The dean of the Stanford engineering school has a very good point. Peter Thiel's dropout scholarhips are very much a rigged experiment.
First he is going to select the brightest kids in the best schools. These kids already have higher than usual chance of success. Then he is going to give them 100k each. That will also increase their chances of success. Then he is going help them with advice and networking as much as he can which will also increase their chances of success.
This is all good and well. I have no problem with Peter Thiel helping a bunch of kids with money advice and networking.
But THEN he is going to say "look, my dropouts succeeded therefore education sucks therefore you are better off dropping out." A lot of kids will drop out when they are not the best in the class, when they do not have the help of Peter Thiel, and they will be fucked.
Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college.
Again this is usually not a problem (not all charity needs to be a social experiment) except for the fact that Peter Thiel obviously wants to use his scholarships as a social experiment. He wants to use them as something to criticize colleges and education with.
Peter Thiel is a very smart person (and ironically also very well educated) so he knows very well this is a rigged experiment. He designed it this way. He has an agenda, and this is to bring out some kind of libertarian utopia to the US. He thinks that academia stands in the way of this political goal and he wants to attack and destroy academia by destroying academic institutions. None of this is a conspiracy theory, he is actually pretty open about all of the above.
And again, I do not have a problem with that in general, any American has a right to be politically active, and to work to bring about what he believes are positive political changes to his/her country.
But again he is using a rigged social experiment in his fight against academia. As bystanders we should be very well aware that this experiment means absolutely nothing and resist his urges to conclude that it means that education is worthless.
This is not an experiment. This is challenging the blind assumption of higher education, taking direct aim at the prestige of higher education, and disproving the belief that anyone who can stays in college and that people who drop out are automatically losers. Peter Thiel is saying with his money that he believes that bright, ambitious people are better off staying out of college. Will this prove it to the rigorous standards of science? No. Feel free to donate another $2M if you want to run that experiment your way.
Do people actually hold that assumption to begin with? There are already plenty of examples of successful dropouts, Bill Gates being one of the more famous. They're talked about in mainstream media relatively frequently, and most Americans know about them. The skepticism is over what the odds are if an average person tries it without connections & assistance, not whether it's possible, especially if it's relatively few kids who are explicitly given money/connections/assistance. I don't see this initiative as doing much to address that particular piece of skepticism.
I don't even oppose Thiel's initiative, I just don't think it has particularly broad implications. If the non-college-attending kids in his program do well, a reasonable conclusion to draw is: if you have someone willing to give you $100k and introduce you to good business connections, in lieu of attending university, then that is quite possibly a good opportunity to take.
If you don't have such an offer, on the other hand...
I don't think this accomplishes that goal, however. I think this experiment demonstrates that connections and money are a good way to get ahead in life, and if someone is willing to hand that to you on a silver platter, it's a smart choice to take it.
I'm sure that with Peter Thiel's money and connections even mediocre students would out perform their peers. Having one or both of these is a significant part of the game.
I personally view this as a publicity stunt. I imagine it cannot be replicated in fields such as mathematics or biochemistry.
I don't really see how he makes that point, though, by holding up a big carrot and then cherry-picking a few for extra-special treatment. It makes me think "you can be successful if someone throws money at you and gives you special attention", but I'd be tempted to think that those who go for the prize would be less likely to be independently successful than someone who persevered through and finished what they started, in spite of how good dropping out looked.
It'd be a whole lot more meaningful to test an alternative education program - maybe get people learning online or doing apprenticeships, something people could actually do without massive sponsorship - and create a credentialing system that's actually selective and credible, so those people aren't at a disadvantage in the job market. Something like that would actually take aim at the prestige of higher education.
> Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college.
There already exists a control group: the class of students starting elite schools in 2011. The question Thiel is asking is: What would happen to an exceptional kid who, instead of attending a top-tier college, entered a entrepreneurship program instead?
If it turns out that Thiel's kids are more successful than the average Harvard grad, then Thiel will have demonstrated that, at least for exceptional kids, going to an elite college may not be the best option.
Well, you still have a self-selecting group. Unless he randomly accepts some of the applicants and compares them to the other applicants, it would still be a flawed experiment (assuming he wants it to be a proper experiment, which I don't think is the point).
It's probably reasonable to assume that many of the kids attending Harvard do have access to "crazy amounts of excellent connections", $100,000, and personal mentors. Many of the kids at Harvard come from the richest, most "privileged" class in society. They go to Harvard presumably because they consider that Harvard is their best option. Harvard is not a 2nd choice. Thiel is out to demonstrate that, for this class of people, Harvard may not be the best option.
The only problem is that the kids who are excluded from Mr. Thiel's group aren't being treated the same. No one is showering them with a hundred grand of startup capital and advice from the best in the business. They're out there on their own. Maybe they get help from their parents, but that's hardly the same level of assistance as a $100k grant and advice from industry leaders.
This experiment doesn't prove that education is worthless, but that there's other ways to gain it. Personally, I could do without the tuition fees and snobby tenured professors preaching the State's religion.
I was a gifted student who dropped out of high school to go to college early. I was awarded scholarships totaling around $70,000 and borrowed roughly the same amount of money to attend one of the ludicrously expensive private colleges you hear so much about.
Now, I loved college, and it certainly did a lot for me. But would I be better off today if someone had offered me the same money on the same terms to start my own business? Almost certainly.
I think it is important to point out .. Thiel is not against education.
He is against the existing institutionalized education system that we have.
If anything he is a huge supporter of education, trying to find a new, more efficient way to do it than the current bureaucratic mess we have right now.
Of course engineering school deans are going to think dropping out is a bad idea. The guy at Best Buy will also try to convince you to buy a warranty on your flat screen T.V.
There are definitely some good reasons to stay in school, but this article rubbed me the wrong way. Take for example, a couple of the arguments presented:
Argument: You get a lot of valuable social connections from being in school.
Counterargument: You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university. Why not connect with smart ambitious people of all ages that are working in your field? If the main value of elite colleges is that they screen bright students and bring them together for 40K a year, the students are getting ripped off.
Argument: Mark Zuckerberg was successful because he was vetted and educated by Harvard.
Counterargument: This seems highly unlikely. No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated. And, Zuckerberg was an accomplished hacker before he came to Harvard.
Argument: Most successful entrepreneurs are not drop outs.
Counterargument: That is because most people who try entrepreneurship are not drop outs. A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed. An even better question, is whether the same person is more likely to succeed if he/she drops out. Unfortunately, the last question is impossible to answer.
"Of course engineering school deans are going to think dropping out is a bad idea."
This is an ad hominem, dressed up nicely. And from the article that I just read (maybe we're being A/B tested for ideology?), nearly all of the deans made clear exceptions for exceptional students. What a bunch of higher-education zealots.
You also got the "arguments" wrong. All of them. None of the deans made an argument for greater success due to social connections (Wadwha makes fun of this idea at the top of the article!), none claimed that Zuckerberg was successful "because" of his time at Harvard (one made the argument that he "needed it for vetting", which is a different argument entirely), and none made the argument that "most" entrepreneurs are college grads (...or anything at all, for that matter; except for the rather uncontroversial argument that "most entrepreneurs fail", very few generalizations were made).
The most important arguments were the ones that you ignored:
1) Thiel's "experiment" isn't actually an experiment. It's a vanity exercise that will prove nothing, because it has no controls.
2) Most entrepreneurs fail, but you can easily point to the exceptions to make (fallacious) arguments about the value of education.
3) An engineering degree improves the average outcome for students, even if it doesn't help the exceptional cases.
4) At the companies founded by famous college dropouts, you'd be incredibly hard-pressed to get a job without a college degree.
The first quote wasn't an ad hominem attack because it wasn't directed at the engineering deans, but rather at the author. If you're trying to determine whether people should drop out of school why would you only survey deans to make a point? Moreover, it is perfectly valid to note the conflict of interest a speaker may have. Their incentives don't make their arguments wrong, but it should give us caution before making generalization or relying on their expertise.
I think we're talking past each other to a certain extent. The deans do make some good points. 1-4 are generally true. I just don't think they are sufficient evidence to show that students shouldn't drop out. They are saying that colleges are good social networks and send important signals to employers. My argument is that something is wrong when we are spending 100K on a screening/networking mechanism. Notice that none of the deans said stay in school because of the things you'll learn in the classroom.
"Notice that none of the deans said stay in school because of the things you'll learn in the classroom."
The second-to-last paragraph of Jim Plummer's response seems to say so. Example: "A university education gives the large majority the tools to become innovators and entrepreneurs throughout their lives." He then goes onto extol the benefits of an engineering education even for careers outside engineering.
Your suggestion that the deans are pro-college institution because they are deans doesn't necessarily follow. It actually is an ad hominem against the deans because you're trying to weaken the author's point by reducing the weight of a series of supporting claims made by the deans because you claim that the deans are acting out of self-interest (or interest of some educational-industrial complex of which they are a part) when they wrote these statements. Given that one side of this argument likes to frame the educational institution as bad (and sometimes go as far as saying the people in the institution are actively working to further its negative ends), it would be reasonable to interpret your first remarks as an ad hominem attack.
That said, your initial statement doesn't necessarily follow because it could also be the case that the deans became deans because they earnestly believe in the system they're helping to further, and that's why they became deans. Claiming the possibility of bias doesn't entail the presence of bias.
You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university.
Create that community. I fear that is harder done than said, given that none really exists.
No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated.
I don't know if Mark can do Facebook at Harvard and get traction w/o being a Harvard student. At the very least Facebook probably doesn't exist w/o a Harvard -- a collection of young exclusives who are technically saavvy. No Harvard means no Facebook, one way or another.
A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed.
A better question, IMO, do we need more startups than are currently being created? Imagine if college enrollment is cut in half. And we increase the number of startup companies by a factor of 20x. Is that net good? Will innovation and goodness increase as a result? I'm not sure it will.
It's almost as if the self-selection of having to choose to leave Stanford/Harvard is a good funnel for founders.
Wasn't part of FB's initial cachet (for people outside of Harvard) that it was initially exclusive to Harvard? And wasn't Z being at H a prerequisite to H students using FB?
I've always felt like FB's success was due more to good timing and marketing (using recursive network effect) than anything else.
The only reason I signed up for facebook initially in college is because it seemed like it was something officially provided by the school. If nothing else, the fact that it had public defaults for visibility, but limited to an exclusive network struck a balance that college students liked. That would have been harder to do and to understand from outside of a college.
Wadhwa ends up helping Thiel's cause, not challenging it. He starts by proclaiming his bias and stating he "asked three [engineering deans] to help me quench this fire". But the deans try to challenge it with statements like "most will fail", "they aren't ready", "it would be a good thing if more [cohort] stayed in school", "it's unlikely they'll succeed", "getting an engineering degree reduces variance in your career..." Can those responses get more stereotypical?
He's right that students will take Thiel's message very seriously. His message is emotional, inspirational, anti-authority, and anti-establishment. And it's impossible to counter with those kinds of responses.
Also, the experiment that the Stanford dean describes is impossible to run, and the closest possible thing has already been realized. The people who want to drop out to take responsibility and start a venture are self-selecting. You can't just randomly assign roles like "you'll stay in school" and "you'll go to a startup" because the students would be emotionally invested in either decision. And many of them do already receive huge no-strings-attached financial assistance to stay in school.
There is no control group. Why not pick 40 very bright young people and give half of them $100K to start a company and the other half $100K to stay in school and complete their education?
That would be a really interesting and exciting experiment. I wish someone would do it.
That wouldn't give you a control group, either, that would give you a new set of students, and would let you answer the question "how successful are students hwo graduate without being crippled by student debt compered with dropouts and a control group of students how received no special assistance and graduated anyway."
I would be very interested in this experiment, but subsidizing a student's education in the US doesn't give you a 'control' group, but a very privileged group.
Would be awesome but it seems hard to implement. Do you randomly choose half and tell them "sorry, no school, you must start a business"? If you let them choose which group they're in instead is the experiment biased? Ideas anyone?
There is a control group: the classes that are now beginning at elite schools. Presumably Thiel's kids would be among them if they were not selected for Thiel's program. To make a proper study, all that needs to be done is to track Thiel's kids and their counterparts, the control, who went to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. How do Thiel's kids compare to Harvard's class at 1 year, 2 years, ...?
"Vivek Wadhwa is .. a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University."
Wadhwa is a beneficiary of the college fees he is advocating paying. He's doing it under the guise of promoting education in general and has conflated Theil's argument with an anti-education argument.
The title of the article he's refuting is:
"Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education."
One of Thiel's best points in the original article:
If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates? It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.
Harvard affiliates?
There are no Harvard affiliates but there are higher education affiliates, which are called as universities. Harvard itself is one such affiliate in some sense.
Universities are a result of Theory of The Firm, since a university is generally restricted to small geographic region, it can decrease the transaction costs between the various components of higher education. However if you franchise a university across multiple locations, the net transaction costs go up.
E.g. University of California system can be considered as an affiliate system. However you would still find one UC e.g. Berkeley more reputed than other e.g. Santa Barbara.
Peter Thiel incorrectly assumes, that a University system can share a lot of resources between distant geographic locations. However most of the resources such as faculty, labs cannot be shared. Thus you are better off increase capacity of students rather than branching out.
Rapacious universities are testing the theory of creating affiliates in pursuit of more money. NYU, Cornell, Texas A&M, and Carnegie-Mellon are opening up campuses in the UAE to pull in some more money.
Try getting a job at Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple if you don’t have a degree. There is almost no chance that you will make it past HR.
Bullshit. There are plenty of people at those companies that never got a degree but proved themselves in other ways (open source, made popular apps ... etc).
Indeed. If your career-seeking paradigm involves going through HR, of course you're going to want to go to college. If your career goal is as much success as possible, even when you accept higher variance, college looks like a worse deal.
One thing that struck me about this debate is college athletics. In particular basketball and football as athletes in those sports tend to make money from day 1 in college (although the money is made for the college/NCAA). Despite the fact that there are minor league versions for both of these sports, they aren't well regarded.
It would seem like minor league basketball is what Thiel is advocating, yet no one is interested in going to it, nor recruiting from it. The best players are recruited from college, and that seems to be the way everyone likes it.
There are always the occassional superstars at a young age -- Gates/Zuckerberg...James/Bryant, but they are clearly rare and imitating them is almost certainly folly. No one would suggest recruiting directly from high school is a good idea on a scale of more than a couple of athletes per year (at most). Just thoughts.
I think the primary difference between athletics and entrepreneurship is the natural talent/experience equation. In a sport like basketball, a certain level of inborn talent and physical prowess is required. No amount of practice and experience will get you into the pros if you don't have the talent to begin with. There are also strongly diminishing returns for experience because as you get smarter about the game, physical aging reduces your abilities in other ways.
Entrepreneurship is extremely different because experience holds much more weight and can easily overcome a lack of natural talent (in a skill like programming, for instance), or open up a new role. Someone who drops out of school to join the NBA and then gets laughed at by recruiters is basically screwed. Someone who drops out of school to build a prototype and gets laughed at by VCs or customers now has much more practical experience than his friends who are still in school and is in a good position to either try again or look for a job with the valuable skills he's gained through his failed attempt.
All this talk of 'superstars' and 'lottery winners' completely misses the point. If you want to be an entrepreneur, trying to be an entrepreneur, regardless of how badly you fail, is guaranteed to teach you relevant skills. Expensive colleges are not.
But this doesn't answer why aren't the minor leagues a bigger deal? I'd argue that most basketball players, even those that are really strong, feel that college offers two things that the minor/farm leagues don't:
1) The best colleagues. The best US ballers not in the NBA play NCAA ball. Not the NBA farm league. Colleges, from the Ivies to the UCs, are where the best students are. The benefit of going to college is you're around the best CS students AND the best physics, bio, literature, econ, and math students.
2) It's a hedge. While college degrees aren't on the forefront of the minds of college players, especially D1 players, it is something that is in the equation. There is a belief that they can be spotted for the NBA by playing college ball, and if it doesn't work out, they still get a college degree (unless they go to USC).
The only thing that twists this up is athletes get a full ride scholarship. And many here complain that college costs too much. But recall that the best students will have their college paid for them (and in some countries college is free). Cost ends up being inversely proportional to perceived potential (with need factored in too).
This ends up being almost exactly the scenario that Thiel is advocating. Top students get lots of funding. Less good students get a little. Average students get none, and rich students with average potential fund things out of their own pocket. Those who are poor with average potential are just screwed. Welcome to college in 2011.
NCAA : college :: Pro sports : real life.
Thiel is saying, "Think outside the box. The best way to prepare for real life may not be to go to college." His 20 under 20 program is seeking to demonstrate this by starting at the top. He's seeking to demonstrate what happens if very exceptional kids, who could go to the very best colleges, elect instead to do something else. The analogy to sports would be someone offering a non-college sports program for the very best high school athletes, who if they went to a college would have a excellent chance of being accepted by a pro team.
While I think there's something to be said for Wadhwa's point in the context of the engineering field, in the larger context it seems pretty clear we've peaked in an education market bubble. Think about all those kids with liberal arts degrees. Heck, even law schools have seen a sudden drop in applications.
Along those lines, I can't be the only one who was surprised that one of his closing examples was Steve Jobs, the famous Reed College dropout. After all, Jobs has stated the importance of his dropping in to calligraphy classes and how it exposed him to the issues of typography, etc. I don't think I've ever heard Jobs talk about the importance of a visual arts degree from a prestigious university, however.
As for the argument that Microsoft or Apple won't look at applications that don't have degrees, well, yes. But in this forum how often have we read of startups choosing their original teams based on prestigious degrees? If you can make something new and useful, are you really worried about HR liking your resume or are you more concerned with finding ways to make your own company happen?
Vivek went to American Society for Engineering Education Engineering Deans Institute. I am not really sure what kind of response he was expecting other than the one presented to him.
Ask HN, is it really an unbiased article when you take their responses, and not for example, students or recent graduates ?
He is not being unbiased, and does not even claim to. He is presenting his own views on education, which are contradictory to peter thiel's, and using education experts' opinions (and other anecdotal evidences) to back them up.
Certainly one can expect their responses to be pro-higher-education. However, I feel like their justification for their responses is the enlightening part. I believe they are correct to point out that Thiel is relying on anecdotal evidence and to criticize his conclusions based on said evidence. They also acknowledge that, in some cases, there are people who do not need higher education.
So, while their overall viewpoints are not unexpected, there is plenty to be gained from their support of their viewpoints.
As to whether it is an unbiased article, I don't think it ever claimed to be. It seemed to me to be clearly the author stating his opinion and presenting the opinions of some engineering school dean.
The whole argument of "bubble" is not about importance of higher education, rather, it argues that the cost is not justified.
As a side note, I applied Facebook for internship when I have taken no CS classes in my college at all, and they accepted me. I am not sure how "true" his last paragraph about applying job in Facebook without a degree would be.
Or, in my case, less than $25,000 for a piece of paper, some very valuable formal instruction that I draw on today (and, more importantly, knowledgeable people who at the time could put it into a context I could understand), some great contacts, some great work experience, an environment where I could take the time to build projects to improve what I know about my profession and my craft without worrying about making rent, and the ability to actually spell "piece". Pretty good trade.
If you spend $200,000 on undergrad, you're making a mistake. That does not make college a bad idea; it makes spending insane private-school money on college a bad idea.
Totally agree. I think there is this bias in these particular stories because of where these stories are originating. Most people aren't from the bay area, or went to Stanford, an Ivy or even a UC School. Most public/state schools will run $5k a year or so in tuition. An average person can finish in 5 years. In some states with lotteries, like New Mexico, you can go to college for free.
People get so wrapped up in their college's ranking in US News that they don't bother to find out which colleges are good enough. It's kind of a silly rule, but I usually tell people that, as long as their college has a basketball or football team (no matter how horrible they are), it's probably good enough.
>Or, in my case, less than $20,000 for a piece of paper, some very valuable formal instruction that I draw on today (and, more importantly, knowledgeable people who at the time could put it into a context I could understand), some great contacts, some great work experience, an environment where I could take the time to build projects to improve what I know about my profession and my craft without worrying about making rent, and the ability to actually spell "piece". Pretty good trade.
This is my experience as well. Admittedly, it was probably closer to $80,000 after everything, but it gave me exactly that environment.
I'm 4 years out of school, and I've made back the cost of my piece of paper.
Depends. Can you work? Can you hustle? There's a lot of free money there if you're willing to get it: I will have paid, all told, less than $25,000 for my education, excluding housing because I elected to spend more than really necessary, via scholarships.
A lot of the rest was paid for by working during school--I had the lame little jobs during school, but I also participated in Google Summer of Code and had a pretty healthy consulting company that I started and operated, employing friends of mine when I had more work than I could handle. Like I said--less than $25,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle, thanks to what really amounted to not a lot of work to make that happen. (It also had the nice side effect of giving me a really nice resume.)
In-state tuition is about 14-15k. Room and board is 5-6k. That's easily 20k a year (I paid north of 22k my first year) leading to 80-100k over four years. Not exactly something you can work through on a <$10/hour job (of which I have had many).
Those numbers sound pretty much like mine. They're also pretty meaningless thanks to the incredible opportunities for scholarships at nearly any school you'll care to look at. After scholarships, between family and myself I'll pay around $33,000 at the end of the day (the discrepancy between the aforementioned $25K being the additional housing and other expenses I chose to incur over the most fiscally responsible decisions).
I left school with $9,800 in debt. Most of the amount paid off before graduation (at least 60%) was mine, the rest my parents'.
No, you can't work through it on a sub-$10/hour job. But I had those jobs, too: they were beer and social money. I set up my own consulting company and I did GSoC and made more than enough to put myself in a really good position coming out of school.
I don't doubt it. I'm just saying that for your average person, college isn't cheap. It's cool that you made it work, but for the majority of the population, college isn't an affordable option.
I don't think you'll find many people who'd say that college is right for everyone, or affordable for everyone. (I would say that, for any given person, if they're driven and dedicated, it's probably affordable. But that excludes a lot of the population.)
I would, however, say that the majority of people in the startup world who seem to have a clue have had some college at the least, and that it's very valuable in and of itself for those people--which makes me think Thiel very misguided.
Ah, but if you weren't too cool for school back in your high school days, you ought to be able to go very cheaply. In HS, I applied myself enough to get a good GPA; yes, like many people here I found it dull, but rather than just skipping classes and not doing homework because I was such a goddamn badass hacker rebel, I did my homework in the 30 minutes before classes started each morning and got something like a 3.95.
The local state school where I grew up runs about $1600/quarter. When I applied as a backup, they offered to basically waive my tuition because my grades and SAT score were good. Bright but poor kids should at least be able to get into state school for extremely low tuition.
As an above-average, middle class student, I got a couple thousand in grants. That's it.
Unless you're exceptionally bright, poor, or unique, it isn't affordable. The vast majority of kids (read: average, middle class folks) get stuck paying 85% of the bill.
A couple thousand in grants would have paid half your yearly bill at CWU. Besides, if you get a decent job, it should not take that long to pay off $20k of student loans.
I ended up going to a private school with tuition of around $30k/year. I got $16k/year in merit-based scholarships based solely on my work in HS... as a white, middle-class male. So I got stuck with 50% of the bill; my parents were kind enough to help with half of that. School-mandated co-op jobs (total of 1 year of them, in my case) definitely helped with the rest--that's part of the trade-off. By going to a well-known but more expensive school, I probably had an easier time getting good internships, which in turn helped pay off the higher tuition.
I think university is entirely worth it if you can realistically afford it. I met amazing people, learned some very interesting things that I would not have been exposed to if I were self-taught (Mentor Graphics software licenses are not cheap), and yes, got a piece of paper that says I hung around a certain school long enough to be given a Masters degree. I've got about $30k in debt. It's doable.
Heck, for all I know a public library subscription would be more useful in "getting to know oneself" by reading what the great minds of our world had to say about it, not to mention that it'd be a lot more cheaper
I have spent probably 30 minutes trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to respond to this post. I want to be able to justify the huge amount of money my parents and I spent to attend the University of Chicago. I can't really compare it to any other university, because its the only one I attended. I can't really argue that other universities would have served me better.
I feel like I got good value from the money we spent. There were other students, professors, events that I would never have encountered at another university. Unless something unforeseen happens, everything will be paid off in a few years.
The core issue is that a university education is necessary for a majority of people. It is a generalist education that fails to prepare people for any aspect of the work force. Most people should be going to vocational schools that in 1-2 years prepare them to be a novice in that field. Universities have done a great job of brainwashing to convince everyone that being a CS major at a third tier school is better than going to a 1-2 year software vocational program and starting to learn to program on the job right away(which hardly exist anyway).
I agree that a college education is undoubtedly important, especially in certain fields such as engineering, but these deans don't seem to pay any importance to the cost of education. It's going up at an unsustainable rate. If an undergrad education at any great school, Ivy league/Stanford or not, were about 40-50K for 4 years, then I doubt even Peter Thiel would argue against it (although I don't know for sure).
But the problem is that the cost of attending such a university are growing at a staggering pace, whereas the cost of starting a software/internet based business in the same time frame has actually been going down at a staggering pace. The risk of failure may remain high, but the costs of failure keep getting lower, so you can't blame students for at least asking the question whether or not they should drop out.
Sure you may argue there is an opportunity cost associated with leaving a university - but that keeps decreasing as the costs of attending that university increase.
What happens when a 4 year education is $400,000?
I think the issue is not so much with education but schooling, of course being educated is essential to success but what isn't essential is spending $250K on an Ivy League degree. Peter didn't say 'be ignorant' he said spending $250K on an Ivy League education is a waste of money and that the asset is overpriced.
There is a price where Harvard makes sense, however $250K isn't it.
I'm not sure it changes the general point, but Harvard in particular is much cheaper for most people. Students from families making under $60k/yr are not charged any tuition, and those under $180k/yr are charged 10% of their family income. So, for example, a student whose family makes $150k/yr would pay $15k/yr, or $60k over 4 years. Only students from quite well off families would pay anything near $250k. (And those reductions are outright tuition reductions, not loans.)
>Of course, the other reason one should not take Peter
>Thiel’s advice is that the value of education is
>intrinsic and an end in itself rather than something
>to be measured by its career financial return. It is
>during one’s undergraduate years that one discovers
>oneself, where one fits into the world and what it
>means to be human.
Sorry, but I just don't believe I need to go to a university to find out "how I fit into the world and what it means to be human." Isn't going out and actually building something useful for the world also a way to find your place?
A university education certainly has value, and may help you find "what it means to be human", but can the author really assert that it's the only or even the best way?
If we set aside for a moment the worthy and edifying nature of education and focus on today's cost Thiel has a legitimate point. In a world in which employment opportunities are shrinking taking on a huge amount of debt for a qualification which apparently doesn't afford job prospects and a salary which are in line with such debt is a widespread and unsustainable problem. And this is a problem which is becoming acute. Education costs continue to rise even as economic prospects become more precarious. Those of us who live in the US cannot count on continued economic global dominance to underwrite domestic full employment. This is a huge change we are barely starting to get our heads around.
The problems with higher education don’t solely rest on the universities; the consumers are equally to blame. I’m sick of people talking about going in dept 200k to get a bachelors degree. If you paid 40k or even 15k a year on liberal arts you’re a fool who deserves to be saddled with dept. Honestly, the liberal arts education the average student gets pales in comparison to what an intellectually curious person would get by visiting the library regularly, searching the web, and watching documentaries. There are plenty of ways people can drastically reduce the cost of education such as testing out of classes, going to community college (hell a reasonably ambitious student can take college classes in high school), etc. As for the meat of your bachelor’s degree, well that’s where university choice comes in.
Perspective students need to research colleges more. A lot of kids think that just because they did well in school and were told they were smart their whole life that they have to go to an Ivy League school or some other very expensive prestigious school. There are many universities that offer an as good or better education for a much better value. Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will. And even if they did, they would be teaching you out of the same text books as the adjunct professors at your local community college uses. Do people think that if they go to undergrad at Princeton a Nobel Prize winning professor will personally mentor them or something?
I’m currently a senior taking a break from cramming for finals, and when I graduate I will graduate with a degree from a school that has high job placement in my field (CS) and that I feel has prepared me very well. And I will do it without going in to dept at all. Not a dime. I’m going to be able to do this because I went to community college for my liberal arts, tested out of classes, lived off campus, worked part time, took advantage of transfer scholarships for high GPA, grants, tax rebates, etc. In short I PLANNED things out and worked hard in all aspects of my life not just school. I know countless students who will be graduating with ridiculous debts because they didn’t plan at all. They got out of high school and just hopped in to college never thinking about the dept for a minute. What’s really sad is that many of them will have degrees that aren’t worth shit unless they go to grad school, or they will get jobs that pay horribly for the amount of initial investment. I’m not as pessimistic about higher education as a lot of people on here, but I definitely have my issues with it. I just think that people are diverting a lot of the blame from the students/parents/mentors to the colleges.
> Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will.
Is this actually true? I don't attend Harvard, but I do attend a private university in the top 10 of the US News and World Reports rankings, and I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student (although some are taught by "lecturers". Some of the classes from the core curriculum are taught by grad students, but that's not actually necessarily a bad thing. Both of the grad students who have taught courses I've taken have been excellent teachers, which can be much more important for a teacher of introductory calculus or such.
> I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student
Actually, this is incorrect. Although I'm not aware of any courses taught by grad students this year, I now recall that one of the lecturers also taught while a Ph.D. candidate. However, only a small minority of CS courses here seem to be taught by grad students.
I tend to agree that there is an education bubble, just not in engineering or the sciences.
Any English or history major has access to the same loans that an engineering or biology major has, but on average, they are likely to make far less in income. Should what you are studying be a factor in loan applications? I think so.
Another side of the same coin on income inequality (pure numbers, not social justice) is that most universities (that I am aware of) charge the same for all degrees, regardless of earning potential. Someone majoring in elementary education will almost always have a smaller return on investment than an engineering major.
If Thiel's actions cause smart students to drop out of school and fail at starting their own companies, that will be great because then the companies that hire the failed dropouts will have to develop non-school-related methods for discriminating between the good ones and the bad ones. If those non-school-related methods become good enough, they'll start using them on graduates as well, and then there will be actual pressure on schools to educate students effectively (along with the option of teaching yourself instead of going to school if that fits your style better).
I'm not sure how surprising it is that academics are defending academia. Plummer's response is sensible--yes, it's a rigged experiment. On the other hand, if you genuinely think college is a bad deal, paying people to go to college is perverse. Thiel isn't so much making a bet as helping people act as if his bet has already paid off.
Katsouleas just makes a lame rhetorical point. Surely he can do better.
Eisenstein speaks the truth: college is not always the best option. "Getting an engineering degree reduces the variance in your career outcomes. You might not get the billions, but you also won’t get into poverty." That's the best way to understand it. In most financial contexts, cutting your variance also reduces your expected outcome--and levering up to buy low-variance assets is a good way to gear yourself for negative outcomes, whether those assets are degrees or CDOs.
Is there any point more boring than noting that two people who finished school a decade or two ago now think that school isn't such a good deal? It would be pretty craven for Thiel and Arrington to believe the things they believe but lie about it because they'd gone to Stanford, so I'm not sure Wadhwa has a point.
A bunch of guys selling a very expensive product, with a direct financial interest in suppressing this debate...yet no big red "conflict of interest" disclaimers.
Modern universities are cargo cults. They do not educate, they select. The value is solely in colocating smart people, which can be done in far less expensive ways.
This article generally makes better points than Lacy's original, especially Jim Plummer's comments, but ultimately still doesn't do much more than fan the flames of the controversy.
Conveniently, perceived controversy is the part that benefits Techcrunch the most.
Perhaps Peter Thiel's real master plan is to increase the value of an education by convincing a lot of people that they shouldn't go to school, and thus increasing scarcity of those getting degrees. AmIright?
1. Higher education is incredibly valuable and most capable people should get one if they can. The intellectual discipline college offers for people who take it seriously is incredibly valuable.
2. We are in a bubble, sort of. It's not like the tulip bubble or a housing bubble where the product can be sold to a "greater fool", unless you consider the bump in hiring a degree provides to be a "sale". The education bubble is something different: panic-buying fueled by parents who are terrified that their kids will end up insignificant, taking orders rather than giving them, if they don't attend the right schools.
It's actually a bidding war over educational cachet and access to limited resources, coupled with much, much higher expectations of the "college experience" (that drive costs up even in the cheaper schools). My grandfather paid $300/year ($4000 today) to go to CMU in the early 1930s. There was also no expectation that it would provide a state-of-the-art, 25000-SF gym, a cafeteria serving better food than most restaurants, and an expensive blow-out concert with free beer every spring.
lots of good points from both sides, me thinks there is a growing need for change in the field of education, since the cost, mediocrity, and opportunity cost of education is growing at an alarming rate.
I do not know know what would solution be - maybe some more real life experiences injected in the education - say 6 month study/6 month real life - work, startuping, whatever. me thinks that would provide more opportunities for young people than another course on greek philosophy instead.
education needs to be disrupted, thats how I feel after I finished uni.
First he is going to select the brightest kids in the best schools. These kids already have higher than usual chance of success. Then he is going to give them 100k each. That will also increase their chances of success. Then he is going help them with advice and networking as much as he can which will also increase their chances of success.
This is all good and well. I have no problem with Peter Thiel helping a bunch of kids with money advice and networking.
But THEN he is going to say "look, my dropouts succeeded therefore education sucks therefore you are better off dropping out." A lot of kids will drop out when they are not the best in the class, when they do not have the help of Peter Thiel, and they will be fucked.
Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college.
Again this is usually not a problem (not all charity needs to be a social experiment) except for the fact that Peter Thiel obviously wants to use his scholarships as a social experiment. He wants to use them as something to criticize colleges and education with.
Peter Thiel is a very smart person (and ironically also very well educated) so he knows very well this is a rigged experiment. He designed it this way. He has an agenda, and this is to bring out some kind of libertarian utopia to the US. He thinks that academia stands in the way of this political goal and he wants to attack and destroy academia by destroying academic institutions. None of this is a conspiracy theory, he is actually pretty open about all of the above.
And again, I do not have a problem with that in general, any American has a right to be politically active, and to work to bring about what he believes are positive political changes to his/her country.
But again he is using a rigged social experiment in his fight against academia. As bystanders we should be very well aware that this experiment means absolutely nothing and resist his urges to conclude that it means that education is worthless.