Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in part for his work as a founder of the study of the economics of human capital. One common finding of the field is that investment in higher education has a high rate of return. So Becker was puzzled when his own grandson pondered skipping college in order to directly become a technology entrepreneur.
I speculate that information technology will make it increasingly easy for autodidacts to learn on their own what they need to know, whenever they need to know it. I further speculate that formal education, especially formal higher education, will wither into irrelevance, just as the Post Office has withered in the face of email and Amazon.
(p. B4) Peter Thiel is trying harder than ever to get young people to skip college.
Since 2010, Thiel, an early Facebook investor and a founder of PayPal Holdings, has offered to pay students $100,000 to drop out of school to start companies or nonprofits.
. . .
Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart.
When he began his fellowship, Thiel, a vocal libertarian who was an active supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, was disenchanted with leading colleges and convinced they weren’t best suited for many young people.
His aim, at least in part, was to undermine the popular view that college was necessary for all students, and that top universities should be accorded prestige and veneration.
Since then, public opinion has shifted toward his perspective. More Americans are rethinking the value of a college education. At the same time, America’s elite universities have come under fire for their handling of a surge in antisemitism and for maintaining what critics call a double standard regarding free speech.
For the full story see:
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(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 24, 2024, and has the title “Peter Thiel’s $100,000 Offer to Skip College Is More Popular Than Ever.”)
Becker is best known for:
Becker, Gary S. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis; with Special Reference to Education. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.