Peter Thiel Will Pay You To Drop Out Of College
What is the Big Idea?
While Congress dukes it out over the federal interest rates on student loans, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has a solution for college students who don’t want to be saddled with huge amounts of debts in an unstable economy. The solution, he says, is to drop out of college.
“We have a bubble in education, like we had a bubble in housing…everybody believed you had to have a house, they’d pay whatever it took,” Thiel tells Morley Safer in an interview that will appear on 60 Minutesthis evening. “Today, everybody believes that we need to go to college, and people will pay– whatever it takes.” And that’s way too much these days says Thiel, when people without a degree can make as much as those with an advanced one. “There are all sorts of vocational careers that pay extremely well today, so the average plumber makes as much as the average doctor,” Thiel tells Safer.
Listen to Peter Thiel weigh in on the burden of a college education:
What is the Significance?
Only half of recent college grads are employed full-time and tuition has quadrupled over the past 30 years. Thiel says the system is broken.
“I did not realize how…screwed up the education system is. We now have $1 trillion in student debt in the U.S… cynically, you can say it’s paid for $1 trillion of lies about how good education is,” Thiel says in the 60 Minutes interview.
The Thiel Foundation’s “The 20 Under 20 Fellowship” pays $100,000 each to about 20 students every year. One of the contest rules requires that the applicant “stop active enrollment in school during the Fellowship.”
Thiel thinks his program offers an alternative to an expensive and ineffective university system, while critics think it encourages student to drop of college or not attend at all.
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Big Think will be tackling with this topic in a nine-week online course called Big Think’s Summer School for the Real World, which will bring you advice from the world’s leading experts, helping you to develop the skills you possess and build the ones you’ll need to thrive in the 21st century workplace. You’ll get a crash course on the essential knowledge they never provided in lecture hall and the critical skills not found on any syllabus, featuring, among others:
You can access the course for free by telling us about your higher education experience. The deadline to complete our quick online survey is June 1, 2012 at midnight. One graduate will be flown to New York City for a business lunch and job interview in Big Think’s New York headquarters.
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