Drop Out and Innovate, Urges VC Peter Thiel 239
An anonymous reader writes "The San Francisco-based founder of PayPal and co-founder of Facebook is offering two-year fellowships of up to $100,000 (£63,800) to 20 entrepreneurs or teams of entrepreneurs aged under 20 in a worldwide competition that closes this week. With the money, the recipients are expected to drop out of university — Thiel calls it 'stopping out' — and work full time on their ideas. 'Some of the world's most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation,' Thiel says. 'This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas either.' Thiel says the huge cost of higher education, and the resulting burden of debt, makes students less willing to take risks. 'And we think you're going to have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies.'"
Re:Perhaps I'm a bit naive, but... (Score:4, Informative)
"Piece of official paper" helps you clear some hurdles in placing you for that first job in your chosen field. It usually establishes what group of lowest common denominators you belong into. Without it, the other route is climbing the career path from menial jobs (e.g. tech support).
Now...certifications are a different thing and come in all kinds of flavors. I'm a CCIE. Even if I had cheated my way through all the tests and wouldn't in reality know jack about routers, it's still valuable for almost any business who uses Cisco stuff - if you employ someone with the cert you get better discounts. So with that in hand I can basically say in the interview "if you hire me, your infrastructure investment costs drop by X%, I require Y EUR of salary a month. Consider if it's worth it".
Now, that's a very vendor-specific thing. Highly-ranked but more generic ones like CISSP certification are in the same category as that university degree - helps you clear some hurdles and maybe helps convincing that you actually have some skills. Then there's of course all the entry-level stuff that are completely pointless (Microsoft certified solitaire experts come to mind)...
They're not talking about dropping out (Score:2, Informative)
They talking about taking a break. And considering the spiraling costs of university education - only to graduate with no job prospects (even if you have a marketable degree!) - taking a break to earn money to pay for school is quite a responsibly thing to do compared to racking up student loans.
These days going to college and graduating isn't as worth as much as when I went to school. Kids today are competing with college grads from all over the World. There are no safe and secure careers anymore and going to school for fine arts, liberal arts and sciences, although quite worthwhile in its own right will get you nowhere on their own unless you have some great connections.
A college education isn't as valuable as it was. Yeah, someone will post the "stats" about how the more education means more money, but those stats are old, outdated and were created before globalization really took off.
So, absolutely take break and so something really high risk like putting everything you have on the line while you're young - it's horribly rough when older and married. Every self made millionaire I know is on at least his 2nd marriage and all their kids are screwed up - Daddy was never home.
Re:Irresponsible (Score:5, Informative)
not irresponsible if this is the only way to get true innovation, it seems once people get through college, they lose the ability to innovate.
Uh, you must have forgotten about all those grad students and researchers in the world, who are busy pumping out innovations that actually are changing our lives. The people who developed transistors had graduated college. So did the people who developed the Internet. So did the people who developed plastic. These are technologies that have been so innovative and ground breaking that they have permanently changed our society, and they were not invented by drop-outs.