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The Thiel Fellowship has been extremely successful, if judged by the top 10% of its participants. That has almost nothing to do with colleges, whose job it is t

The Thiel Fellowship has been extremely successful, if judged by the top 10% of its participants. That has almost nothing to do with colleges, whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students, at a scale of over 15M students per year. There's a lot you can say to criticize higher ed, but this is an apples to oranges comparison. I'm reminded of Teach For America, which I did 15 years ago. I became a full time teacher with only 5 weeks of training. Most teachers go to 4 years of ed school. I firmly believe 2 things: TFA has produced some elite teachers, but it is not a scalable model because it is not better for most people. Similar argument for bootcamps vs college for training technologists. > There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today. Ethereum is a truly incredible and fascinating project, but at this point, I don't think anything that has come out of it qualifies as promising. Nothing from it has had a substantial impact on existing value chains of products and services. It's like the bustling economy of a techno-futurist hermit kingdom, but one which doesn't produce things anyone needs to survive (including its own subjects).

randomdata 3y ago
> whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students If that were the case, wouldn't we be able to point to some kind of evidence of that being the case? Nobody seems to know what these worthwhile outcomes are. It has even failed demonstrate the most popular college claim: That its graduates will make more money. In reality, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of college. Furthermore, if we compare the USA, where ~40% of its population is a college graduate, with its nearest neighbour Canada, where ~70% of its population is a college graduate, the median American without a college degree makes ~50% more than the median Canadian with a college degree. It seems the actual job of college is to act as the arbiter into certain supply managed careers (doctors, lawyers, etc.), ensuring that only the "top 10%" of students are permitted into those professions.
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  It's certainly debatable how good a job college is doing, or even what the right metrics are, but my point is that it's attempting something on a completely different scale than the Thiel Fellowship.

randomdata 3y ago

> whose job it is to produce worthwhile outcomes for the vast majority of their students If that were the case, wouldn't we be able to point to some kind of evidence of that being the case? Nobody seems to know what these worthwhile outcomes are. It has even failed demonstrate the most popular college claim: That its graduates will make more money. In reality, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of college. Furthermore, if we compare the USA, where ~40% of its population is a college graduate, with its nearest neighbour Canada, where ~70% of its population is a college graduate, the median American without a college degree makes ~50% more than the median Canadian with a college degree. It seems the actual job of college is to act as the arbiter into certain supply managed careers (doctors, lawyers, etc.), ensuring that only the "top 10%" of students are permitted into those professions.

acjohnson55 3y ago
It's certainly debatable how good a job college is doing, or even what the right metrics are, but my point is that it's attempting something on a completely different scale than the Thiel Fellowship.