An Education Bubble

There has been a great debate recently, sparked by comments made by PayPal guru, Peter Theil, in which he declared that graduating seniors should really second guess attending college.

Here's a sample -

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on  something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

But he argues that it isn't.  It used to be.

As Sir Ken Robinson used to state, during the Baby Boomer generation, a college degree automatically meant a job and that you were set for life.  

Not so today.  In fact, in 2004 the number of college grads without jobs   was actually higher than the number of high school drop outs without jobs.  That's scary.

So what is Theil's solution?

Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to drop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

But as many critics are now charging, it's quite one thing for a billionaire like Thiel to argue students should drop out.  It's quite another for a kid with nothing to actually drop out.

But it's also one thing for someone who took college seriously and was fortunate enough to be able to earn a degree and find a job they love to advise going to college.  It is another for a student who isn't ready to practice the delayed gratification it will take for four or five years in college to persevere and earn that degree to enroll in college . . . even when they still might not find a job.

Here is a great rebuttal to Thiel.