<p>“The top 25% are generally too smart for the typical college environment.”</p>
<p>I generally agree with this – that’s why they benefit so much from going to Harvard etc. instead of the typical college environment.</p>
<p>I know PrincetonDreams covered him/herself by saying “rough estimations” but I just wants to point out something:</p>
<p>The 75th percentile composite for ACT is 24 and for SAT is 1730. To say a typical person with a 24, or even a 25, 26, or 27+, is the type of person who just needs to go to college to meet people to start their tech business, and can learn everything on their own, is wildly unrealistic. There may be a segment of the population which this applies to, but it is FAR less than 25%.</p>
<p>Meh. Test scores don’t tell everything. I scored around an 1800 on the SAT, but scored around a 32 on the ACT (and I completely bombed the science section). None of this means anything, though, and says nothing about how well a person can learn. I know a lot of really smart people that need the structure that college gives them, if not the actual professors and lecturers teaching the material to them, along with the interactions with the other students. I think it may be more of a personality issue than a purely intellectual issue, though intelligence has a huge part in it. This is similar to the personality trait that is required of most entrepreneurs; that is, not every smart person can be one, it takes a special combination of personality traits to make one successful in that area (and of course, a certain amount of luck).</p>
<p>Though I still agree, 25% of the population is pretty huge… I doubt there are that many people that can learn everything themselves to be honest (in my own experience, the number would be more around 10%).</p>
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<p>Except for the problem that the top 25% of college students won’t get into Harvard or peer schools. Those schools will admit only a small fraction of top students, thereby leaving plenty with little choice but to attend a more typical school.</p>
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<p>I wish more employers would agree. Yet the fact of the matter is - apart from a minority of professions such as entrepreneurship, entertainment/sports, and some aspects of computer science/IT - you basically need a degree to have a decent career. You can’t even land an interview at most decent employers without a degree.</p>
<p>And that, ironically, includes many companies that were themselves founded by people who lacked degrees. It’s not easy to land a job at Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, or Apple without a degree. In other words, those companies ironically probably will not hire their own founders. </p>
<p>When employers start developing contempt for education is when we will know that education is no longer sacrosanct. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Right now, employers are able to utilize education as hiring screen that is costless to them…but unfortunately not costless to the rest of society. Rather, they’ve ingeniously managed to impose a cost upon the students by forcing them (or greater society through taxpayer subsidies) to pay for the costs of their screen. </p>
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<p>I don’t believe he was talking about actual professional students who obviously need some type of hands-on vocational training. </p>
<p>Rather, what he (and Thiel) was talking about was the undergraduate experience, much (probably most) of which can be replicated through self-study. Honestly - how much of a typical undergraduate curricula could not be replicated through diligent self-study? You can’t read books on your own time? You can’t set up a small science lab and run your own experiments? {Heck, there are high school students who have successfully set up their own nuclear fusion reactors in their garages for just a few thousand dollars of used gear. There is also a burgeoning bio-hacking home tinkerer’s community that develop their own genetically engineered organisms in their home labs at the cost of only a few thousand dollars.} </p>
<p>More to the point, plenty of doctors from around the world never had to undergo undergraduate studies before entering medical school. Many medical systems in Europe, for example, are rated higher than the US system, despite allowing students to enter medical school right out of high school.</p>
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<p>How would he be able to do that? Thiel doesn’t run Paypal anymore, nor is he even on the Board of Ebay (who owns Paypal now). </p>
<p>Given that he no longer has power over Paypal’s day to day activities, Thiel is trying to effect change through the means that he has.</p>
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<p>Obviously the point of the small experiment is to watch how it unfolds, learn from the results, and if successful, expand it to a greater scale. This is similar to any other sort of experiment - you generally don’t begin at the largest scale possible but rather start with a small pilot project from which you can learn about your phenomenon before scaling up. </p>
<p>Hence, Thiel’s experiment might be the seed that eventually sprouts to a larger program funded by NGO’s such as the Gates Foundation that will provide benefits to kids who would be better off as entrepreneurs rather than wiling their time in college. </p>
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<p>Obviously the vast majority of 20-year-olds are by definition, of only average talent and motivation. Put another way, by definition, half of all people must be in the bottom half of ability. </p>
<p>I suspect that what Thiel proposes is to change the market for labor at the top of the talent pool - the very talent pool to which the CC community tends to skew. Let’s face it - plenty of highly talented people who don’t really need college nevertheless have to attend anyway because they don’t dare not to obtain the degree credential for a decent job, as even a mediocre student can obtain a degree through some creampuff major at a low-end school. </p>
<p>But what if the correlation between top talent and degrees could be broken, or at least weakened? What if employers could not be assured that using a college degree as a screen would not garner top talent for them, and indeed might be screening out top talent? Then those employers - at least for the top jobs - would no longer rely upon the degree as a screen. That is the new equilibrium point that Thiel is pushing the market towards. </p>
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<p>If anything, I would argue that Thiel’s elite educational background infuses his proposal with more credibility, not less. After all, he’s calling the value of his own background into question. Who better to question the value of an elite education than somebody who actually has one? </p>
<p>And besides, let’s keep in mind that the analogy of a resident in a nice quiet neighborhood complaining about outsiders moving in is not apropos in the least. After all, nobody is being forced to take his money. Those students at elite schools who don’t want to leave are free to do so. Heck, even those students who do take his money aren’t really ‘leaving’ either: they are merely withdrawing and are free to return to the school at anytime. {Similarly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are still technically on ‘leave’ from Stanford and could return to finish their PhD’s at anytime, although they seem to have more important things to do.} </p>
<p>All that Thiel is proposing is that highly talented youths who feel that they should be pursuing professional opportunities rather than going to college might now be given the funding to do so. What’s wrong with that? Is that really so controversial? Must every highly talented young person attend college?</p>
<p>Education is questioned every day, every minute by recalcitrant school kids, by those not wanting to pay for it, by those like Thiel who are bringing up the question. It’s not a taboo; it’s a common discussion.</p>
<p>Education is not just about going to college, so anyone who is interested in doing something else constructive is usually looked upon quite positively. College is just a convenient, easy, canned way to get some education, spend the time when a young person doesn’t know what else to do and no one else wants him/her. I told my son he certainly could do something else this year, but he had no ideas of anything else he wanted, despite my suggestions. College was the easy choice. Don’t think he is particularly enamored with the ideal of more school, but he might as well do this in an environment of other young people where a lot of amenities are being provided. He is working 2 jobs this summer and knows what professional opportunities are available along with what social ones are if he does just stay home and those choices are less appealing. Around here, the jobs available for an 18 year old right out of high school are limited. Both he and his girlfriend have had jobs since they were in middle school, are hard, diligent workers and know what the life is of their co workers who did not go away to college or are commuting and going to school part time. His girlfriend has siblings that are still at home post high school and can see how they are living, and has seen what her full scholarship offers instead.</p>
<p>^^Excellent post, and somethinng I’ve been trying to put into words for weeks, now. It seems that no matter where you go, the ages between 18 and 25 are periods of great flux and experimentation. In Great Britain and on the continent as well, people often collect degrees, if they have the money; they go directly from their equivalent of high school directly into highly specialized degrees like law, economics or architecture. If one career choice doesn’t work out to their satisfaction they simply go back to school for a few more years and pick up another certification. In the United States we’ve developed a vast sorting mechanism called, the liberal arts curriculum, that encourages our young to try on different hats before choosing one career path. And even then, because of the complexity of the modern industrial enterprise, it may take years of career hopping to find one’s niche. Either way, I don’t see how you can make the sorting process perfectly efficient in order to meet the short-term needs of a particular industry. Industries fade, innovations arise out of people’s garages. You can’t test for that.</p>
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<p>The taboo comes into play within political discussions. No politician is going to stand up and say that we need fewer high school or college graduates, when that may in fact be the truth (especially the latter). There is an inexorable political pressure to push more students into college, regardless of how appropriate it may be for them.</p>
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<p>I think you’ve tipped your hand, here, Sakky. This is less about pedagogy or the liberal arts vs. techies (people are pretty good at self-selecting which path works for them) this is about throwing poor kids (those pesky, intractable, inner-city kids and their teachers union fellow travelers) under the bus.</p>
<p>To be clear, I have nothing against poor kids, nor even against teachers unions per se. But I admit that I do have a problem with any kids - whether they be poor, rich, or middle-class - who care not a whit about academics and don’t even know why they’re in college at all, but who attend anyway and then basically utilize the experience as a 4-year social party/vacation while cruising by in creampuff majors. Surely we can all think of plenty of student who have done exactly this. </p>
<p>And to be fair, I suspect that population actually is skewed towards the rich. For example, both George W. Bush and John Kerry - scions of rich families both - have freely admitted to being egregiously unmotivated students while at Yale. Granted, Yale along with the rest of the Ivy League were basically just finishing schools for the upper crust during that time period rather than the truly fully-fledged academic institutions, but even nowadays, there continue to be rich students at elite schools who are conspicuously doing very little work.</p>
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<p>Sure, but why is it our business? Why do you have this “problem?” If some kids wants to waste four year and tens of thousands of dollars on a big fun spree, that’s their choice not yours. It’s a “problem” for the kids and/or their parents, not you. Why the need to try to order other people’s lives to your liking by imposing educational limits on them?</p>
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<p>Actually, it is everybody’s business because they’re imposing a cost onto the rest of us. After all, they are taking up an admission seat that could have instead gone to somebody who was actually serious about the educational opportunity provided.</p>
<p>Put another way, coureur, what if it was your child that was denied admission to the college of his choice because they decided to admit other students who then turned out to be more interested in using that college as a 4-year vacation and social club? How would that make you feel? Would you be proud of this system? </p>
<p>If those students want to enjoy a multi-year vacation, then by all means have them take a Grand Tour around the world. Or, heck, allow them to attend an open-admissions community college where their presence does not impinge the ability of any other students’ opportunities to receive an education. By doing so at a school with competitive admissions, they’re denying that seat to somebody else. Your child may now have to go to a school that he doesn’t really want because the college he does want won’t admit him. Hence, those students’ hedonism becomes a problem for everybody else.</p>
<p>You say that I should not impose educational limits on others. yet by taking an admissions seat, only to use it as a vehicle for a 4-year vacation, those students are doing exactly that - imposing educational limits on others. Why should they be allowed to do so?</p>
<p>^^How may business models do you know of are predicated on getting rid of paying customers? Cream puff majors virtually pay for themselves.</p>
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<p>Wait, are you trying to say that universities are businesses? I thought universities were nonprofit organizations. That is, after all, the justification for their tax exempt status. If they truly are businesses, then fine, they should be taxed as businesses, right? </p>
<p>Furthermore, if universities were truly businesses, then they shouldn’t really run admissions processes at all, but rather should sell every admissions seat to the highest bidder, right? If somebody is willing to pay a million dollars to be admitted, then they should be taken over a more qualified student who is only willing to pay $100k, right? So why leave money on the table? Universities should list all of their seats on Ebay. </p>
<p>{Yes, I am well aware that schools sell a minority of their seats to rich donors now, but surely we could agree that they could generate far more money if they sold every one of their seats. In contrast, many elite schools such as Harvard will not only not charge even a dime, but will actually pay free rides to those students who are poor but talented. That should end immediately, as if universities are just a business, then that is clearly a foolish business decision, right? Does General Motors actually not only give out free cars, but actually pay people to drive them, if those people happen to be poor but also skilled drivers?}</p>
<p>^^Hey, it was your choice of metaphor. If you have a moral objection to lazy people say, so. don’t try and disguise your judgmentalism as economic theory.</p>
<p>Sakky - Implicit in your tiresome arguments is the false assumption that the school (or some regulatory body) can tell IN ADVANCE what a kid’s motivation for going to school is. You can’t. If the kid has decent high school stats for that particular college, and he can pay, and he says on his application that he wants to attend, on what basis would the school reject him? How can they know who and who isn’t going to take a four-year vacation?</p>
<p>And even if the school could somehow tell he is a slacker and yet for some goofy reason still wants to admit him, they should be free to do so. And he should be free to go. That’s what having free choice in a free society is all about. (Yes, I know that you are going to argue that society isn’t truly free and give some example, but does nothing to justify making it even less free by artificially curtailing the choices that people and institutions currently can make for themselves. Which is what you are hell-bent on doing).</p>
<p>It’s the kid’s time and money. If he wants to waste it on college education he doesn’t particularly care about, that’s his free choice. And it’s the school’s reputation. If the school wants to squander it by deliberately admitting nothing but slackers, that’s its free choice. Motivated kids are free to chose other schools that cater them and not the slackers. And all of it is none of your business.</p>
<p>I’m much more concerned about the predatory colleges, for-profit and otherwise, that aggressively seek out students they know are likely to fail, and are unlikely to make enough money to pay back their federal loans even if they succeed. The federal government takes all the risk and pays for all the bad bets. This is everybody’s business.</p>
<p>It’s just like the doctors who do tons of unnecessary (or phantom) procedures just for the insurance/Medicare reimbursement. Even if the patients are happy, it’s theft, and it’s my business.</p>
<p>Actually, the most selective colleges DO try to screen out unmotivated students using proxies like academic accomplishment, significant community involvement, major athletic and extracurricular achievements, etc. The vast majority of these students aren’t going to aimlessly coast through college.</p>
<p>Less selective schools may attract more students interested in a four year cruise, but certainly part of every college’s mission is to expose students to many areas and spark interests and motivation that didn’t exist previously.</p>
<p>Thiel’s program is great for the participants but isn’t scalable and doesn’t apply to the many students who don’t have the combination of unique ideas and drive that make a successful entrepreneur. </p>
<p>College degrees are likely to be screening tools for years to come. I’ve hired in boom times and bust times, and the hiring dynamic changes completely. If you get five resumes for an opening, you study them all carefully. If you get two hundred, you use simplifying tools like, “4 year degree” or “Cisco-certified” or “at least three years of experience.” (And if you are proactively searching thousands of resumes, filters become even more important.) It’s not that the people in the reject pile might not turn out to be great employees, but rather that you can’t carefully analyze and interview 200 candidates. A college degree as a qualifier is a weak predictor of success, but it’s likely to be better than randomly tossing out 80% of the resumes. </p>
<p>The colleges themselves face a similar dilemma - they know that HS GPA and SAT/ACT scores aren’t great at predicting college GPA, but they have to use something.</p>