Future Stanford Freshman Chooses Palantir Internship Over College: Is Silicon Valley's "Zero to One" Mentality the New Path to Success? Sebastian Tan, a top student headed to Stanford, opted for a Palantir internship, inspired by Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" and Silicon Valley's growing skepticism towards traditional higher education. He believes the fast-paced tech world demands immediate experience, prioritizing practical skills over a formal degree
Silicon Valley's rising stars are increasingly questioning the traditional path to entrepreneurial success. While Stanford, alma mater of Peter Thiel (author of the influential "Zero to One"), was once seen as the ideal route, a new movement championed by teenage founders and tech billionaires emphasizes skipping college to build the future. This shift highlights the perceived opportunity cost of higher education in the rapidly evolving tech landscape
Skip College? The High Opportunity Cost of Higher Education in the Fast-Paced Tech World. Silicon Valley's rising stars are questioning the traditional path, choosing internships and real-world experience over a four-year degree. Is college hindering progress in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape? Learn why some are opting for alternative paths to success
Inspired by Peter Thiel's "Zero to One," Sebastian Tan, along with hundreds of top standardized test-takers, bypassed traditional college and secured a Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship. This paid, semester-long internship at the Thiel-cofounded software and defense technology company offers a fast track to a full-time position, embodying Palantir's "skip college, get the Palantir Degree" ethos. CEO Alex Karp's critique of higher education and advocacy for alternative learning pathways fueled Tan's decision, reflecting a growing Silicon Valley trend prioritizing practical experience over traditional schooling
Sebastian Tan chose Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship over immediate Stanford enrollment, deferring his studies to fall 2026. He prioritized practical startup experience, believing college's theoretical computer science curriculum lacked the hands-on skills crucial for today's fast-paced tech industry. This decision reflects a growing Silicon Valley trend: forgoing traditional higher education to jumpstart careers in innovative companies like Palantir
Silicon Valley's Myth: Is College Necessary for Tech Success? The rise of tech giants like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who bypassed traditional higher education, fuels a growing trend. Soaring tuition costs, exceeding $500,000 for some degrees, and the accessibility of AI-powered development tools are prompting many young people to skip college entirely. Venture capitalists are even encouraging this, viewing it as the ideal time for startups. Is this the future of tech entrepreneurship? Learn why some are choosing the "Palantir Degree" over a traditional college education
Is College Worth It? Silicon Valley's Growing Skepticism and the Rise of Alternative Paths
With the Trump administration considering slashing billions in higher education funding and tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg questioning college's value, the debate over higher education's relevance is intensifying. The allure of rapid wealth creation, fueled by social media, is prompting many to view college not as a stepping stone to success, but a potential detour. This shift is exemplified by rising trends like Palantir's "Meritocracy Fellowship," which encourages high-achieving high school graduates to bypass traditional college and gain practical experience instead
Silicon Valley's Anti-Elite College Dropout Trend: Is Higher Education Obsolete? Peter Thiel's $200,000 fellowship for college dropouts and Palantir's "Palantir Degree" exemplify a growing movement questioning the value of traditional higher education. Influenced by figures like Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, young entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing to bypass college, arguing that the rapid pace of the tech industry renders a formal education obsolete. This trend reflects a broader Silicon Valley anti-elitism, challenging the traditional path to success and prompting a debate about the future of higher education
Silicon Valley's rising trend: Skip college, build tech empires. Palantir and other tech giants are hiring non-graduates, fueled by a surge of self-made founders who eschewed higher education to launch successful companies. From teenage entrepreneurs to billionaire CEOs, the message is clear: real-world experience trumps traditional academia in the fast-paced tech industry. Is a college degree obsolete for tech success?
Steve Jobs's iconic Stanford commencement speech advice: Start each day asking, "If today were my last, would I want to do what I'm about to do?" Consistently answering "no" prompted him to change course. This powerful daily self-reflection, practiced for over three decades, offers a life-changing perspective on purpose and priorities
Skip College, Build a Startup: The Rise of Teen Founders in Silicon Valley. Inspired by Steve Jobs, 19-year-old JC Btaiche bypassed college to launch Fuse Energy, a groundbreaking nuclear fusion startup. His story, along with others like Sebastian Tan's Palantir internship, highlights a growing trend: ambitious young entrepreneurs are choosing alternative paths to success, prioritizing real-world experience over traditional higher education. Is skipping college the new Silicon Valley blueprint?
Silicon Valley's rising anti-college sentiment questions the value of higher education, particularly for aspiring entrepreneurs. Some argue that the traditional path, including professorships often filled by inadequately trained teaching assistants, represents a missed opportunity. The fast-paced tech world demands immediate experience, leading many to bypass college for apprenticeships and internships, prioritizing practical skills over theoretical learning. This trend, championed by figures like Peter Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, suggests a "Palantir Degree" as a viable alternative to a traditional college education
Respecting mentors is crucial to my learning journey, he emphasizes
Skip College, Build Your Empire: Learning From Founders, Not Professors. Many aspiring entrepreneurs are ditching traditional education, choosing instead to learn directly from successful founders like Steve Jobs. They believe real-world experience trumps theoretical MBA programs, opting for a faster path to success by studying the playbooks of those who've already achieved their goals. This approach emphasizes practical skills and rapid adaptation to the ever-evolving tech landscape
From high school dropout to billionaire: At 25, Guild built a lucrative Minecraft server, then launched Owner, a restaurant marketing platform valued at $1 billion. His success exemplifies the growing trend of young entrepreneurs bypassing college to build billion-dollar businesses
Guild is blunt on his assessment of colleges: “My belief is that they’re more like drop shipping operations, where they stamp their logo on already extremely high potential, high IQ young people, and then take credit for their success in society,” he says. The value of a degree is “negligible,” Guild tells me. Instead of forking over hundreds of thousands in tuition, he argues that people like him are better off learning from biographies of iconic founders and the internet — or better yet, from an AI trained to be like Steve Jobs — than from professors who’ve never built anything themselves.
“The autodidact is the new alumnus,” Surya Midha, cofounder and chief operating officer of AI hiring platform Mercor, wrote in a recent X post. (Midha dropped out of Georgetown after receiving the Thiel Fellowship for his startup.) “College teaches you how to sound interesting at dinner parties and, when the guests leave, how to carry that performance into life.” He adds, “A degree feels less like a distinction than a delay.”
Perhaps this DIY mindset can also be defined by a fixation on one Silicon Valley term: “high agency.” Arbaaz Mahmood, who also skipped college, initially wanted to become a physicist but now runs a startup that builds an AI tool for car dealerships. He says school was a numbers game of citations and published papers. “I could just go and argue with my CEO and get things done my way,” he remembers of a startup he worked at after leaving higher ed behind. “That obviously changed everything.”
Being young and getting his way has made Mahmood realize that college is a countersignal. “In the era of the internet, if you have to go to college, it is probably because you’re mediocre,” he continues. “Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they’re going to change the world. That’s a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It’s just bullshit.”
Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me that college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. “It signals DEI,” he says. “It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die.”
There’s another reason Schneider dropped out: “By being a young man and not having the ability to make money, there’s a piece missing from your soul,” he says, in language that would feel at home on a manosphere podcast. “You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long.” (Schneider’s startup, Eldil AI, raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding and is generating revenue, he tells me.)
Declining Male College Enrollment: A Million Missing Men? Pew Research Center data reveals a startling trend: Since 2011, college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds has plummeted by 1.2 million, with men accounting for a full million of that decline. This raises crucial questions about the future of higher education and the evolving paths young men are choosing
Schneider says that the women from his high school in Idaho were “so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at.” He’s married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to “make men more manly, and women more feminine.”
I ask if his AI startup has hired women. “I should be careful here so I don’t get sued,” he says. “Yeah, right now we’re all men because those are the four most qualified people I know. And like, when I say qualified, I mean really qualified.”
Less convinced of the anti-college movement, of course, are the university professors the cause’s adherents rail against. “Very, very few people are truly autodidactic,” says David Deming, a Harvard economist who studies how education shapes life outcomes. He compares the self-taught, often AI-driven, approach to copying a friend’s homework, then trying to solve the same question on your own during a final exam.
“I think a lot of them are fooling themselves,” he says.
For 18-year-olds learning exclusively on the job, whether at a startup or a public company like Palantir, the education tends to be narrow and vocational, unlike a more expansive college curriculum. Some early-career founders see no value in such a syllabus. “I don’t believe in the model of learning that exists in colleges,” Mahmood tells me. “In fact, I don’t want to learn anything at all. I want to preserve my brain.”
Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what’s good for the company — which consequently “will have much more control over you,” he says — isn’t always what’s best for employees.
While the Zucks and the Jobses have outsized roles in Silicon Valley’s cultural imagination, founders who dropped out or never attended college are still a “vanishingly small share of people,” Deming says. And college degrees still pay off. Across nearly every occupation, workers with degrees earn more, on average, perhaps because the college degree affords graduates with an adaptable skillset and an “openness to new things,” he adds.
The percent difference in earnings between college and high school graduates, or the college wage premium, has held at 75 to 80% for the last decade. For an average American, Deming says, the return on an investment in college — including the opportunity cost of attending as well as the sticker price — exceeds the annual returns of investing in the stock market, buying a home, and starting a business.
For founders, “The question is, would they do better or worse if they had gone to college?” Deming asks. “They get exposed to new ideas or new people, and they pivot. You know, founders pivot all the time.”
Palantir’s head of talent, Marge York, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 with a degree in political science and a lingering sense that she learned from a “pretty homogenous tilt of some, not all, of my professors,” she tells me.
Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, according to York. “The success of Western civilization,” she argues, “does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now.” (Karp echoes this sentiment in his book, writing that top colleges “remain remarkably cloistered and walled off from the world.”)
Universities like Penn have long held a monopoly on the most formative years of smart students’ lives. But Palantir thinks college admissions are missing something. The college application process, it argues, is “absent meritocracy” and “based on subjective and shallow criteria,” the fellowship’s job description reads. In addition to an SAT or ACT score at or above a 1460 or 33, respectively, the Meritocracy Fellowship requires applicants to provide a personal statement to the questions, Why do you want to work at Palantir? And, what do you consider your three greatest achievements?
York thinks this “merit-based” approach gives high school seniors admitted to non-Ivies a better shot at success. (One applicant, she mentions, had started a successful company in addition to excelling academically in high school and had only been admitted to a local state school.) “This question of, ‘what possibly more do I need to do to gain access to these places or to be worthy of them?'” York says. “It’s opaque what the admission standards are.”
For all its posturing against elite universities, top colleges seem well-represented in the incoming fellowship class, with some accepted fellows deferring admission from Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, and Columbia, according to their LinkedIn profiles. A spokesperson for Palantir said in an email that the company “did not systematically ask candidates which colleges they were considering or committed to, nor do we plan to.”
While fellows won’t take finals to clinch the “Palantir Degree,” the company is crafting an education of its own. Fellows will follow a company-curated syllabus that will teach them “how to think,” with “a great books bent to it,” York says, which could include texts like the Federalist Papers or from Plato. The jury’s still out on whether Karp’s book will be required reading. “I was truly almost moved to tears by it,” York tells me. “It’s really, I think, for an artist colony, a very appropriately artistic and literary syllabus.”
Sebastian Tan, the soon-to-be Palantir fellow, still plans to attend Stanford eventually. He’s concerned he will “spend another four years of my life learning a lot of technical and theological things, but not really be able to apply them,” he says, but he still sees the value in a liberal arts education.
Plus, Tan adds, his mom really wants him to go.
Julia Hornstein covers venture capital and defense tech for Business Insider.
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