Peter Thiel Believes the Future Belongs to College Dropouts

The individual validation that a student gets upon attending Harvard is predicated on the unparalleled difficulty of getting in. In my class (2014), for example, admissions were at an all time low - ~7% admission rate, with ~30,000 applicants. Possibly a majority of those applicants could have attended Harvard and graduated with respectable success, but had Harvard chosen to open its doors to all of those applicants (just assuming for the moment that its resources would have allowed it to do that), the respect a Harvard admission garners would plummet - because it proves very little.

It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and there's the problem. I'll shoot up a counterexample - when I was choosing between schools, Harvard was actually far from my first choice. UChicago was hands down the college I wanted to go to, and I had my heart set on it. In all honesty, the academic rigor at UChicago is lightyears above that at Harvard (saying that after now having taken courses at both institutions), yet the prestige of UChicago is nowhere close to that of Harvard. That's due to a number of factors, but as a correlation (can't quite say causation in either direction) the acceptance rate at UChicago used to be immensely higher - it plummeted down to the teens in 2010, but it was roughly ~30%+ for all preceding years. Hence, while the education you might receive upon admission might be comparable to or even arguably better in certain ways than an education at Harvard, admission itself demonstrated very little. And that's the problem - for applying to the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, being an undergrad at Harvard undoubtedly helped me far more than would have being an undergrad at UChicago. Like Thiel said, most of the finalists came from Ivy League and prestigious name institutions - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford...not a single one from UChicago.

The exclusivity is, quite honestly, the main thing.

Addendum - though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to Harvard manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief, pretty much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to California to make it big.

Acceptance rate and difficulty of getting in aren't the same thing, that's my point. "Not everyone can get in" can mean several different things. Most people who don't meet the standards for admission don't even bother applying, so even that 7% admission rate is likely higher than ratio of high school grads who meet the standards vs those who don't.

It stops being difficulty when it's just a matter of dumb luck. If there were 5,000 qualified candidates and only 2000 slots, and those other 3,000 wind up going to Yale or MIT or Stanford, does it really matter? So it doesn't make sense to emphasize Harvard's exclusivity without also admitting where that exclusivity comes from: reputation and high standards for admission. Exclusivity is a consequence of that, it's not the reason for it.

It no longer demonstrates that you're any better than your peers, and there's the problem.

I would say that if you are better than your peers then you aren't really peers in that sense.

though admittedly, the real awesomeness that lies in going to Harvard manifests itself in the peer environment. Contrary to popular belief, pretty much everyone who goes here is social, super chill, extremely nice, and radically tolerant - on top of being insanely intelligent and supremely accomplished. It just inspires you to do things...like drop out and move to California to make it big.

This is exactly my point. The students, faculty, and overall culture at Harvard make it a superb environment for an ambitious student. Exclusivity alone isn't responsible for that.