Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

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"Thiel Fellows are given a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to skip college" - thielfellowship.org

"The fellowship is intended for students under the age of 20 and offers them a total of $100,000 over two years as well as guidance and other resources to drop out of school" - Wikipedia

"Everybody believes that you need to go to college... the average plumber makes as much as the average doctor." - Peter Thiel in video interview: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/billionaire-offers-college-alter...

If the Thiel Fellowship isn't about convincing kids to drop out of college and not go back, someone should tell Peter Thiel and the person that runs the website. :-)

Glad to hear the fellowship is working out great for you, though! I'm not a big fan of college myself.

To be clear, you cannot be enrolled at a university and go through the Fellowship at the same time. My comment above referred to post-Fellowship.

Then why doesn't he give people fellowships to become apprentice plumbers?

Peter Thiel is lying. Plumbers make about 1/4 as much money as a doctor:

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/plumber/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/physician/salary

Haven't done the math myself, but if you factor in years of salary earned while the doctor in training would be at school/residency/fellowship and the salary on that page is for folks who have been at it for a while and either have a private practice with many clients or have been in academia for 10-15 years.

That's a misleading way of comparing them because the doctor has radically higher startup costs in both time and money.

Once that's factored in, the doctor still has higher lifetime earnings, but not nearly the 4x you're pointing at. More like 1.8x.

And it's not until about age 40 that the doctor breaks even relative to the plumber.

And the doctor can only pull all that off in the first place with access to about $500,000 in credit.

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