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$100,000 to Drop Out of College

PayPal founder and billionaire investor John Thiel has offered up a new strategy to kick-start American entrepreneurship: paying students to drop out of college.

Thiel has awarded 24 fellowships of $100,000 to students who agree to drop out of college and pursue business ideas for two years. The students, of course, can always return to college. Thiel’s fellowships follow in the wake of a wave of research casting doubt on the validity of our nation’s “college-for-everyone” mantra. The Harvard Graduate School of Education released a study earlier this year, “Pathways to Prosperity,” that pushed for far greater emphasis on technical skills requiring a two-year degree rather than pigeon-holing students into four-year programs with questionable return-on-investment.

In the New York TimesBits Blog” Thiel questions our educational assumptions.

“We’re not saying that everybody should drop out of college,” he said. The problem, he said, is that “in our society the default assumption is that everybody has to go to college.”

“I believe you have a bubble whenever you have something that’s overvalued and intensely believed,” Mr. Thiel said. “In education, you have this clear price escalation without incredible improvement in the product. At the same time you have this incredible intensity of belief that this is what people have to do. In that way it seems very similar in some ways to the housing bubble and the tech bubble.”

Given the ever-rising cost of college and mounting research showing that niche technical skills are worth more in the job market than a four-year degree, one has to question the direction we’re taking education in Wisconsin. We’re cutting funds for Wisconsin‘s technical colleges and squeezing k-12 budgets when those are precisely the institutions that should be innovating to offer more technology education and apprenticeship opportunities. Is that helping Wisconsin’s young adults keep pace with the evolving job market?