Earlier this month, billionaire Peter Thiel—founder of PayPal, investor in Facebook—announced his plan to offer 20 college students (or groups of students) $100,000-dollar grants to drop out of school and become entrepreneurs, like him.

Slate columnist Jacob Weisberg calls this idea “nasty” and frames it around his portrait of Peter Thiel: a Libertarian douchebag who believes that empowering women with the right to vote wrecked the country, and who wants to colonize space (and, um, the ocean) so he can create a new world of politics—where losers are losers and winners take all—because, as he put it, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Weisberg asserts that Thiel wants to create proteges with the “narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible.”

A basic feature of the venture capitalist’s worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel’s case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel’s program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy’s version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.

I want to call bullshit on part of Weisberg’s argument, here. Saying that dropouts “halt their intellectual development” is hopelessly narrow-minded. Quitting school (or never enrolling to begin with) doesn’t bar anyone from learning if they like to learn. Books are cheaper than classrooms; college is prohibitively expensive for some people; and earning a degree doesn’t guarantee anyone a job. Offering grants to bright students to drop out of school and focus on developing their ideas is, at least, encouraging a new form of learning—one of trial and error. If the dropouts fail, if their ideas are terrible, no one’s going to bar them from enrolling again if they want. (Also, pre-assuming that these faceless young entrepreneurs are obsessed with getting rich and only secondarily interested in seeing their ideas succeed is very jaded.)

That said, given Thiel’s resentment of women’s right to vote and his fixation on creating a Libertarian utopia on the ocean (got your sea legs, Matt?), I can’t wait to see what business proposals he chooses to fund.

Former Stranger news writer Cienna Madrid has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House, a local literary nonprofit. There, she taught fiction classes and wrote 4/5 of a book about a death-row...

14 replies on “Billionaire Offers College Students $100,000 to Drop Out”

  1. A lot of being at an elite college is not the actual course material, or the instruction.

    It’s who else is going to that college and the networking you do while there.

    Hence, successful entrepreneurs, in that they have networks of both well-trained friends who actually went on to get degrees, and their families to finance their new companies.

  3. people who go to college and are introduced to ideas, social interactions, and critical thinking skills beyond high school are just plain better than those who don’t.

    sure, becoming an entrepreneur can get you rich, but the development of self that occurs in higher education is priceless.

  4. sure, you CAN learn on your own if you never attend or drop out of college, but in my experience, kids like this aren’t wealth-obsessed. once a young entrepeneur gets wealth, do they take time to read Spinoza and learn about Ghandi? or do they read Ayn Rand, as it confirms their narcissism and paranoia?

  6. I’d have been more impressed with this idea had he asked high schoolers or middle schoolers to drop out. THAT would be real risk, and as we all know the perfect emulation of Ayn Rand’s Libertarian Paradise!! LOL!!!!!

  7. Interesting idea, despite the guy’s beliefs and whatnot… Young people today face weak unions, a battered economy, and asshole business owners. Depending on a corporation to take care of you just isn’t viable anymore. Having balls, a good plan, and 100k in your pocket sounds like the path to a good future.

    He should be offering these grants to kids after they graduate, though. Like we need any more reinforcement for our anti-education culture.

  8. I agree with Cienna completely. Weisberg sounds hysterical. Like it’s the most evil thing in the world to suggest that college isn’t for everyone, or that college is the only way to learn, or that college absolutely has to be done between the ages of 18 and 22, or else you’ll never be well-rounded and well-read.

  9. @8: there’s something odd about his targeting of college students. It’s fine to say that college isn’t for everyone, but targeting only young people who have already decided that it might be for them is definitely this side of contemptuous.

  10. Both Thiel and Weisberg are douchebags. College is good for four things: 1> preparation for an academic career. It may not be the only way, but it’s by far the surest and most efficient way. 2> It teaches you about the standards set for your field of study, which are sometimes, in some fields, not all that easy to glean just from a library card and an internet connection. 3> It’ll let you make the bulk of those simple, obvious mistakes while the stakes are really low. 4> forging relationships with a better class of peers. All of these are valuable, but hardly necessary to life as a well-rounded adult. For a lot of peeps, they’re nowhere near worth the $240,000 investment that is a Harvard education.

    If you really NEED college to achieve intellectual growth, you’re probably not capable of much intellectual growth, period.

    Of course, that level of intellectual growth is often what separates a real good ole boy from a poisonous redneck. At the same time, in most programs, you get the bulk of your basic intellectual growth in your first two years.

    But real entrepreneurship requires a lot of qualities that are inborn or at least ingrained by the time you finish high school. The vast bulk of humanoids are meant to be happy little betas and that’s that. Most of the miner-49ers went broke and wound up working for someone else.

    The critical failure of Libertarianism is that it makes absolutely no differentiation between individual Liberty and corporate Liberty. With the former maximized, you get, for good or ill, the Wild West. WIth the latter, feudalism. And we really don’t want to go back to either, do we?

  11. Jesus, take the man’s money. He wants two years of your life for $100k. And that’s bad because he’s a douchebag?

    You know who’s a douchebag? Your fucking drill instructor screaming in your face while you look forward to 4 years of dodging roadside bombs. Or on a good day you get to wear a 100% polyester dress uniform. Sweet. All so you can get the measly GI Bill if you survive.

    Take the PayPal guy’s money.

  13. I knew many people in college who were there for the parties, for the chance to be away from their parents while they partied, and because it was expected of them. Most of them picked popular majors with low minimum requirements like communications.

    They were a waste of space and the university’s resources. If they had believed it was possible to party and later get a job without going to college first they would have. Not everyone is at university to better themselves, and many of them actually detract from someone else’s learning experience. Or attempts to get anything done Thursday through Sunday.

    That said, someone who has a brilliant concept but no funding, who would only go through college to become someone else’s flunky with an idea slowly going stale in the back of their mind, could really use this. The thing is, anyone with the drive to become a successful entrepreneur will do so with or without this money, he’s only enabling the weak! (in case you’re wondering, I’m kidding)

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