If they had a clue about what lay ahead, they logically wouldn’t be teaching in the first place. Again, as Thiel notes, “Every moment in business happens only once.” College professors are teaching what’s already happened, yesterday’s news as it were, and are almost by definition not talking about the future. Why are we doing this to ourselves?” The obvious answer is not to learn how to succeed in business. Thiel has already contributed a great deal to the commercial world as evidenced by PayPal, Palantir and Facebook (to name but three successful companies he’s co-founded or backed), but his greatest long-term contribution could very well be in the education space by virtue of him exposing the fatuous lie that says a college education is necessary for career advancement.Īpplying the above to the education-skeptic in Thiel, he writes further on that “For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation.

Nothing against the great time that is college, but the idea that what’s learned on campus has anything to do with real world work and advancement is not a credible one. The Thiel Fellowship provides $100,000 grants to individuals who don’t have time for college, and who instead want to pursue work, ideas and education outside the traditional university. Quite unlike other wildly successful billionaires prone to promote the obnoxious fiction that says access to education is what explains differences in individual achievement, Thiel was willing to say that education is arguably a barrier to success.Įven better, Thiel was willing to put his money behind his views. It’s hard to say when I first read or heard about entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, but it was when he went public with his contrarian views on education that I most eagerly began reading anything by him, or about him.

Peter thiel book zero to one