Peter Thiel heads to campus
reuters.com
Peter Thiel heads to campus
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#2Maybe he will convince a few Stanford students to focus on their startup before the end of their graduation and drop out!
What is for sure is the more you spend money on your education (with college, an MBA, etc...), the higher the opportunity cost of starting a Company (vs. getting a well paid job). When you drop out, you have nothing to lose, and so you are "all in", which allows you to take bigger risks.
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#3 "Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble?
No, because that's where people buy their books."
- Tom Morello
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#4I notice the writer doesn't actually quote any specific things Peter has said that would make this a hypocritical move.
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#5I haven't followed everything he has said about college education, but I do believe he doesn't hate universities so much as their current value proposition.
The amount of debt students have to take on now to get a degree, in contrast to what a motivated person can learn and do on their own now with alternative educational sources and a cheap computer, means that most of that debt is paying for just the credential, whose value is being increasingly undermined while its cost continues increasing.
So he believes student loan debt is the next big financial bubble due to collapse, given that there is more of it than credit card debt [1], and that it's being loaned for any major regardless of its expected ROI, among other things.
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student...
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#6I'm a little confused as to why this is offered as "Computer Science 183". Is "Computer Science" used as a heading for anything computer-related at Stanford, or is this an exception?
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#7Maybe he will convince a few Stanford students to focus on their startup before the end of their graduation and drop out! What is for sure is the more you spend money on your education (with college, an MBA, etc...), the higher the opportunity cost of starting a Company (vs. getting a well paid job). When you drop out, you have nothing to lose, and so you are "all in", which allows you to take bigger risks.
"Which allows you to take bigger risks", reads as if risk taking is an good thing in itself. Presumably you meant to write "necessary risks"? I was going to point out that rationality would alleviate the reluctance to jump off, post-education, but that supposes that doing a start-up is typically a rational act...
Generally, I think education allows you to lower the risk of achieving a given return. Or, it could be seen as allowing a higher return for a given amount of risk.
Maybe that's the definition of a start-up: a company that sets a level of risk, then tries to maximise the returns on that risk? A "normal" company does it the other way: sets a level of return then minimises the risk required to achieve the return.
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#8I notice the writer doesn't actually quote any specific things Peter has said that would make this a hypocritical move.
The writer certainly doesn't quote Thiel's actual views:
"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college."
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe...
"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-...
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#9He doesn't like universities because he thinks they're too costly and not good at preparing students for the real world. He now intends to teach a class that prepares students for the real world and will not increase the marginal cost of their tuition. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction.
Re: Peter Thiel heads to campus
#10I notice the writer doesn't actually quote any specific things Peter has said that would make this a hypocritical move.
The writer certainly doesn't quote Thiel's actual views: "The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college. " http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe... "...are there 20 of those…
I suspected as much. This is someone attacking a straw man to generate controversy.
Thanks for finding those quotes.