Billionaire entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel pays students to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurship.
From CBSNews.com
One of the wealthiest, best-educated American entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, isn't convinced college is worth the cost. With only half of recent U.S. college graduates in full-time jobs, and student loans now at $1 trillion, Thiel has come up with his own small-scale solution: pay a couple dozen of the nation's most promising students $100,000 to walk away from college and pursue their passions.
See the interview below.
Some noteworthy parts of the interview… [bold emphasis mine]
Peter Thiel: We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing in the last decade. Everybody believed you had to have a house. They'd pay whatever it took. Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay whatever it takes.
Morley Safer: You describe college administrators as subprime mortgage lenders, in other words conmen.
Peter Thiel: Not all of them, but certainly the for-profit schools, the less good colleges are like the subprime mortgage lenders where people are being conned into thinking that this credential is the one thing you need to do better in life. And they're actually not any better off after having gone to college; they typically are worse off because they've amassed all this debt.
More Peter Thiel quotes:
Peter Thiel: I'm saying that people should think hard about why they're going to college. If your life plan is to be a professor or to be a doctor or some other career where you need a specific credential you should and probably have to go to college. If your plan is to do something very different you should think really hard about it.
Peter Thiel: I did not realize how wrong-- how screwed up the education system is. We now have $1 trillion in student debt in the U.S. That trillion dollars-- wanna describe it cynically? You can say it's paid for $1 trillion of lies about how good education is.
Peter Thiel: We have a society where successful people are encouraged to go to college. But it is a-- it's a mistake to think that that's what makes people successful.
In the interview, Mr. Peter Thiel has been criticized for advocating or pursuing “anti-education” sentiment. But such accusation represents a misplaced understanding of Mr. Thiel’s position: the growing impracticability and irrelevance of the current “screwed up” educational system.
In other words, Mr. Thiel has not been anti-education “where you need a specific credential you should and probably have to go to college”, but rather he points out that the cost benefit tradeoff of higher education has become infeasible, and worse, the quality of education has not been aligned with the “education” necessary for work. And this is evidenced by the decreasing returns of higher education.
Finally Mr. Thiel doesn’t really pay people to drop out of college to become bums. He has instead been preaching entrepreneurship to students.
To quote anew the great Ludwig von Mises on the relationship between education and entrepreneurship,
In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal [p. 315] to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.
Once again Peter Thiel
Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook didn't complete Harvard. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. When you do something entrepreneurial, the credentials are not what really matters. What matters is having the right idea at the right time, the right place.
Peter Thiel has definitely not been out of touch with reality.
