In his Reddit AMA, superstar–and radical–investor Peter Thiel (PayPal, Facebook) stuck to his belief that college is an overpriced waste of time–at least for certain people. Thiel famously started the Thiel Fellowship, which gives money to entrepreneurs willing to skip college and get right to the business of building businesses. Thiel was asked whether the Thiel Fellowship has been a success so far–or whether some of the fellows would have “benefited from more time in school.”
Thiel wasn’t having any of it. 83 of his fellows have collectively raised $63 million he said and “almost all of them did and learned far more than they would have in college.” The lessons available in Shakespeare aside, it’s a sweeping statement that’s probably true–for this particular group of people anyway. Theil backs up his case with the claim that student debt is a national plague. Much of the $1 trillion in student debt, according to Thiel, has “gone to pay for lies that people tell about how great the education they received was.”
