Tag Archives: Peter Thiel

“The University has no Clothes” – New York Magazine

Photo credit: New York Magazine

A couple of weeks ago I posted a brief comment regarding libertarian, entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s mission to rip the universal fabric of higher education’s importance to education, job prospects, and the rate of winning at life.

It comes, I think, at the spear’s tip of an emerging wave of skepticism over whether or not whippin’ out around $200,000 for a college education (or incurring the Wrath of Debt in that magnitude) is worth the investment. There seems to be a steadily rising number of popular written material on this issue in the past couple of months, and only time can tell whether the raised awareness of it all will ultimately change things before American society hits some sort of economic pressure point and explodes.

And while most of these writings say generally the same things (like this whole university thing is a bubble like the housing thing was, kids don’t actually learn shit in school, etc. etc.), this recent article in New York Magazine – entitled “The University has no Clothes” – has particular appeal enough to warrant a Wesleying post for three reasons.

  1. It engages the Peter Thiel Project from a different angle.
  2. It comes with the above picture of naked people.
  3. And it has the following quotation:

“People come back to me,” he (James Altucher, a subject of the article) says over lunch at a crowded restaurant in Union Square, “very smart, intelligent people, and say, ‘Look, college teaches you how to think, college teaches you how to network, college teaches you how to write.’ Personally, I didn’t learn how to do any of those things in college.” What Altucher learned to do in college, he says, is what all young men—“with almost no exceptions”—learn to do: drink and talk to women.

According to the sloths we here at Wesleying hired to research the tastes and preferences of our readers, these are precisely the things that appeal to you folks. For the article, click here.

Happy Hangover Holiday!

TechCrunch: Peter Thiel v. The Higher Education Bubble

Why are we in college again?

This is a question that probably runs across the minds of many attending colleges and universities across this country at some point during their undergraduate tenures. There are of course many among us who have some understanding that the diplomas we are to receive give us some sort of “proof of worth” that in turn allows us beter access into the job market. And indeed, this is perhaps the true case of our modern times in complex societies.

But taking that truth within the context of the financial realities that come with it (see: an almost certain future of debt) highlights what can only be described as a perverse internalization of the “higher education” concept by society: It is an accepted convention that we are supposed to whip out large amounts of cash in order to be able or allowed to receive some decent amount of cash in the future (and even that’s not guaranteed).

This appears to me nothing less than a clear example of an absurdity made normal. And so it does to Peter Thiel (pictured) – co-founder of Paypal – as well who, as chronicled in a recent article by TechCrunch, is seeking to undermine this convention. Thiel is part of a project called “20 under 20,” where the idea is quite simple: Pick the best twenty kids they could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

In vouching for the notion of diploma-free success, Thiel is fighting what he calls the “Higher Education Bubble,” which he sees as having irrational and detrimental social processes that are quite similar to what we saw with the housing bubble that greatly contributed to the late-2000’s financial crisis. Fascinating stuff.

You can check out the article here.

[Thanks to Anike Arni ’13 for the tip!]