The Entrepreneur Grant
Love this. Marcus Wohlsen writes for the AP about San Francisco tech mogul Peter Thiel's scholarship given to two dozen bright kids. But, it's not a college scholarship, but a non-college scholarship:
The recipients are being paid not to go to college.Instead, these teenagers and 20-year-olds are getting $100,000 each to chase their entrepreneurial dreams for the next two years.
The description of one of the scholarship recipients at the link pretty much describes me in high school -- and throughout my life:
Instead of paying attention in high school, Nick Cammarata preferred to read books on whatever interested him.
His "gift for coding" got him into Carnegie Mellon, but he'll be self-schooled instead, thanks to Thiel's gift.
I wish more guys would actually prove how worthless college is.....how about some big corporations actually hiring people straight out of school to be employed in their companies? Instead of those guys actually wasting 4 years in college paying through their noses for crap that is never going to be used and making some useless good for nothing ppl who masquerade as profs rich?
Redrajesh at June 1, 2011 3:27 AM
Google "Griggs vs Duke Power" if you care to know why companies no longer use aptitude tests to find and develop talent for jobs that don't actually require a college degree.
The only ones still doing aptitude testing are the military. The rest let you spend four years and thousands of dollars getting the training to get you the job I got without having a degree. I went back and finished when my employer was bought by a company with a degree fetish.
Education is something you get for yourself. It's not the product of four years spent doing what you are told and reciting a professor's opinions back to him.
MarkD at June 1, 2011 6:12 AM
Good for those kids. I'm impressed they have the drive this early on. It took me until basically now to figure out what I'm passionate enough about that I could start entrepenuring.
Elle at June 1, 2011 7:16 AM
Some people seem shocked by this story; not here but elsewhere based on the comments I've seen.
The fact is that if a person is interested in pursuing the entrepreneurial path, high school / college / university teachers/professors are most often THE WORST folks to ever go talk to about it. Think about it for a second ... these folks, especially at the post-secondary level, have some of the cushiest jobs & benefits one could ever imagine. Their lives are the absolute antithesis of the challenges & uncertainty an entrepreneur faces every week.
I applaud Peter Thiel. Loudly!
Robert W. (Vancouver) at June 1, 2011 9:41 AM
College is a fence you have to climb over. If you can't climb over it, you are not good enough to hire. If you do, it doesn't mean you know anything at all. It just means you know how to climb.
ken in sc at June 1, 2011 6:24 PM
I went to a tech college for a few semesters. They announced at the end of the second semester that the new requirements stated that all students had to take math courses on top of whatever tech degree we were going for. That would have been about $1400 additional on top of the $12K it was already costing me.
The only reason I was doing it was to have an associates paper to show I knew how to do what I already could do.
I dropped it like a hot rock.
Jim P. at June 1, 2011 10:05 PM
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