"To question education is really dangerous. It's the absolute taboo..."

College Search & Selection
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<p>*“Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”</p>

<p>...“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.”...</p>

<p>...“We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top.”
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<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Harvard doesn’t offer one of the best educations because it has some sort of special technique. What people get out of Harvard is direct contact with some amazing minds (as opposed to just reading books written by them) and the interaction with other students, as well as high standards (compared with most schools at least). The thing is, none of these are exportable as franchises. </p>

<p>If people want to learn more the easy way, they should just go to MIT open courseware and buy some books (written by the aforementioned Harvard professors). It’s a s simple at that.</p>

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<p>Well, actually, those attributes are actually quite franchiseable and exportable (although perhaps not to the 100x level that Thiel proposes). Let’s face it - Harvard, with the vast resources that it has, could admit far more students than it currently does. For every one student they admit, they surely reject another 1 or 2 others that are just as qualified. They could also surely hire plenty more star faculty to teach those extra students. </p>

<p>But Harvard will obviously never do it precisely because much of the value of the Harvard brand stems from the fact that it is a ‘positional’ good - conferring value upon you because other people don’t have access to it. It’s primarily a status symbol.</p>