"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college."
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe...
"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-...
> Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.
Which is a bit better that quoting other comments that might be construed as out of context.
I know that my education, and work experience will payout huge when I start a company. The emotional and intellectual development learned in school and working for companies afterwards will be an amazing asset and would be for anyone.
When you drop out, you have nothing to lose, and so you are "all in", which allows you to take bigger risks.
Using the poker example, when you have nothing to loose you are effectively playing "on tilt". When I was broke (limited commissions coming in), and I didn't know what to do I started a wedding photography business. I made a profit, but I wasn't making real money and there was no real big opportunity. The next thing I work on will be massive in ambition since the opportunity cost would be leaving my insanely awesome job.
Having nothing makes most people focus on survival, having some income and confidence that there is another job out there if it doesn't work has to help people more than it hurts them.
And, as you read this, you are probably thinking about your friends working at big companies that would never leave to start a company. I would argue that the vast majority of people are not entrepreneurs and not going to school wouldn't change that. They would just have a worse job.
Generally, I think education allows you to lower the risk of achieving a given return. Or, it could be seen as allowing a higher return for a given amount of risk.
Maybe that's the definition of a start-up: a company that sets a level of risk, then tries to maximise the returns on that risk? A "normal" company does it the other way: sets a level of return then minimises the risk required to achieve the return.
The amount of debt students have to take on now to get a degree, in contrast to what a motivated person can learn and do on their own now with alternative educational sources and a cheap computer, means that most of that debt is paying for just the credential, whose value is being increasingly undermined while its cost continues increasing.
So he believes student loan debt is the next big financial bubble due to collapse, given that there is more of it than credit card debt [1], and that it's being loaned for any major regardless of its expected ROI, among other things.
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student...
- Thiel really hates that college puts undergraduates in serious debt. Stanford doesn't -- take a look at its financial aid.
- When someone decides to drop out to pursue a startup or stay in school, it's often not just about the "value" they think education has. Travis Kiefer is the entrepreneur's entrepreneur: he can survive on the adrenaline of his company until it succeeds. He lives for this. I considered senior year with my best friends a once in a lifetime opportunity and didn't drop out. I live for this.
- This startup class shouldn't surprise anyone from Stanford's perspective. It has encouraged entrepreneurship forever -- there will even be an entrepreneurship themed dorm next year -- and Thiel is as good as any to teach it.
- Zuckerberg routinely appears as a guest lecturer in CS106A, the introductory CS class.
- As an aside, Stanford can sell out a football game, and the stuff about Khosla's daughters is way exaggerated (I was quoted).
"Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble?
No, because that's where people buy their books."
- Tom Morello