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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

I will point out that Thiel is not completely anti-college. His position on the matter is that if you want to go to college, you should have a firm grasp of what you hope to achieve out of it, not because you are blindly following your peers or acting on advice from elders.

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.

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Most high school graduates have no idea what college can do for them and what they want to accomplish in life. Giving them $100K to do start-ups ain't helping. College -- for many -- is a time of exploration. A liberal art education provides the essential ingredients for a well-founded life. It's more than just getting in, learn the skills and get out to get a job. Further, college provides an environment where you meet and learn from your competitive peers.

Thiel and you probably seem to think that colleges are like vocational schools. But they don't.

Thiel and you probably seem to think that colleges are like vocational schools.

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.

>If you do have very specific goals in mind during your stay in college, $100K isn't going to sway you away anyway

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.

It is, at best, equivalent to a salary anyone bright enough to graduate with a college degree could make straight out of high school. Perhaps often less, as the expenses of running a business can start to pile up even more quickly than that. The money alone isn't going to promote sway any more than the compensation out of any job would.

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.

It is, at best, equivalent to a salary anyone bright enough to graduate with a college degree could make straight out of high school.

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

There's a big difference between being paid $100K to start a business and being paid $100K to have fun with. Thiel is funding the former. Out of that money you will take living expenses, but most of the investment will go directly back into the business to make something of it. That is, after all, the goal.

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.

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