Peter Thiel founded PayPal and was an initial investor in Facebook (cha-ching), and last September he announced creation of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program through which twenty people under the age of twenty are awarded $100,000 and?introduced into a network of tech entrepreneurs and innovators. Each?awardee?is to spend his two-year fellowship?developing?his own startup or project. Today, the winners were revealed, and some of them have educational aspirations. Dale Stephens, for instance, is head of UnCollege, a ?social movement? that believes ?unschooling??in other words, an entrepreneurial approach to education?in which individual students take charge of their learning by involving themselves in a mixture of self-directed projects, readings, introspection, etc.?should be an integral part of ?higher education.?
Nick Cammarata and David Merfield, according to the Thiel Foundation website, ?are working on OPEN, a project that aims to flip the industrial-scale classroom experience. OPEN is a tool used by teachers to create and share online lessons designed to be viewed at home by their own students, leaving class time free for more engaging activities.? Thiel was asked by Forbes if two fellows without a college degree could possibly reinvent education. Thiel replied, ?If you haven't been educated you have no credentials, if you have been educated you're a hypocrite for not encouraging people to do the same thing. It's a crazy catch 22.? He continued: ?What we somehow need to do is move away from this obsession with status, it may not be possible to get rid of status altogether, but I think having more substance would be a very healthy direction to go in. There's a lot to be said for learning, but credentialing is a status or signaling mechanism is much more dubious proposition.?
Forbes also asked Thiel why his fellowship specifically draws students away from college. ?There are different things that are valuable for different people and there shouldn't be a single track everybody has to be on,? he responded. ?Credentialed education is valuable in certain cases: if you want to go to medical school you have to do pre-med, if you want to practice law you should go to law school, but there is no reason to think this is the only track . . . . Some sort of vocation schooling is maybe okay for some people, but even for the most talented and able young people it's not the case that there should be just one track, that you should go to a top university and everything else is simply worse.?
Thiel was one of the early predictors of both the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble. Interesting that he is now talking about an ?education bubble.? Asked about the crazy routes parents will take to enroll their children in high-end preschools, Thiel said:
It's on the one hand just a logical cumulation of the education bubble. If education is an abstract good and is worth more than anything you could possibly pay for it, you should always pay more and always get started earlier. It is consistent with the deep logic of the education bubble that we're in. There are a lot of questions you should ask, does it add that much value? Does it somehow screw up the kids or the parents to be this tracked? Do people get to college and get kind of burned out by the time they're 18?
Education today, he believes,?has become?a sort of ?insurance?:
For the most part its not an investment or consumption decision. It's basically a way to buy insurance to make sure your kids don't fall out of the middle or upper middle class. The broader social questions we should be asking is why has the cost of insurance gone up so much . . . our society has become less stable, if you don't do things the exact right way, and if you deviate you get whacked. Forty years ago it was not a matter of life or death. Not that people who go to college are doing so much better, it is that those who just finish high school are doing so much worse
Parents camping out on doorsteps is the education bubble carried to its logical conclusion?it is an increasingly expensive insurance policy, and we should be asking why.