook-backer-wishes-women-couldnt-vote)

~~~
yummyfajitas
Some context is extremely helpful.

Peter Thiel only believes democracy is instrumentally valuable. I.e., it is
valuable only insofar as people vote for more freedom, and harmful when they
don't [1]. He believes women vote against freedom. Thus, he believes women
voting is harmful.

[http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-
educa...](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-
a-libertarian/)

[1] The belief that democracy is valuable only when people vote for your
preferred policies is not that uncommon. Witness, e.g., hostility by gay
marriage proponents towards voters who oppose gay marriage.

~~~
martythemaniak
*Peter Thiel's definition of freedom.

It's important to note that a lot of libertarians' ideas about freedom and
pretty much everything else is comically out of step with how most people
think. They think it is because they have stumbled on the magical answer to
everything (the response to any problem facing society is a trivial "no
government") and that everyone else is a blind idiot, when in fact they are an
odd fringe that is unlike most other people.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Of course Peter Thiel's opinion of politics will be informed of Peter Thiel's
definition of freedom. The fact that it is out of step with how most people
think (in particular, women and welfare beneficiaries) is precisely why Peter
Thiel is pessimistic about democracy. This is explained in the short essay of
his that I linked to.

Apart from attempts to lower Thiel's status, what value do you believe your
comment adds?

~~~
starwed
This guy is pushing an idea that, on the surface, I disagree with. Confronted
with it, I then wonder if it is worth taking more time to understand the guy's
arguments, to see if there is something of worth there.

Evidence that this guy has other ideas that are more clearly bullshit keys me
in that, no, I don't.

------
dasil003
> _"Why doesn't Thiel make it possible for anyone who wants to go to Harvard
> to be able to do it?" Maneker wonders._

What makes Harvard Harvard is that _not_ anyone can go there. If everyone
could, it would just be a good state school, and that certainly wouldn't pay
the bills.

What universities don't realize, is that the same force which drove more and
more people to attend college at the beginning of the information age, is also
tearing down the requirement for college. There is really very little that you
can't learn or even experience on your own these days to give yourself a
brilliant education.

That said, a good college is still far and away the best way to learn
classical knowledge quickly. I am very thankful for my CS degree, because
there's no way I would have gotten that breadth of exposure to the most
interesting parts of CS with 4 years in industry, but with the way tuition is
increasing, the cost is squeezing out the benefit for more and more people,
masked only by the availability of government loans, and throwing people into
a life of indentured servitude.

I don't know if Thiel is doing these kids a favor, but it's certainly no worse
than the deal they'll get from the establishment. I'm glad he's throwing a
wrench in the works regardless of how misguided he may be.

~~~
Goladus
> What makes Harvard Harvard is that not anyone can go there.

That's part of it, but it's not the main thing. What makes Harvard Harvard are
the resources, professors, environment, culture, history, reputation, and
other students.

That not everyone can get in is largely a consequence of the school's limited
resources. It's also a consequence of high admission standards, and those
can't be replaced however it's already the case that Harvard cannot accept all
qualified applicants.

~~~
intenex
Actually, being a current undergrad at Harvard as well as one of the Thiel
20u20 finalists, I have to pitch in my two cents and say that in immense part,
what makes Harvard Harvard _is_ the fact that not everyone can go there.

The individual validation that a student gets upon attending Harvard is
predicated on the unparalleled difficulty of getting in. In my class (2014),
for example, admissions were at an all time low - ~7% admission rate, with
~30,000 applicants. Possibly a majority of those applicants could have
attended Harvard and graduated with respectable success, but had Harvard
chosen to open its doors to all of those applicants (just assuming for the
moment that its resources would have allowed it to do that), the respect a
Harvard admission garners would plummet - because it proves very little.

It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and there's
the problem. I'll shoot up a counterexample - when I was choosing between
schools, Harvard was actually far from my first choice. UChicago was hands
down the college I wanted to go to, and I had my heart set on it. In all
honesty, the academic rigor at UChicago is lightyears above that at Harvard
(saying that after now having taken courses at both institutions), yet the
prestige of UChicago is nowhere close to that of Harvard. That's due to a
number of factors, but as a correlation (can't quite say causation in either
direction) the acceptance rate at UChicago used to be immensely higher - it
plummeted down to the teens in 2010, but it was roughly ~30%+ for all
preceding years. Hence, while the education you might receive upon admission
might be comparable to or even arguably better in certain ways than an
education at Harvard, admission itself demonstrated very little. And that's
the problem - for applying to the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, being an
undergrad at Harvard undoubtedly helped me far more than would have being an
undergrad at UChicago. Like Thiel said, most of the finalists came from Ivy
League and prestigious name institutions - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT,
Stanford...not a single one from UChicago.

The exclusivity is, quite honestly, the main thing.

Addendum - though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to
Harvard manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief,
pretty much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and
radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely
accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to
California to make it big.

~~~
Goladus
_The individual validation that a student gets upon attending Harvard is
predicated on the unparalleled difficulty of getting in._

Acceptance rate and difficulty of getting in aren't the same thing, that's my
point. "Not everyone can get in" can mean several different things. Most
people who don't meet the standards for admission don't even bother applying,
so even that 7% admission rate is likely higher than ratio of high school
grads who meet the standards vs those who don't.

It stops being difficulty when it's just a matter of dumb luck. If there were
5,000 qualified candidates and only 2000 slots, and those other 3,000 wind up
going to Yale or MIT or Stanford, does it really matter? So it doesn't make
sense to emphasize Harvard's exclusivity without also admitting where that
exclusivity comes from: reputation and high standards for admission.
Exclusivity is a consequence of that, it's not the reason for it.

 _It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and
there's the problem._

I would say that if you are better than your peers then you aren't really
peers in that sense.

 _though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to Harvard
manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief, pretty
much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and
radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely
accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to
California to make it big._

This is exactly my point. The students, faculty, and overall culture at
Harvard make it a superb environment for an ambitious student. Exclusivity
alone isn't responsible for that.

------
brudgers
A person under 20 has a far better chance of making $100,000 in professional
sports than getting it from the Thiel Foundation. I suspect that for a person
under twenty, the odds of getting $100,000 from Thiel are even lower than the
odds of winning the same amount in Texas Hold'em.

Not to mention that they also have a far better chance of getting an academic
scholarship to an elite institution.

~~~
jerf
That's a strawman. Nobody is saying that the only way to be an entrepreneur is
through Thiel's program. And once you remove that implicit assumption from
your snark, there's nothing left.

~~~
Goladus
That's not a strawman at all. If the argument is that any given high school
graduate would be better off starting a company than going to college, using
20 hand-picked or self-selected candidates isn't very good support. Pointing
out that fact is important context.

~~~
jerf
The post I replied to has been edited since I made my comment. It previous had
a much stronger false dichotomy where the only entrepreneurs were those in
Thiel's selected group. I still think the false dichotomy offered is too
strong, but it's less pronounced than it was.

------
andjones
Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733089>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799700>

------
podperson
I was not aware of Peter Thiel's other opinions when I read this piece, but
his arguments that we're in an education bubble seem to me to be very solid.

Indeed, there's a lot of evidence he left "on the table". E.g. grade inflation
is analogous to the kinds of things we saw surrounding the housing bubble and
the internet bubble -- people want the metrics to meet certain criteria and
don't care about the underlying fundamentals, so everyone is above average.

------
jarin
As a high school dropout, I'm just going to go ahead and extrapolate.

------
yafujifide
I satisfy the following three conditions:

* I dropped out of college.

* I got kicked out of college.

* I graduated college.

Why stop at dropping out when you can have it all?

~~~
exit
how did you get kicked out?

