Philanthropist aims to get young people out of education

Philanthropist aims to get young people out of education

News (International)

Giving to education may one of the most popular causes for US donors, with $38.87bn in estimated donations for 2011, but PayPal co-founder and Facebook’s first external investor Peter Thiel was keen to tell delegates at last month’s Digital-Life-Design (DLD) conference in Germany that the US education system is broken. He explained why he is funding young students to leave university.

“Education is almost the opposite of technology,” he said: “We are now doing the same or less with more and more resources.”

Instead of funding this ‘trillion dollar business’ Thiel has launched a controversial philanthropic programme, the 20 Under 20 fellowship scheme, that awards $100,000 grants to students so that they can leave university to concentrate on their own projects.

During the two-year fellowship, the Thiel Foundation and its network of mentors provide guidance and support to help the fellows build their scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial ideas. While fellows are expected to work on their innovative ideas full-time, they determine their specific paths; this might mean starting a company, but could also mean doing freelance work, developing a social movement, interning at another company, or pursuing research and development independently.

Launching the third round of applications in October last year, Thiel said: “We think young people are capable of tackling hard problems and building big things, and we hope to enable more of them to work on cool projects for two years and push the boundaries of what’s possible not just a decade from now, but today.”

Thiel first started looking at education in 2007. He had originally thought of putting money into universities or starting his own. But he decided that most recently founded universities didn’t work.

Deciding that helping young people to take risks and learn for themselves could be more valuable, he started the Thiel Fellowship programme in 2011. Although he admitted it isn’t scalable, the philanthropist said he hopes that his idea of mentoring might be copied.

Although Thiel completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Stanford University, phenomenally successful technology entrepreneurs Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college before completing degrees.

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