Thiel: Ask more questions before enrolling in college
Billionaire venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel says high school seniors need to take a long look before they leap into college.
Thiel, author of the new book “Zero to One: Notes on Start-ups or How to Build the Future,” thinks the current secondary education system has become a “substitute for thinking about the future.” Thiel, who co-founded PayPal in 1999 and became Facebook’s (FB) first outside investor five years later, says young people need to ask themselves what they want to do with their lives before enrolling in a school and choosing a course of study.
Thiel isn’t necessarily advocating skipping college, but he thinks young Americans should think hard about its purpose and what comes next. More than 70% of college seniors who graduated last year had some sort of student loan debt. The average borrower was saddled with $29,400 in loans, according to the Institute for College Access & Success’ Project on Student Debt. That number has been climbing steadily with tuition and fees on the rise and families’ incomes flat.
Thiel attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, earned a degree in philosophy, and went on to Stanford Law School. When he graduated law school, he took a highly-coveted job at a top law firm in New York. Thiel recalls thinking, “On the outside, everyone wanted to get into these places. On the inside everybody wanted to leave.” It was at that point, Thiel says, that he had a “quarter life crisis.” He returned to northern California and became an entrepreneur.
Thiel’s experience in his 20s inspired him to start the Thiel Fellowship program. The fellowship, now in its fourth year, sponsors selected students under the age of 20 who have entrepreneurial interests and allows them to skip a college education to start their own companies. Each fellow receives $100,000 and mentorship from the foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists.
The program has plenty of critics, but if the fellows achieve a fraction of the success Thiel has achieved, it will be well worth skipping college. In 2002, eBay (EBAY) bought PalPal for $1.5 billion and Thiel has made $55 million in the deal. In addition to being an early Facebook investor, he invested in companies like LinkedIn (LNKD) and Yelp (YELP) and co-founded Palantir Technologies, a big-data consultancy. His estimated net worth is $2.2 billion.
Thiel says if he had to do it over again, he might still go to Stanford, but he would ask himself more questions before enrolling. Thiel believes he didn’t think enough about what he really wanted to do with his life before he attended college. He says, “I would not do it because of the status or the prestige. I would do it because I was interested in the substance of what I was learning."
More from Yahoo Finance
This September sag in stocks looks a lot like the midsummer swoon
