Paypal Co-founder Gives $100K to College Dropouts

If you’re looking for a reason to drop out of college, then you may want to look to Peter Thiel. The co-founder of Paypal, and Facebook investor, is convincing some bright, young adults not to go to college. He gave out a $100,000 grant to 24 college-age entrepreneurs to pursue their business ventures.
“It’s good for some people, maybe most people to stay in school, but it is not good for everybody,” Thiel said. “There are people who are inventors, who are entrepreneurs for whom staying in school is not the right thing. And a lot of these ideas there’s a certain right time and place for when they should be built. And if people have a passionate, great idea that is going to change the world, they should get started on it right away.”

Thiel’s “20 Under 20” had over 400 applicants, and the selection process started last September. One of the selected 24, Alex Kiselev, 19, is in the process of reinventing a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer, a medical device used to evaluate a person’s physical health. Another recipient, Jim Danielson, 20, who converted a gas-powered Porsche into an electric one, is using his grant to endeavor into the electric-automotive industry.
Though Thiel may be encouraging some of America’s brightest to forgo a degree, he assures us that he isn’t opposed to college education, and that his grant program isn’t just about dropping out.
“Dropping out has the connotation you stop education and do nothing,” he said. “I think all of these people will do a lot more outside of college than they would have done in college.”
I think he has a point. It would be naive to say that college is for everyone. I’m not saying that America’s youth should stop after achieving their high school diploma; on the contrary, I believe that everyone needs some sort of education well into their 20s.
So, whether it be a college degree, the military, technical training or even Thiel’s fellowship program, education comes in many forms, and who’s to say one is more valuable than the other.
Via CBS News