By VIVEK WADHWA, PBS
Editor’s Note: In the debate over the value of higher education, few have been as outspoken as Peter Thiel and Vivek Wadhwa. Recognized as innovators in their own right, Thiel and Wadhwa have dug in their heels on this issue, often conducting their intellectual duels in the media. One of the latest exchanges appeared in the Washington Post, first with an op-ed from Thiel Nov. 21 entitled, “Thinking too highly of higher-ed.” In his own column on the Post’s innovations blog this week, Wadhwa responded: “In defense of college: What Peter Thiel gets wrong, once again.”
Entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa defends the value of higher education. Photo by Flickr user LGagnon.
Before we air that response, some background on Thiel, from whom we’ve sought another response. (The debate never ends.) In 2010, the PayPal co-founder started paying young people to drop out of college. Thiel fellows receive $100,000 and two years to make their big ideas come to life. The famous Mark Twain quote — “I have never let schooling interfere with my education” — a tagline of sorts for the fellowship, captures the essence of Thiel’s opposition to higher education. But as he lays out in the Washington Post, there are serious economic concerns, too, to America’s obsession with college degrees.
Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. Critics are cast as heretics or schismatics endangering the flock. But our greatest danger comes from the herd instinct that drives us to competition and crowds out difference.
He doesn’t dispute that college graduates earn more — one of Wadhwa’s central arguments — but he doesn’t think college is an investment. For starters, the origins of that wage premium are ambiguous, Thiel writes. Maybe that advantage stems from “learning invaluable skills,” or networking or from a self-selecting pool of ambitious people making smart choices.
Either way, he thinks, “higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament” that ends poorly for the losers — and for the winners, who, when anointed with their diplomas, fall into the same old lines of work. (Thiel fellows, he’d argue, are innovating new industries). In that sense, college education is what home ownership used to be; that thing that everyone says you’re supposed to do — go to college, buy a house. In other words, Thiel says, a bubble.
Making Sen$e is publishing Wadhwa’s full response, originally printed in the Washington Post, below. A regular contributor to this page, he most recently weighed in on Uber’s management difficulties with “Uber’s boys club is what’s wrong with Silicon Valley.”
For even more on the Thiel-Wadhwa debate, check out their 2011 Intelligence Squared debate, Jeffrey Brown’s interview with Thiel from 2011 and Wadhwa’s 2013 critique of the Thiel Fellowship.
– Simone Pathe, Making Sen$e Editor
In a Washington Post opinion piece, billionaire Peter Thiel asserts that college is the final stage of a competitive tournament in which kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else. He claims that college education is a bubble and doesn’t provide more value than an insurance policy; that the college admissions process is all that is important because it anoints an “already-proven hypercompetitive elite.”
Thiel is mistaken on all fronts.
If indeed the value came from the college admissions filter, employers would simply replicate this by requiring applicants to supply the same material required by admissions offices: SAT scores and high-school records. They would hire former college admissions officers to assist in hiring, or recruit freshmen who have been admitted to a selective college. After all, that is what professional sports leagues do: hire players as soon as league rules allow. Why wait for them to graduate if college education is just a waste of time and money?
In a paper titled “Are Our Colleges and Universities Failing Us,” Stanford Provost John Etchemendy postulated that if employers were primarily using college as a signal of general intelligence, as well as perhaps the ambition to apply and get into a selective college, we would see much more hiring behavior like that of professional sports leagues. We would surely not see a premium for college education unless it provided real value.
Read the full article HERE.
