I read with interest PayPal co-founderPeter Thiel’s publicity stunt of paying 20 college students $100,000 each to drop out and innovate. He’s got a point when he says:
“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.
Some of the most successful folks I know in the tech industry do not have computer science degrees. Most of them attended college and most have earned degrees, but many of their degrees are in fields other than computer science. In many cases they might as well have skipped college entirely.
I worked with one guy who was so smart it was freaking scary. He could code rings around our degreed developers and yet his formal education ended with high school (and half of that home-schooled). I’ve met enough of these folks that I can say with certainty that college is absolute a waste of time and money for some people.
My friend Chris O’Donnell blogs frequently on topics questioning the value of college. One story he linked to told the tale of a young woman who traded $200,000 in debt for a sociology degree. At what point do you have to concede that higher education might not always be the sure thing everyone says it is? If no one is hiring anyone, are you worse off if you’re unemployed or if you’re unemployed and have $200,000 in student loan debt?
Local techie (and blogger – yay!) Vivek Wadhwa tore into Thiel’s stunt, saying
“All the people who are making a fuss are highly educated. They’re rich themselves. They’ve achieved success because of their education. There’s no way in hell we would have heard about Peter Thiel if he hadn’t graduated from Stanford,” he says.
Actually, there’s no way we would’ve heard of Thiel if he hadn’t co-founded PayPal. Instead, he would’ve been just another of the legions of lawyers churned out by our educational system – many with no idea what they want to do. Stanford’s greatest gift to Thiel wasn’t his philosophy degree (try getting a job with that!) or even his law degree, it was meeting the bright fellow students that he subsequently recruited to his company, Confinity: the precursor to PayPal. He could’ve also located these folks in online forums, or computer clubs, or many other places where geeks congregate.
Having worked with colleagues in other countries I’ve often found them smart, hard-working, and highly educated. When I returned from China, I was convinced that the techies in these developing countries were more than capable of besting their American counterparts when it came to intelligence; discipline; and, yes, education. So why weren’t they already eating our lunch, I wondered? Then I realized they were missing something that Americans have in spades: innovation. And innovation cannot be taught. It can be learned, but not in any classroom.
There is something about our culture which fosters innovation in a way that few other countries can match. Is it greed, or is it something else? I think it comes from the example that others have set. America still has a soft spot for the individuals, the lone wolves, the outlaws. Those who dare to be different. We have an environment where almost anyone with a good idea and hard work can make something useful. (At least in theory – America has its flaws but it’s better here than almost anywhere else).
Is college a safe bet? For some, yes. Is it true that one can learn far more outside the classroom than inside? Absolutely. There are roles for both the college grad and the college refugee.
Betting on the kid who does what everyone else does will always be the safe bet. I’d rather put my money on the kid who does her own thing, though. In my mind, that’s the bet that’s more likely to pay off big.