This is super wrong. The Thiel Fellowship stopped betting on underdogs long, long ago. I invite anyone reading this comment section to select a random recipient from the last few years go and look at two things:
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.
Thiel's strategy seems to rely on external "pre-selection" to pick his fellows. Even when the program launched, he selected several candidates that already had been accepted to elite schools prior to applying.
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.
> But it does explain why colleges might be nervous: He's piggy-backing off their selection process to poach young candidates.
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. :-)
That’s one takeaway from a Krueger study referenced elsewhere in this thread. Namely, elite colleges select for people who will be successful regardless rather than adding anything to their potential.
I’ve thought about this (because of course it might happen and I need to be ready, haha) and if I had billions I’d do two education things:
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)
you are correct, but this is also what top tier universities are doing. They are betting on (selecting) the winners. The actual education adds almost nothing, except for some networking benefits.
“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."
That's interesting. Maybe this is the point, but observe that they are already leveraging the 'University of Pennsylvania' selection magic. Just because those students chose Penn State, for financial reasons or because they like the Nittany Lions, doesn't matter, the fact that they got into U of Penn means they are going to be more successful. If I were running admissions at a selective but middle tier College, I think I would immediately start training an ML model on the publicly available dataset but also historical datasets. Pretty soon I would be able to predict student future success with all kinds of interesting outliers that go beyond grades and SAT scores. I might find, for example, that inner city kids that create websites when they are 12 are extremely successful, or that kids who win the spelling bee when they are 9 go on to win at life. Who knows?
Not disputing anything you're saying, which is that the TF isn't quite a "Horatio Alger" fund, but I still think there's a lot of value in diverting people away from college who don't really want or need to be there, and growing their companies 1-4 years faster. It's no secret that Thiel hates how colleges have largely become a culturally self-appointed gateway to the middle class (in his perception), and that he's trying very hard to dispel the idea that college is necessary.
College is about learning many things. Trade schools are about learning other things. Thiel's program feels like a trade school for high-valuation entrepreneurship. Nothing wrong with that.
College, particularly elite colleges, are good for status signaling but not good for moving the needle on a person's life outcomes.
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.
My understanding is that the biggest predictors of success is a combination of IQ and big 5 personality traits. You need high conscientiousness, low agreeableness, low neuroticism (high risk tolerance), and some openness.
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 apologies for the delay in responding to this - I go through periods where I simply don't have time for HN :)
> 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.
This is a bit like saying that Rhodes scholarships are challenging the status quo of academic advancement.
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.
It's not particularly surprising that there's a higher-than-baseline success rate for a program that selects people who are already best-positioned for success. Can't help but wonder what the value-add of the program is at that point.
If a billionaire instead sets up a similar program for, say, parolees and sees higher-than-baseline success, then that's something to celebrate.
I don’t think the idea was for it to scale broadly? You could make a similar argument about higher education anyway, the current cultural mantra is that every single kid would benefit from university and should be the top goal broadly, which cannibalized a ton of useful industry and left tons of kids with $100k in debt and no life skills - yet still thinking they should have a university-type job, so they sit around depressed in their parents house and wash out into some low paying job like journalism or some unsatisfying gov job demanding 2 degrees.
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.
This is mentioned as a point of comparison in the article. Rhodes scholarships offer more value in terms of money, greater connections, more students, and still doesn't produce unicorns like this.
I think the counterargument would be they are different programs with different goals. TF is decidedly focused on innovation and entrepreneurship so it is obviously focused on cultivating that, while the Rhodes scholarship has a different angle. Comparing the two by the number of entrepreneurs they create is like measuring a sports car and tractor by comparing their top speeds.
That's the least surprising thing ever.
Doing things is much easier when you start with more money and more contacts.
Maybe that's a new thing for people who believe that "success" is a meritocracy, but it was already obvious for everyone else.
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.
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.
Maybe that's one of the reasons the United States has such well-regarded colleges, because play and work combined provide a stronger foundation than either alone.
Its cool that you got to spend time producing an album and writing about campus nightlife for credit, but some people need to make a living, not play student into adulthood. I cannot think of anything more privileged: a university system forcing you to take superfluous classes to become "well rounded" while being dumped out at the other end with tens of thousands of dollars of debt with skills that hold no marketable value in a world that is uber expensive to live in.
These are all "marketable values" for software engineers that CS classes don't teach:
* 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.
The general education requirement is one of the single most important things that universities demand. A well rounded, liberal arts education is crucial to making sure people who come out don't just come out with a hyper specialized knowledge and know nothing else of the world. I agree that it could be taught better, in fact there should be more gen ed reqs added, not fewer.
I've heard some variation of this many many times, and remain very unconvinced. General education in university isn't the norm around the world. Are non-americans all hyper-specialized people who know nothing else of the world? Are people who didn't go to university the same? Did someone do a study at some point and conclude that general ed was important or do these general ed requirements exist purely because they are tradition?
> General education in university isn't the norm around the world.
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.
I agree in principle. It's probably better at top schools and lib arts colleges, but a large percentage of my generals were also low quality department fundraisers (a health class comes to mind).
A lot of people don’t actually work in their field of study after they graduate. A quick google say only 46% do. So I think some general education is in order and valuable.
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.
I majored in EE and only ever had math and engineering classes. I had one class in philosophy that I took for fun but dropped after a week after realizing it's not for me. It didn't hurt my option to graduate in three years. What's the requirement for general education?
It's going to vary from school to school. Here's Caltech's requirements for courses outside of your major:
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.
>> I majored in EE and only ever had math and engineering classes. I had one class in philosophy that I took for fun but dropped after a week after realizing it's not for me. It didn't hurt my option to graduate in three years. What's the requirement for general education?
Which university did you attend? Almost every EE program i've seen has atleast some writing course requirements. Some social science reqs.
I agree 1000%. I've made this argument numerous times here before and always get push back. By the time you reach college, you've repeated the general education requirements several times over. Not only does it hamper your ability to 'move on' and start your career, its ridiculous to assume university systems know what makes up a 'well rounded' individual. If anything, the higher education system, and its staff, couldn't be farther from well rounded. They live in superbly isolated bubbles.
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.
It depends on your values I suppose but as someone who teaches a course that many take for general education requirements I'd say that the majority enter my course not knowing basic things about the world, like that American Sign Language is a language and not just people making gestures at one another. They also believe weird things they learned off the Internet, like "Eskimos" having 1000 words for snow or some tribe having no concept of time because they don't have a past tense. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Students in their early 20s often haven't even developed the general bullshit detecting skills to question a lot of this stuff. If they don't learn these skills somewhere they may never do so. I know it sounds kind of harsh but it is possible to get a degree in engineering or English literature and still be super stupid outside of a narrow field. I think that is bad for society. It creates a lot of problems when people don't get educated in the basics. It makes them poorer critical thinkers. It is easier to take advantage of them and they may be part of something hurtful or destructive without understanding why it is a bad thing. A university that sends out the equivalent of flat earthers and anti-vaxxers in droves is worthless. Who cares if people are getting jobs right out of college if they may actively be working against the public good in the long run due to ignorance?
I think it's unfortunate that this comment is being downvoted because it underscores an important transition regarding university education in the US. At some point, the focus of college changed from that of understanding and contributing to culture to one geared to vocation. (I put the start around the Morrill Land Grant Act in the mid-1800s). If you go back a few decades, surveys showed the main goal of students was to "develop a philosophy of life." Now it's to "find a good job." And before people say it's because of a change of demographics, the largest influx of working-class students came after WWII and they still tended toward the former outlook for a few decades. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but we should probably take note of that change and the consequences of it.
Given that there are around 12 million between age 18-24 that are enrolled in a higher education program, 20 million that aren't - AND that 95% of startup founders have at minimum a Bachelors degree - my naïve take on this is that the probability for success (if we define success as getting funding for your startup) is much higher for the college educated bunch, than the others.
I guess it’s awkward if you were trying to argue that college is the best way for everyone to achieve entrepreneurial success, but I ‘m not sure that’s a common argument for college. Certainly, the people I went to college with didn’t have that as a primary goal.
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.
Many of these will be written down to zero. Of course, it will still have been a cheaper education in self-aggrandizement than your typical Ivy League.
There’s a bit of mistaken identity of correlation vs causation here. Obviously Thiel would hand pick only the ones he see that has already have some traction into the products before handing(investing) out 100g. So if you hand out 100gs for anybody to drop out it won’t work. You need to already be “there” to have this work and those are the ones that maybe too smart for college
- you are prodigious in some area, and higher education would be a waste of your time versus self directed work and study
- 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
For example, I never went to college, but I can easily do calculus and science in my head. Some of us just naturally would exceed without needing to be lectured.
The article makes a fair point, but just like college, you have the problem of signalling value: does a degree/Thiel's program/award X only recognize potential, or also contribute to potential by drawing attention to the recipient? Regardless, is Thiel's model scalable, in any meaningful sense?
Colleges aren’t scalable either. Ask Harvard to hand out more degrees and you’ll see part of the value of a degree is signaling something you have that others don’t.
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.
$100k to drop out of a top university, for a gifted person who could make the most out of that environment, does not actually sound like a good deal. Does it come with additional funding down the line?
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?
I was thinking about this last week around the news coverage of the kid who got rejected from 16 colleges and decided to go straight to working for google.
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.
The program was launched a long time ago. At the time, $100k was a lot of money. A know more than a few people that were part of the program and most of them liked it.
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)
According to the inflation calculator[1] I consulted, and the fact that the program had its first round of applicants in May 2011[2], their $100,000 would be about $135.6k now.
The gifted person can make the most out of any environment. If the impact that person desires is to build a valuable business, going to uni sort of dilutes their effort in many ways and sets them back a few years.
Maybe that student had $100k+ in scholarship money? Maybe not.
> The gifted person can make the most out of any environment.
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.
Not that it literally pays the rent, but I think having a TF on your resumé is probably at least as good in a competitive job market as a top tier college diploma.
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.