It's definitely controversial if seen from an American perspective.<p>But it's much less controversial if seen from a German perspective. So perhaps you need to understand Thiel's German background first. Germany offers many successful alternatives to university.<p>Now combine it with Thiel's libertarian views: Apparently, Thiel tries to set up alternatives to college privately.<p>===<p>EDIT (for clarification):<p>I'm not saying that Germans would like this particular experiment. But they usually agree that university is just one out of multiple desirable options to gain a qualification.<p>In other words, I'm saying that thinking about alternatives to university is very German. This leads me to the idea that the motivation for this experiment may have its roots in Thiel's past.<p>Saying this as a German.
Peter Thiel has replaced one flawed institution with another. College works mostly because it gives you prestige and connections. Thiel's fellowships work on the same level. If you want to skip college and start a business, then do it.
Myself being a college dropout (though not from some prestigious university), this all sounds a bit foolish to me:<p>> Before the crowd of technology enthusiasts, he sketched out his plan: grants of up to $100,000 each for up to 20 people under the age of 20 to "stop out of school" and pursue their passion.<p>Maybe I'm just being sore and jealous, but my decision to drop out was not for the prospects of pursuing my passions. Rather, it was based purely upon economic and temporal constraints: in order to go to school, I needed a ton of money; in order to get money I needed to work full-time; in order to work full-time, I needed to take less and less classes. The fact that I later ended up pursuing my passions was basically out of necessity, not because some investor said he'd been thinking about it for a year and thought it might be better to leave, and oh by the way here's $100K.
I do think its interesting - his dropout club is filled with individuals that dropped out of already elite and prestigious institutions. Many of them have already signaled their intention to return to school after two or three years.
My initial worry about dropping out is what you don't learn - things that are abstract but perhaps very valuable. Things like real analysis, literature, classics. That's just a worry, though. I was encouraged to see that this was addressed in this article. I've been accused of not valuing the arts when I asked (on a different forum) if it's really worth spending 4 years and running up tens of thousands of dollars in debt (perhaps more) to study it. Hey, you can do that for songwriting too. Trust me, I love songwriting, but I think it would be beyond nuts to go 120K in debt to major in it. The existing system is broken to the point where we need a new way.<p>I'm not sure what to make of Wadhwa's criticisms. "Right now we should have had a dozen billion-dollar companies, if what Peter Thiel said was true," he says. Instead, he sees small businesses selling small products, and teenagers teaming up with seasoned executives because they lack the management skills they could have learned in college."<p>I'm not sure of the numbers - is this in reference to the 24 people who were funded? Falling short of a half dozen <i>billion</i> dollar companies in a short period of time means what Thiel said "isn't true"? Well honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Wadhwa, mainly because I find he does things like calling others (like Thiel) "disingenuous and dishonest" when he should really just say he disagrees and explain why. Even so, this seems strange enough that I'm figuring there is some context I'm missing.<p>The bit about management is weird, too. It's a bad thing young people are teaming up with with seasoned executives to learn the management skills they would have learned in college? Huh. I suppose there are good extracurricular opportunities in college (clubs, newspaper, and so forth), but working with a seasoned executive seems like a pretty great opportunity to me.
The thing that kills me about Thiel's critics is how much they ignore the risk that going to college poses.<p>obviously it can be done at alot of different price points, but Vivek Wadhwa teaches at Duke and Stanford, what sort of career outcome ROI do you need to justify attending those school if you're not attending at a heavily discounted price?<p>what percentage of grads does Mr Wadwa suppose achieves those career outcomes? especially if they're not a STEM major?<p>espcially considering that that debt typically isn't dischargeable?<p>depending on what sort of debt burden you're looking at, taking that on to attend college seems far riskier, if nothing else, you've locked yourself into a game of high paying/ high stress career or bust,<p>which seems silly to lock yourself into at 18, or at least, highly risky
What interests me is that he has managed to openly ask students to drop out of mainstream education without much public outrage. Is it a sign that the society at large has perhaps stopped associating failure with dropping out?<p>Or is it because the people who joined the fellowship were too different to be called "normal" already?