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Comment by browsemybooks | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that those proclaiming that students bypass education (including Tony Hsieh) are products of the top universities.

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Also interesting to note that they're generally the product of upper middle class families and probably had a strong financial support system to fall back on if they failed.

Somehow I doubt he's looking to invest in people who would starve to death if their company failed. He asks rhetorically in his response whether college is worth going "a quarter of a million in debt" for, which gives you an idea of who he's talking about when he says college might not be the best choice for everyone.

It's not at all surprising if you consider that it's the expected thing to do for upper-middle class kids. Presumably having gone to those schools also gives them knowledge of what the experience provides and how it did or did not help them start a business. I doubt it's some kind of evil plot to keep kids out of school.

I'm not sure it's knowledge so much as hope: they didn't have the guts to skip school and just start a business, but they hope someone else will. Whether it'll work or not is an open question, but I would've had more respect if they took that route themselves, rather than paying other kids to do their experiment for them.

(I doubly distrust Thiel in particular on this, because not only did he not take this advice himself, but he also has a decades-long political feud with what he views as the too-liberal political climate in higher education, so would like it to be bypassed, regardless of whether he honestly believes it's a good choice for the kids in question.)

I have understood that Thiel thought college is the right option for million of kids. It's in the article.

Thiel himself has two degrees from Stanford. He appears to have liked higher education enough to keep going back for more!

Does that invalidate his current opinions? People can change their minds.

I suppose it boils down to not really believing that he's changed his mind. His expressed views on academia are quite consistent over the past 25 years. He wrote frequently against academia while he was getting degrees, but continued to stay there and finish two degrees anyway. Take a look at late-80s and early-90s issues of the Stanford Review, the right-wing newspaper he co-founded.

His main beef with academia is that he feels it's one major impediment to libertarian politics, so he wants as few people as possible to be exposed to it. Perhaps he also now genuinely believes that finishing his two degrees was a mistake, and it's actually in kids' own best interests to drop out of school. But I'm skeptical that that, rather than politics, is the real reason, as I usually am when someone's professed beliefs: 1) don't match their own actions; yet 2) conveniently match their politics.

I agree. I think this is really a libertarian attack on academia. If you read the atlantic and the economist you will notice that an attack on academia had been going on for a while now from libertarian circles.

Which is kind of ironic because universities overloaded themselves with libertarian professors (some with very flimsy scholarly credentials) in the last ten years in order to suck up to the Bush administration and the right wing donors that are getting more and more important.

But of course libertarians are not happy to have some professors in universities. After all universities offer tenure and independence of thought, etc. They much prefer to have no universities and have all scholarship done in "think tanks" where "scholars" follow orders and get fired at the first sign of disobedience.

> Which is kind of ironic because universities overloaded themselves with libertarian professors (some w scholarly credentials) in the last ten years in order to suck up to the Bush administration and the right wing donors that are getting more and more important.

Holy random statement, batman. Do you have a citation for this? The idea of libertarian professors being a plus to the Bush administration makes effectively no sense whatsoever.

I'm guessing he's referring to the conservative/libertarian donors who've established Ayn-Rand-studies endowed chairs at a few universities. It's a pretty small number, though (I think three), not really a tidal wave.

Top universities don't produce students, students make top universities.

They themselves might be, but some of the notable people they've invested in have dropped out. Granted for Zuckerberg it was Harvard he dropped out of.

Zuckerberg is actually the only one I can think of, though I assume there must be at least one or two others. But if you look through Thiel's portfolio companies, they're stuffed to the gills with people with degrees, often multiple degrees, from top universities. PayPal was all people with degrees, LinkedIn is people with degrees, Palantir was founded by a PhD, etc.

Singularity Institute founded by someone who went autodidact after eighth grade...

Plus there is always the fact that when you drop out of Harvard, they usually give you the ability to come back later on.

Makes dropping out to pursue a startup a low risk / high uncertainty bet.

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