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.

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.

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.

That would be a really interesting and exciting experiment. I wish someone would do it.

"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.

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).

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.

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?

Ask HN, is it really an unbiased article when you take their responses, and not for example, students or recent graduates ?

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.

Four years and $200,000 for a piece of paper and a false understanding of where you fit into the world.

There is a price where Harvard makes sense, however $250K isn't it.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conveniently, perceived controversy is the part that benefits Techcrunch the most.

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.

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.

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.

I've always felt like FB's success was due more to good timing and marketing (using recursive network effect) than anything else.

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.

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.

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.

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.