Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not atypical but also not the majority. I don't think it's a stretch to say most people pay for grad school.
It depends whether you're counting law school, business school, medical school, pharmacy school, nursing school, etc. as grad school. Among Hackers grad school is far more likely to be of the type "studying fractal patterns in African architecture while teaching two sections of introductory socio-cultural anthropology" Generally you pay through the nose for the first kind and they pay you (a little) to do the second…
My point was that because school systems are hackable, sometimes hackers will have hacked the signs of the costs involved. For example, my graduate school costs less than -$12,000 a year, but some peoples' schools may cost more than $12,000 a year (so they're not "doing something right?"). Big deal. In the long run, education wins financially and in terms of helping people accomplish their goals.
One can easily make the argument that startups are education, but obviously this consists of more than "Web 2.0" and a few other buzzwords thrown together at random. (I'm not criticizing Paul here, but I am criticizing the lunatic fringe that seems to grow around Paul.)