Techcrunch begins this article about Peter Thiel (Paypal founder and Silicon Valley hedge fund manager) by saying it was going to make a lot of people angry.
Being a person that is about to commit the rest of my working life to higher education, this obviously piqued my interest and alerted my defenses to what was coming. I’ve heard a lot of arguments from successful entrepreneurs against education and I think a lot of them have merit, but they always seem to take it one step too far. I think the merit is that it is true that not everyone needs to be educated to be successful, they take it too far a lot of times in intimating that the education is mostly worthless. I think these people have been successful without a formal education are generally very motivated to educate themselves and have a lot of talent. What some of them fail to realize is not everyone has that drive and frankly not everyone has the talent to be successful without furthering their formal education.
So as I read this article, I was somewhat surprised that I agree with almost everything that Thiel said on the subject (or at least what the article presented). Education doesn’t have to be elite (although you could argue that the connections you make at an elite school are as important, if not more so than the actual education). It doesn’t guarantee an increase in salary and job prospects, although I think it would be difficult to argue against the likelihood of finding a better job based on your education. , To be honest, I was pretty picky about the schools that I would attend to pursue my PhD and after I scored well on my GMAT even more so. And finally I agree with his argument that you can absolutely be successful without going to school. I actually applaud him for trying something different and since one of the topics I’m interested in studying is innovation and entrepreneurship I’ll be greatly interested to see how his experiment works out. And I hope that as I move forward towards my degree that I’ll be able to keep this mindset that trying new things in education are good and they shouldn’t be fought.
So to Techcrunch, I’ll be interested to see if you really get the negative feedback you are expecting or if this is an idea that is more freely accepted than it would have been a few years back.
