Neg: Exhaustive review of individuals showing that nothing of value (except riding on existing trends) can be shown from any applicant, except potentially in the case of the Solar Energy startup, in which money was used to hire PhDs with actual domain knowledge.
Pos: Saying that everything great is under NDA and that the solar energy stuff is cool, that the youngin' in question has impressed PhDs enough that they want to work for him. No real info, expecting you to trust that good stuff is in the works.
I think the "Pos" side should be discounted as it is obviously Thiel centered PR from an employee. I think the "Neg" side should be the default, since one should not presume value until value is demonstrated. That we are still in a sense "early stage" indicates that we don't have a full picture yet and so shouldn't presume that we do.
I have mixed feelings about the program in general. Entrepreneurship programs maybe useful for promoting excited entrepreneurs, but by no means are an adequate replacement for researchers or higher ed in general. In many of these cases, the entire premise is hogwash. Technical innovation comes from depth in a subject area, and you actually have to study something before you can innovate in the context of it.
This is most obvious in the case of the Uncollege movement -- the person and movement are exceedingly shallow and provide nothing of value except as a publicist for other trends in online education. I'd hate to think that his applies across the board, but suspect that it is more true than not.
"Technical innovation comes from depth in a subject area, and you actually have to study something before you can innovate in the context of it."
I think you are making three assumptions that can be disputed:
1. The only place to gain a depth of knowledge is a traditional university; and
2. The best time to gain this depth of knowledge is between the ages of 18 and 22; and
3. You need to innovate to have a successful business (where "innovate" is something more profound than just being creative).
Youth is the time when people are most able to adapt, learn, and change their path in life, so it's no surprise that K-12 and colleges would like a monopoly on the nation's youth.
But entrepreneurship teaches things that colleges stifle, such as independence, following your own path to success on your own schedule, and learning the consequences of your decisions quickly. And there's no law saying you can't study on your own while starting a business, or study later if the business goes south.
We're already in a situation where a bachelor's degree is watered down and doesn't offer any differentiation. Many students feel they need to get a doctorate to differentiate themselves, or in some cases, just to get in the door. In many situations, it's not a question of whether to spend 4 more years in school after highschool, it's whether to spend ten more years. It's no surprise that people simply say that the opportunity cost is too high, and do something else.
I would argue that the problematic conflation exists in the original program, insofar as the 20 under 20 program is often described as a potential replacement for higher ed. As far as I see things, there are a whole bunch of extra factors which are much more extensive than your three categories and which require a much more rigorous analysis.
For example, how do we foster innovation in specific subjects? For instance, we presumably know that with respect to atomic physics, this requires highly knowledgable people who have spent a lifetime studying very abstract subject matter, and this is most likely to be facilitated by institutions not governed by a profit motive. This is not quite as clear for innovation with respect to alternative energy, which may require any of the following: developing new types of energy, developing the technology which employs the new type of energy, or bringing an existing technology to market. The skillsets required for all of these areas are different, as is the institutional setting in which they will foster. If you take a very brilliant person who could ostensibly be working on harnessing new potential energy from the atom and put him in a program focused on entrepreneurship this would be a total mis-utilization of talent and, consequently, a huge step backwards. This is to say that business and entrepreneurship are only a solution for a certain set of problems and these are not the only problems.
Also, certain subject areas require super-specialization. So you need to start early and stay focused. The means for doing this will probably depend on what the subject area is. Is "higher ed" the solution for a would-be master electrician? No, probably some combination of vocational school and apprenticeship is. Likewise for a pianist. You go to a specialized school for a specialized subject.
Standard higher ed is an easy whipping boy insofar as it is often the default solution for many people who don't know what they want to do with their lives, many of whom don't actually end up taking advantage of the resources available to them and learning all that much. In a certain sense this might be a fault of the institutions themselves, including massive inflation in costs, multiplication of institutions, and failure to actually teach anything of value. However, the fact remains that for certain cases, there are no obvious better options than higher ed.
In any case, I think higher ed should be looked at as a set of tools rather than a solution to a specific problem, least of all the question "what should I do with the next four years of my life?" If you look at it that way, you might find that the tools that are available for you, including potentially interacting with a number of bright and diverse people and broadening your experience in various unexpected ways will be beneficial in many ways.
Case in point: I was chatting with a professor at Harvard yesterday who studied French and German before focusing on Arabic, and he was lamenting the fact that he had not had the chance to study more Sanskrit (he did study a bit) or Urdu or get his Persian up to snuff, all of which he though would have deepened his understanding and approach to life, which have some relationship to his scholarship. Of course, all of these things take time, and usually they take some form of institutional support, but as far as I see it they can be valuable if they expose you to certain ways of thinking about the world that you might not experience otherwise.
For that reason, I think you are right about entrepreneurship as a possible thing to do alongside your studies or even to replace your studies, but it very much depends on the person and where they are trying to go with their life. There are a lot of very hard problems that cannot be solved in the context of a startup and indicating to the youth that this is the best option may deprive them of valuable life experience.
As for the specific question of age, I agree that there is no set time to do anything in life. There are, however, natural patterns, insofar as people are not usually ready to leave the home and exist on their own until sometime in their late teens. What they do at that point probably should depend on their talent and proclivities. In that sense, I do think that Thiel's initiative may be right for some people. It is, nonetheless, billed as a solution for all sorts of problems for which it is not (much like the gazillion online education initiatives).
> It is, nonetheless, billed as a solution for all sorts of problems for which it is not
I have never had that impression from Thiel himself, though others have certainly spun it that way. He seems very much in favour of traditional formal education, unless your life goals are to have a career; in which case he promotes focusing on that instead.
The problem, as you describe, is that many people enter college for four years of their life and come out having gained nothing. Four years of being in the working world would have put them in the same standing, plus they'd have valuable experience to propel them into better jobs. They aren't there for the positive reasons to be in college, they are there because they don't know anything else and that is unfortunate.
There really is no one solution for everyone, and Thiel seems to be promoting that by showing there are other options. The only effective way to do push that on the masses is to attack the idea that college is the "one true way."
Four years of being in the working world would have put them in the same standing, plus they'd have valuable experience to propel them into better jobs.
Four years of being in the working world would have had them working in the kind of job one could get with a high school education and no experience. I see a lot of people say they'd rather hire employees with four years of experience than hire straight out of college, but I don't see many who are hiring high school graduates for those first four years.
> Four years of being in the working world would have had them working in the kind of job one could get with a high school education and no experience.
Which is the exact same situation a college graduate who put nothing into their education will be in, just several years later. You can leverage your time in a post-secondary school to move immediately into a better job in the future, but it is not the default.
In the meantime, the high school graduate has taken an entry level job and applied their own educational pursuits to move up the ladder at work and after four years is taking on the same kinds of jobs that someone who worked hard in college is.
The moral is that learning takes time and effort. There are no shortcuts, but there is no clearly defined path either. I find it a little disturbing that this article thinks these people should be overnight successes after just one year. Let's revisit them in ten and see where they stand. I expect they will be doing just fine.
In the meantime, the high school graduate has taken an entry level job and applied their own educational pursuits to move up the ladder at work and after four years is taking on the same kinds of jobs that someone who worked hard in college is.
You conveniently forget what kind of employer is actually likely to hire people who just finished high school.
I am not sure how the exact job is relevant, really. Every job has problems that can be solved in new and creative ways and that's where you start to make your mark.
To appeal to the local crowd: If you end up as a barista and, unsatisfied with your efficiencies, you go home and write a program that solves the optimum way to prepare the different kinds of coffee you now:
a) Are a more productive and therefore more valuable employee
b) Have a product that could be worth quite a bit to your employer, and perhaps the competition too
c) Have professional experience writing software using algorithms that the average professional programmer cannot even utilize
The catch is that you have to actually do it. Your typical high school graduate who does not go onto college generally did not go onto college because they do not have the drive to go over and above like that. That skews the statistics in such a way that it makes it look like having a degree matters.
I'm not dismissing your thorough reply, but HN can only support a certain depth of discussion.
I think we agree more than disagree here. I strongly agree with the idea that college should be seen as a set of tools and not the default choice. I think we can also both agree that alternatives need to be developed, otherwise college will remain a default.
I guess our disagreement is over the claims versus effectiveness of Thiel's alternative in particular.
> since one should not presume value until value is demonstrated. That we are still in a sense "early stage" indicates that we don't have a full picture yet and so shouldn't presume that we do.
Couldn't agree more. Until evidence is confirmed by multiple neutral third parties the negative (random) hypothesis holds precedence until such a time as evidence falsifies it. No presumption - merely rational scepticism there.
> I have mixed feelings about the program in general. Entrepreneurship programs maybe useful for promoting excited entrepreneurs, but by no means are an adequate replacement for researchers or higher ed in general. In many of these cases, the entire premise is hogwash. Technical innovation comes from depth in a subject area, and you actually have to study something before you can innovate in the context of it.
You perfectly illustrate the problem with one minded thought (as in capitalism > socialism || libertarianism > socialism).
As usual a rationally weighted mix is usually best under complex situations.
I think Thiel was probably creating a program with a knowledge of the PR the initiative would generate without much thought to long-term outcomes. Obv. he is a smart guy with plugins to higher-ed, and clearly someone who believes in the positive possibilities of innovation. In that sense, he is someone I would like to collaborate with.
That said, he may have shot himself in a foot here in picking people who were good from a short-term PR perspective yet will blow up and look like idiots in the long run. I heard of Dale Stephens before, but didn't take him seriously until Thiel sponsored him. Then I subscribed to his Facebook and blog email feed. What a joke. The whole thing is tailored for a bunch of angsty underachievers and provides zero positive value.
In this sense, I think Thiel has also done himself a disservice by pandering too much ultra-libertarian tech crowd which wants to see everything privatized -- the ultimate goal is a "Halliburtinization" of the US, where all governmental and public functions are provided at speculatively higher efficiency by the private sector.
Obviously, as the Halliburton saga in Iraq illustrates, this is very rarely the actual outcome. Enrons and their ilk create private monopolies on markets and spike the price to their own benefit.
This sort of short-sighted approach to higher ed is just a symptom of a similarly flawed way of thinking about the world that emphasizes profit (a short-term metric that is rarely the most important), instead of the other values which can be fostered within the context of higher ed. In this sense, I think the East coast Ivy League establishment often does a better job than Stanford in emphasizing some of these other elements -- for example, the library at Stanford positively sucks and it is very difficult to find the books necessary for anyone who reads widely (Cal is a bit better, but in general Californians seem not to read very much).
In any case, I think Thiel needs to step up his game a bit. Initiatives are needed to make better, more well-rounded people, rather than more little entrepreneurs who want a quick buck at age 20. In his book on Stanford educational system, he appropriately references Caliban and the need to "chain the beast" so-to-speak, but it seems that he hasn't taken his own lessons to heart.
the ultimate goal is a "Halliburtinization" of the US...
You could just as well call it the "Swedenization" of the US, since Sweden has adopted the same model for many govt services considerably more extensively than the US. (E.g., Sweden has privatized about 10% of their school system.)
They seem to do alright, but then again they also don't go starting too many wars.
You could call it that, but given that the US track record so far is closer to Halliburton (i.e. the aforementioned Enron case) and not Sweden, it seems more appropriate to refer to what has actually happened rather than what people wish would happen.
I'm a mentor; officially for two fellows, informally for another 6. Atop this, they move in my circles. It's a pro-bono relationship -- I'm working with them because I'm excited about them and what they're doing.
In that case, what do you mean by "the inside" ? Presumably you have some sort of privileged access to information, including that which is currently under NDA. If you aren't receiving funding from the organization, what exactly is your relationship?
Neg: Exhaustive review of individuals showing that nothing of value (except riding on existing trends) can be shown from any applicant, except potentially in the case of the Solar Energy startup, in which money was used to hire PhDs with actual domain knowledge.
Pos: Saying that everything great is under NDA and that the solar energy stuff is cool, that the youngin' in question has impressed PhDs enough that they want to work for him. No real info, expecting you to trust that good stuff is in the works.