Public-Private Partnerships
Let’s all stop shitting on academia
In entrepreneurial circles, its been incredibly popular to denigrate higher education as the death-kneel of innovation; this has mainly been the result of the Valley ideal of the college drop-out CEO in the vein of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Successful entrepeneurs of this background are usually seen as the ‘elite’ in the tech field, as they chose to pursue their passions in lieu of a university education. With the creation of things like the Thiel Fellowship, this idea has only grown in popularity despite it being based on dubious grounds.
The Thiel Fellowship is a questionable reaction to the increasing costs of higher education and the belief that the current U.S. university system doesn’t properly teach entrepreneurial principles to students. Although much can be said about the current state of outreach in this area, Peter Thiel’s brainchild fails to demonstrate the flaws in the system. The Fellowship offers a significant monetary grant and support to promising students in exchange of them foregoing the university system. In its intention, it attempts to demonstrate that the current educational system isn’t a necessity to business or career success and oftentimes hinders professional growth and skill development. While I don’t agree with the principle that college education has been overvalued in the job market, bribing students to forego higher education is misguided for two reasons: 1) most successful entrepreneurs emerge after years of experience in their field (which includes some level of higher education) and 2) that the Thiel Fellowship is highly competitive, meaning it selects individuals it sees as having the highest potential for success despite their lack of college education.
This is misleading because most students are not in this position, meaning the Fellowship cherry-picks the top percentage of students and entirely misses the point that higher education is a necessary step in the advancement of the vast majority of students. The point that the elite 1% of students will succeed regardless of educational attainment does not need to be made, and doesn’t serve as an argument for the redundacy of college on a national level.
More importantly, the Thiel Fellowship has largely failed in its stated goals, as no major successes have arisen from the program. Despite all of the hand-holding that accompanied in the first ‘classes’ of the program, the results are scant and serve more to demonstrate that a university education is not necessarily a roadblock; in fact its pretty ironic for Thiel to pursue this train of thinking given his undergraduate and graduate education from Stanford University.
If anything, Stanford is a perfect example of how academic institutions, in partnership with the private sector, can create new industries and serve as a roadmap for innovation in other sectors. Stanford was key in encouraging its students to develop companies in the region and provided significant support in ensuring the success of a number of companies. More importantly, Stanford serves as a key source of talent for the Valley, despite the fact that the demand for talent in the region has surpassed the ability of Stanford to supply it. The tremendous success of Stanford’s model and the Valley in general have served as blueprints for replicating this model in other parts of the country. This can be seen in the development of Research Park at the Universty of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other places throughout the country.
The sucess of this model on a national level only underlines the crucial need for strong academic institutions and their continued participation in partnerships with private sector actors.
