I disagree pension--- plenty of business people are middle class and higher without formal education. It's not an either or situation.
What you're ultimately investing in is not the phenomenon that college is unnecessary, it's the selection mechanism itself: i.e., Thiel and a highly-selective, savvy, advanced-degree-educated, well-funded support system that could probably incubate any promising idea into profitability. Anything small and discrete is a "niche." Yay for tautologies. The question at stake is: would this niche be more profitable than investing in the FourSquares and Googles and Twitters created by actual grads, with their Stanford CS 106 connections, top-notch professors, and creative learning environments? Again, why is Silicon Valley located where it is? Where did Elon Musk or Peter Thiel get their educations? If your premise is "yes," then your position is that college would only hurt such entrepreneurs' chances. Statistics do not bear that out, so in the end it's just an ideological gambit.
In hindsight, I think surfer would have been the world richest man had his parents didn't make him go through kindergarten. lol
Early School did kick the shit out of my spirit. Non traditional education would have been much better for me, but my parents are major conformists regarding such things.
Excellent point-- I haven't thought in those terms-- I don't disagree with you-- within the context of your post. Peace.
+1 Any research done at Stanford is owned by the researcher and not by the university. So firms like SUN and Cisco were developed by scientists at Stanford who then went on to commercialize that research. SUN stands for Stanford University Network.
A more relevant question would ask billionaires how much of their college education do they use and attribute to their fortune? Probably not much. Like another guy said, theils drawing on a pool of highly intelligent self starters. Who would probably succeed either way. And that's the gem. Based on that particular demographic, college is more a hinderence than a help.
I remember back in high school, we learned a lot of craps like Shakespeare, geometry, history, etc. I only use math and accounting in my job. Does it mean high school was a hindrance? To someone who is bound to be a billionaire, it probably is, but not to me. The question is, when do you know you are bound to be a billionaire, and just skip all those schools and educations? And how do you know you are not just being overly optimistic about your future?
did you know when you were in high school that what you are doing for a living today is what you wanted to do when you grew up?