I don't know where he went to school; you may be right about the eliteness, but I'm almost positive he took business.
"In the US, where I attended college, nearly everyone starts undergrad in the same way: After graduating from high school at age 18. When they start school, few people have a clear sense of the career path they’ll set on; it’s rare to meet a person who has high confidence of what they’ll end up doing, and even rarer to see someone who actually follows that plan. Instead, people happily confess that they don’t know what they’ll do, and that they’ll figure it out by trying different classes and by joining clubs, sports teams, fraternities, and so on."
I attended college in the United States as well, at UT Austin, and although I have only peripheral experience with the business school, that seems much more true of business students than any other majors I interacted with. Almost universally, the students are young, and choose that school because it offers good jobs if they have no "clear sense of a career path". His further comments, such as "By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions", only emphasize the impression.
In the STEM majors, you'd best hit the ground running, or you will spend some extra semesters catching up on things. [But, isn't "they’ll figure [what they'll do] out" one of the advantages of attending college?] On the other hand, there isn't anything "zero-sum competition" about it; do you know what they call the person who graduated from medical school in last place? "Doctor". Also, and moreso in other majors such as liberal arts, "[m]ost [students] are not super differentiated from each other" is simply false. Significant chunks of the students are older, from other countries, or just have otherwise odd backgrounds. (One of the guys I graduated with was getting twin degrees in CS and music; we didn't regard this as "zero-sum competitive dynamics", we just thought he was insane. Which he admitted himself.)
Also, after finishing the article, I'm just very confused. I can't find a definition of "mimetic contagion", or why he would think Reddit-like "memes" have anything to do with it. I also find comments like,
"No one has ever asked me how one should escape mimetic contagion on campus. Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead."
to be rather horrifying. He seems to be both complaining about and advising the kind of intellectual inbreeding that colleges are designed to avoid. Take the damn electives outside your major; explore the options while you still have some left.
Finally, I can't make head nor tails out of "[i]f one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges."
1. "American meritocracy"? Does such exist? Is that good or bad? If it's good, why is it a catastrophe?
2. "Growing tendency"? The "people running the country" have always come from the elite colleges and "hothouse environments".
3. When he says, "where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles", is he unaware of the Southern tradition of honor?
And he says, "I think mimetic contagion is worst in US colleges. In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses." So, apparently, closing off your options as early as possible is a good way to avoid "mimetic contagion"?
P.S.
"Thiel gets at the learning capacity of the latter when he makes a point about Aspergers in the Valley: “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, then you’re less likely to do the same thing as everyone else around you. If you’re interested in making things or programming computers, you’ll be less afraid to pursue these activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”"
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" say Wernher von Braun