(Offline)
Sounds like something that Bill Gates would have been attracted to when he dropped out of Harvard (scholarship too!) to invent Microsoft in the garage with Paul Allen.
Would you encourage your super-smart kid to drop out and become part of this?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Peter Thiel thinks college is overrated. He co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, so he has the money to act on his convictions.
He's created a fellowship that will give a few dozen teenagers $100,000 (and a fair bit of mentoring) to spend two years trying to build high-tech companies.
To qualify for the money, they have to drop out of college (unless they never enrolled in the first place). They can go back to school after the fellowship if their company doesn't work out.
The winners were announced today. They are, of course, ridiculously impressive.
Here's a typical sentence about one of the winners:
After he stops out of Yale, his first project will be to build a diagnostic biosensor, the initial step toward his goal of making synthetic biology easier to engineer.
Thiel, who graduated from Stanford, recently explained his skepticism about college to New York Magazine:
It's not just a question of if you get [a degree], you make more money ... It's also a question of how many options you're precluding for the future. ... lots of college debt means that you're maybe stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.
(Offline)
There's lots of college dropouts that became huge successes like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I think college stifles extremely intelligent people rather than nurtures their talents because they expect conformity from their students. Good luck to the winners!
(Offline)
Steve Jobs says one of the best decisions of his life was dropping out of college. He just followed his curiosity and stumbled into a calligraphy class.
That decision influenced his future ones on the Mac design.
http://www.estatevaults.com/bol/archives/2011/02/08/when_steve_jobs.html
I would encourage my kid to participate, sure would!
(Offline)
I think college is good for teaching them more about having to be structured in their work and having self-discipline. Time management isn't what you pay the big bucks for though! I agree with you on the rest, frazzledmom.
I've always thought a degree did not do much more than demonstrate your ability to regurgitate information on exam day. Especially the less useful kinds. Most of the real learning you do is out in the working world. I think this is excellent!
The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. - Mad Magazine.