Would You Get Paid to Drop Out of College?
Tech investor and all-around rich guy Peter Thiel is getting press today for his Twenty Under Twenty program, which awards innovative young thinkers with $100K.
Getting paid to not go into debt for the next 15 years definitely has its appeal. After all, now that college prices are spiking, people are starting to question the merit of higher ed in the first place. Don’t you wish you could ask someone who just graduated what they think about it? Luckily, this very blogger happens to be 23 and one year out of college. (Har har.)
Since graduating and starting to shell out hundreds of dollars every month paying back my degree in English/Cultural Studies/ Journalism (what can you say, I had dollar signs in my eyes), I’ve been surprised by how negative my opinions about college have become. Sure I loved the 4 years I borrowed from the rest of my life, where I got to write papers about food porn and take naps every afternoon, but once you start paying for it, it seems a lot less lovable.
Almost every skill that I learned during that time that I actually use now came from internships. Aside from Chinese language classes and a couple classes in Freudian lit and post-colonial studies, I learned little that I still actually think about. Beyond that, if someone was dying to know more about Freud or post-colonialism, it’s increasingly easier for them to learn those subjects on Wikipedia, iPad apps, social learning sites and in good old libraries (and eLibraries). Those things are generally free. Internships, however, make you actually work on deadlines and learn lessons like “What it’s like to publish a negative review and get told by anonymous web commenters to go kill yourself.” You don’t learn that in lecture.
Going further, a lot of what I learned in college was geared at making me think and speak like an academic, which is actually a totally useless skill in the real world. Why learn to have a point counterpoint about “jouissance” other than to come off as a total prick over a wine and cheese sampler? Why spend years on a dissertation that no one will read without learning how to turn it into an eBook or pitch it as an article in a magazine? Internships teach you how to actually create things geared for the real world of understanding and consumption.
Peter Thiel’s approach is somewhat different from mine. It assumes that these teenagers already have the know-how to take $100K and invest it wisely. Looking at descriptions of them, they are clearly extraordinarily brilliant, and probably capable of doing just that. But for the rest of us, a higher ed model built around the old paradigm of apprenticeships, now incarnated into internships, might save us money and help us get more jobs.
-Becky Lang