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.
In fact, the future may be increasingly different due to the role college plays in collapsing demographics as currently implemented.
A better future will probably normalize many age ranges of people in college getting educated when most appropriate.