Curious if Peter Thiel has children. If he does, did they or will they go to college?
If you do have very specific goals in mind during your stay in college, $100K isn't going to sway you away anyway. Otherwise, it is probably a blessing to realize that there are other options available to you. Too many end up going to college simply because they do not see any other options or believe it is the only path to success and that is what Thiel is against.
If Thiel were to have children that decided to go to college, I am sure he would support their endeavours. It would not go against his worldview as long as they attended for the right reasons.
Thiel and you probably seem to think that colleges are like vocational schools. But they don't.
Quite the contrary. How often do you hear someone say something along the lines of "I'm going to school to get a good job"? If the majority of students actually believed it was just a life-improving experience with no expectations about future employment opportunities, there would be no problem. The reality is that most people do consider college to be essentially a vocational school and Thiel is working to put a stop to that mentality.
The fact is that if you only want a good job, there are much better avenues for finding that. Thiel is using his own money to demonstrate, to at least some students, that point. Again, if there were no expectations about employment in the process, the $100K wouldn't be all that interesting to the perspective student anyway because a "well-founded" life would be the goal, not money.
The fact that so many are keen to join his team speaks to the vocational-based mentality around the idea of college that has come to be.
I dunno. To a naive eighteen-year old, $100K is a lot of money, easily enough to sway them into making potentially dumb decisions.
Mind you I assume Peter Thiel can't stop you from ever going to university, can he? [Can he???] So at worst you're putting it off for a few years.
What it does gain someone, however, is the ability to work on their own ideas full time. Given that you are reading HN, I'm sure you can see how that can be appealing. If they have something amazing that they are ready to run with at that age, going to college at that juncture would have probably been a poor idea anyway.
College is not about finding a job or making money, so anyone who is interested in what college really has to offer is not going to find this offer by Thiel particularity appealing to begin with. Their sights are set on something much different.
Oh, bullshit. There are lots of people fitting the rather low bar of "bright enough to graduate with a college degree", who do indeed get college degrees, and who never even get close to earning $100K.
There are very, very few people who earn $100K just out of high school regardless of what they do. I can think of two categories:
a) People who spent all their spare time in high school learning computer programming and who either have some really good contacts when they leave school or are amazingly good at hustling
b) Particularly good-looking strippers
Almost nobody makes $100K, degree or not, ever, in their lifetime (the top 5% earners begin at just shy of $90K, from what I recall). You also won't make $100K to spend as you please by taking his offer either. The realities are that you will probably take $20-40K of that money to spend on yourself, which is definitely not an income out of reach of anyone with just a plain old job. Heck, flipping hamburgers at McDonalds will pay that much on the low end.
It seems like a fantastic opportunity to me, but it's not a big money windfall. Not unless you can make something of your business.
Edit: their about page says "We were founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists."
Sounds like Thiel doesn't like the taste of dogfood.
That was posted an hour after my post :)
Peter Thiel is gay, so it is unlikely that he will produces an offspring.
that means pretty much exactly nothing as gay couples adopt children all the time, and a wealthy individual like Thiel can also pay a surrogate mom to carry a child for him.