Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

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.

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.

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.

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.