$100,000 to forgo college?

The Thiel Foundation today named the first winners of its controversial "20 Under 20" fellowship program, which hands young people $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurial ideas rather than a university education.

It's a limited program designed to showcase a bigger -- and for many, a troubling -- idea: That higher education is highly overvalued.

The Thiel Foundation, the libertarian group formed by Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, argues that the costs of college increasingly outweigh the financial returns. They've dubbed it a "higher education bubble."

The broad aim of "20 under 20" is to produce more technological innovation, and in turn faster and more sustainable economic growth, said James O'Neill, head of the Thiel Foundation. We can best encourage that innovation by unleashing the creative and unsullied mind power of people under the age of 20, before lofty student loans and academic orthodoxy funnel them into safe and risk adverse careers, he said.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=89687&tsp=1

:eyes:

...someone who said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" and financed James Fucking O'Keefe.

the right does not want an educated middle class. They want the peasants poor and stupid. Also, despite all the rightwing noise to the contrary, a college degree continues to be a good investment.

The loons want to kill off public education from K-12 and access to college for the masses. Lying about the value of a college education and defunding public institutions is their plan.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_07/b4215072350752_page_3.htm.

and he bankrolled facebook.

it's all the same giant clusterfuck.


In 1987, Thiel founded The Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper that became an outlet for student jeremiads against multiculturalism, speech codes, affirmative action, feminists, and ethnic and gay campus groups. Sacks, who worked with Thiel at the Review and succeeded him as its editor, says, "We thought the people on campus were way outside the mainstream, and if the people who were funding the university—the alumni, the donors, the American taxpayer—knew what was going on, they would be pretty outraged."

Thiel stayed at Stanford for law school and remained embroiled in the culture wars, co-authoring a book with Sacks in 1995, The Diversity Myth, which decried multiculturalism at the university. He clerked for federal judge James L. Edmonson, wrote speeches for former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, and worked at Sullivan & Cromwell and Credit Suisse First Boston in New York before moving back to California in 1996. In 1998, Thiel met Levchin and, over breakfast in Palo Alto, launched the company that became PayPal. Thiel and his co-founders defined their mission in historical terms. They saw PayPal as a vehicle for realizing the libertarian dream of a global financial marketplace in which transactions took place entirely outside the reach of governments. The company's T-shirts read THE NEW WORLD CURRENCY. "There was an idealistic element to it—that's what everyone within Peter's circle of friends talked about," says Ajay Royan, a PayPal veteran who is now the managing director of Clarium. "The business side was secondary to the vision."

Thiel says that "there were a lot of cool, interesting questions we wanted to engage in, but at the same time we had to develop a very detailed, specific plan" to enable people to buy and sell items seamlessly on eBay (EBAY). It worked: PayPal weathered the Internet bust and went public in February 2002. Eight months later, eBay bought the company for $1.65 billion. Thiel, who had initially invested $240,000, walked away with $60 million, which he used to launch Clarium Capital, the hedge fund, and the Founders Fund, an early-stage venture capital shop. Two years later he agreed to a meeting with Zuckerberg, then a Harvard sophomore, and Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster who was helping Zuckerberg raise funding for his fledgling social networking site, Thefacebook. Thiel lent Zuckerberg and Parker $500,000 in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the new company. Thiel sold half his shares in 2009, mostly to Digital Sky Technologies. Based on Facebook's current valuation—a number that fluctuates depending on whom you ask and, seemingly, the minute you ask—a conservative estimate of his remaining stake is about $1.5 billion

n/t

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE

It is criminal what Americans forced to pay for uni and health care.

are my doctor(s) and my dentist.

Sonoman

I guess it depends on what your degree is. High tech tends to demand tech degrees (not always, but vast majority.)

For liberal arts degrees - 'in your degree' can be almost anything that requires a brain. That is sort of the point of a non-tech BA.

Since those without degrees are also equipped with brains, the value of a liberal arts degree is somewhat ambiguous.

not field specific. Working at the McD drive through with a BA in English would be 'outside the field'.

who are aware of their place in history. If we want to make our part in the age-old struggle of humanity worthwhile, that's kind of important.

Now, if we just want to be drones who file papers and run machinery and mindlessly consume, then that artys-fartsly liberal arts stuff is not so important. (no disrespect intended)

I say that as a (thus-far) fairly successful engineer who wished he had gotten more of that with his education.

PS:


Before anyone brings up those self-made men and women of American legend, recognize that it takes a special sort of gumption to do as they have done. Independent growth into a well-rounded person also often requires strong emotional and financial support. Bill Gates and Peter Thiol never lived in a dilapidated apartment, after all. All of these factors are things which most teenagers and young adults (even the brilliant ones) don't have easy access to, especially in this, the age of the vanishing middle class and numerous easy distractions.

Those people are special and worthy of praise, but they are a small minority.

GF and I were just talking about this. Pretty much all of our friends are self-employed, retired or independently wealthy.

Most of our friends are either artists (musicians, writers, etc.), in the wine/weed biz or just hanging around.

I suppose it depends on the path one walks. Heck, I don't even have a GED - never needed one.

Sonoman

entrepreneurial. That makes much more sense to me. How are people with limited education going to advance technology in a knowledge economy?

claims education is overrated. The thing is, some do just fine without it. However, if they had taken statistics, they would have learned that your odds of becoming the next Bill Gates are fairly small compared to the odds of making $50,000/yr with a college degree. No, it is not the only path, nor does it guarantee success, but it pads the odds in your favor for a decent middle-class lifestyle. At least it did until Bush and the Rethuglicans ruined everything.

and one has to really reach over to bend the facts to claim otherwise.

being being class is just getting tougher and tougher. They turned the blue collar factory guys into WalMart cashiers, and now its the teachers, the police, the firefighters, the federal employee, and IT guys. We lose a little more every election. I wonder if my grandchildren will be under an oligarchy or a plutocracy because it sure feels like that is the right's objective.

:thumbsup:

making sound investments. This all coincides with the explosion of casino gambling in this country for the last 20 years. There moving us toward a more stable economy, donchaknow.

It just makes it a HELL of a lot easier to achieve.

I know plenty of business owners who live great lives and never stepped foot on a college campus. I know even more people who are poor and live shitty lives...and never stepped foot on a college campus.

I do know several people who are struggling and have college degrees, but most of the degreed professionals I know ARE employed and live at least a middle class lifestyle.

There are no guarantees for success in our society, but a college degree certainly shifts the odds in your favor. Even a self-made entrepreneur will benefit from a business degree...or will be forced to hire people with them eventually.

Higher education is highly overvalued, this coming from a Libertarian group does not surprise me.

Are entrepreneurs the only people who matter? Not everyone WANTS to be an entrepreneur, ya know. So those who'd rather be something other than an entrepreneur - what do we do with those people? Allow them to starve to death? Make jobs so scarce and low-paying that the non-entrepreneurial members of the species die off in mass numbers?

Huh....wait a minute...I think I've just stumbled on the Republican playbook...