Conjecture: the point of Thiel Fellowships isn't to bribe everyone to stop attending universities, it is to combat elitism and education-based stratification of

Conjecture: the point of Thiel Fellowships isn't to bribe everyone to stop attending universities, it is to combat elitism and education-based stratification of society. Thiel specifically picked "safe bets" from elite universities (most of which are extremely flexible when it comes to students returning to finish their degrees after the fellowship) to demonstrate that elite university graduates' success is not due to the fact that they've graduated from said universities, but due to other factors (intelligence, grit, curiosity, etc..) That in turn will make traditional employers think twice before turning someone away because at 17 years of age an admission officer (who, of course, knows nothing about the employer's industry or the position the candidate is applying for) looked at myriads of factors on their application (most of them irrelevant to the employer's industry) and decided -- with a very different acceptable margin of error and optimizing for very different goals -- that they should attend their state's flag-ship public university as opposed to Stanford. Most startups and younger established technology firms already know this: while they may only send recruiters to specific campuses, as well as form partnership with only a handful programs (like the Waterloo co-op program, for example), once one has been in the industry for a few years, all else being equal, the university they've attended matters very little. The _quality_ of education they've received matters -- but how they've received it doesn't; this may be obvious to many of us, yet if you speak to someone in another field or industry and a different picture emerges. I see messaging as fairly clear in that Thiel isn't telling a 20 year old me (a first generation immigrant working on BS degree in CS/Math without taking any loans) or a 23 year old me (having an employer pay part of my tuition for an MS degree in CSE, again, without any loans on my part) to drop out: I was seeking a degree for the purpose of (wait for it...!) education and not signalling, I chose a field of study I both love and that had great career prospects, and I did not go into debt. On the other hand, he is telling society that "attending an elite school for the purpose of signalling" should not be considered an investment that can never lose its value.