With nostalgia for the innovation culture of the ‘60s and general lack of enthusiasm for popular investment fads, Peter Thiel – who was Facebook’s first outside investor and a co-founder of PayPal – is shunning the most popular Internet startups because they are not “taking civilization to the next level.” He is putting his billions behind emerging innovators, urging them to sacrifice the questionable value of college for a seat on his magical bus.
“Universities are like the General Motors of the 1970s,” said Thiel, a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. “They're incredibly dominant, incredibly arrogant and impervious to change.” His nonprofit organization, the Thiel Foundation, is vetting candidates under the age of 20 for 20 fellowships. Each recipient will be awarded a $100,000 grant to leave college and pursue entrepreneurial projects.
Is this a call for the end to universities as we know them, for their reinvention, or perhaps for a new model that expands education directly into the rich action learning arenas?
