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This is the middle-class trap. In reality, kids from middle-class families are squeezed, because they are ineligible for most financial aid / scholarships and dont have enough money to go to college on their own.
I was part of that trap. My parents wouldn't or couldn't help me and they made too much for me to get financial financial aid.
I'd be somewhat more interested in a program like this if it were being run by someone I believed actually wanted in good faith to improve education/business, rather than having ulterior political motives. Thiel is quite open that his main motivation is that he thinks universities promote politics he dislikes, so he'd like to destroy them for that reason. He also claims that in doing so he'd improve education, but it…
_Delirium, could you please provide a citation both where Thiel openly stated that he wants to destroy universities, and that he wants to destroy them because they "promote politics he dislikes"? Thanks in advance.
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90+% of Google's political donations go to a single party. Is their business fundamentally political? [1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/14/technology/google_democrats/
Do they also provide a disproportionate amount of airtime to Mother Jones and the American Prospect? Are they also aggressively pursuing an agenda that people have explicitly described as "liberal". It's not one thing, but its the combination of his apparent agenda coupled with his background. With that said, if Google decided to promote planned parenthood links and hid southern baptist links, then I'd probably belie…
I.e., don't you think it's possible that his individualist, pro-free thinker views inform both his libertarian political views and also his views that our rigid college-based gatekeeping system is unnecessary?
Kudos for Thiel to stepping out of the box and best of luck to these kids. Work like crazy and change the world!
This feels ageist to me. I'm 30 and I am getting the feeling that even though I am more than willing to work 100+ hours a week for my idea, my age condemns me. I'm washed up before I even had the chance to get started. It's important to remember that not everyone starts their business before they can drink legally.
If you're willing to work 100+ hours for your idea, work 40 for someone else and 40 on your own, and save money until you can take a few months off. Sell everything you have and move to somewhere with good internet and low expenses. The outskirts of a university town are a good place to start. It is possible to live on less than $1000 a month in much of the country. This will extend your runway. Wait, is that "not fe…
You can make excuses or you can make it happen. I chose to make it happen.
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I find it really disingenuous to paint someone as intelligent and quirky as Thiel with the "bah, republican" brush. In terms of where he's putting his money, bear in mind that he's a multi-billionaire; donating a quarter million for him is not a substantial capital commitment. I wouldn't even call Thiel's goals fundamentally political; he's trying to shape society and throws money at things that he believes will bend…
Also, someone just submitted this link to HN: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/18/what-s-wrong-with-silicon... Some nice quotes from Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ in…
You're conflating a whole mess of things: "conservative", "Republican" and "Libertarian" are all different. The only one of those three that can Thiel can be meaningfully labeled is libertarian. He's a couple orders of magnitude further away from Republicans than most Democrats. His political views are radical and outspoken, but "Republican" they are not.
Second, it's silly to assume that someone as prolific as Thiel does everything for an ulterior political motive (investing in Facebook, Zynga, life extension, running a hedge fund?) or that even those that do conform to some pre-fabricated ideology. His views are sufficiently distant from the norm that I find it overwhelmingly clear that he thinks independently on separate issues. If you want to label the lump sum of a person's ideals "political", then sure, they're "political", but that definition isn't particularly useful. The more conventional definition of "political" would be "having to do with governmental politics", and if anything his ideology is anti-political.
Your comment was ad hominem -- you made no attempt to actually draw a connection between this program and his purported political agenda and instead chose to go after the fact that he donated to republicans and gave interviews to the Cato Institute. That's what was disingenuous. That he's a libertarian is obvious; that this act was part of some effort to undermine the universities because of his "conservatism" is not.
While I somewhat agree with the whole "degrees aren't always a good idea" meme, this feels like something of a "stunt" by Thiel. Taking people who are so incredibly smart and giving them money is an interesting concept, but it sure won't prove much about whether Universities are a good idea for us "ordinary" people.
he's taking the smart, motivated people who don't need school and giving them a head start on changing the world.
these smart motivated people won't be clogging up admissions and class sizes, which will make college better and more accessible for people without the smarts, will, or desire to be entrepreneurs.
I am seriously lost in terms of innovation. You may give kids money and they'll open up their Lemonade bars but how can you expect innovation without any research? And research without any education? I can't fathom any kid dropping out and then inventing a satellite? or solve any medical problem? And if they don't innovate then how can they even think of ways of bringing it to the consumers (which is the difficult ne…
There are definitely different magnitudes of innovation. There's innovation in terms creating new products and services that people will pay for, and there's innovation that nudges the entire human race forward a little bit. The scientists and engineers who enable the first manned mission to Mars will not be college dropouts.
Many of the key scientists and engineers who enabled the first manned mission to Luna were not college graduates.
This feels ageist to me. I'm 30 and I am getting the feeling that even though I am more than willing to work 100+ hours a week for my idea, my age condemns me. I'm washed up before I even had the chance to get started. It's important to remember that not everyone starts their business before they can drink legally.