Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)

I don't get this. Although I'm not a big fan of the higher education system, a degree from an accredited institution implicitly asserts that you have received a passing grade in the relevant courses, whether that is determined by exams, project work, or whatever. That's why accreditation is such a big deal; a degree from an unaccredited school is heavily discounted in the employment marketplace.

My qualifications: I hold a Ph.D. in some topics in applied math from a world class research university. Before the Ph.D. I taught math in one university and computer science in another. After my Ph.D. I was a professor in an MBA program at a Big Ten university and a research scientist in an industrial computer science lab. Now I'm an entrepreneur.

There are two collections of 'knowledge' that are dangerous:

First, there is the knowledge you don't know but you should and should consider using.

Second, is the knowledge you do know but shouldn't and should never use.

Of these two dangers, in practice by far the worst is the second.

My view is that the most important lesson in college is to learn to detect and reject the second of these two dangers.

Next most important is to give you the background and practice in learning so that you can acquire knowledge to get around the first danger.

Next, broadly, there is a big, huge challenge in the world, life, careers, etc. -- doing well with things that are new.

Here is a bold, blunt, fact of life that illustrates the challenge and importance of doing well with things that are new:

A 'career' usually has to last from a person's 20s to their 60s. We may raise that to a person's 70s. So, that's over 40 years of working and maybe 50 years, half a century.

It might be nice to get an education for a 'good job', get such a 'job' in a 'good organization', and hold that good job for one's entire career. But a blunt fact is that so far the number of such jobs, that is, that will last over 40 years, have been only a very tiny fraction of the total number of jobs. None of IBM, GE, GM, AT&T have been able to provide many such jobs. It's not at all clear that Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Facebook, or Twitter will either.

So, during those 40+ years, there will be a lot of changes, and nearly everyone will have to keep up with the changes, with the things that are new. This is important but a challenge.

So, there is essentially no way college or anything else can get you ready for 'a good job' that will last 40+ years if only because such jobs are so rare. So, instead, college can try to get you ready to keep up with things that are new for 40+ years.

Some years ago on TV was an ad for an electronics trade school. They showed a happy graduate standing behind a box of electronics and saying, "Learn to play one of these babies, and you are fixed for life.". What was the box? Sure: It was a computer disk drive with a removable stack of disks, 14" in diameter, with total capacity about 14 million bytes. What a laugh.

So, in simple terms, first, college should teach you not what you need for a 'job' but how to keep up with things that are new for several jobs over 40+ years.

Second college might also teach you how to be a leader in things that are new, that is, be one who gets a lot of benefit from things that are new.

So, in working with things that are new, we come back to the two dangers, knowing things that are bad you should not use and not knowing things that are good you should use. So college should teach you how to separate these two and, for the second, how to learn. And, college might also teach you how to create good, new things you should use.

For how to separate, it is good to have some practice in some solid fields where we can separate relatively easily. Of course the crowning jewel of such fields is math with its theorems and proofs. Likely next is mathematical physics and then other physical sciences, engineering, etc. So, these fields can teach 'intellectual discipline', that is, some examples in at least those fields how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

All this is not very new but goes back to an old saying, "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.". That is, he has obtained some good means for separating the wheat from the chaff and already knows a lot of the wheat and maybe how to create more.

Is Harvard the only source of such education? Not nearly! There are hundreds of colleges in the US where a good student can get a good education -- maybe the outline here will help them know what to look for and pursue. And there are a few dozen US research universities that can provide world class guidance in creating powerful, new knowledge.

As a credential, it's very well known in tech-heavy industries and will help open doors there. Further, it's a good enough school that it will help open doors if you decide to pursue a graduate degree in the future.

As an experience, you got the opportunity to work with top professors and it sounds like you actively sought them out to get those experiences. Further, you almost certainly got to know a lot of students and if you were smart, reliable and hard-working, likely created a situation that could open professional opportunities in the future.

I'll concede that the correlation between a conferred degree and the value captured by the student is not perfect, and that a degree is not the only opportunity to capture value between the ages of 18 and 22. But I largely believe the "debate" consists largely of overblown, hyperbolic rhetoric and oversimplification.