ca • reared

  1. reared to pursue a career as a primary objective in life.
  2. duped or screwed by a career, or by the pursuit of a career.
↪ Peter Thiel on the Higher Education Bubble

Brilliant insight by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, on the scam that is higher education in this country.

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Americans are conditioned to believe that higher education is the promise of a better future. “Do this and you will be safe,” is the mantra many cling to, but:

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

Comments

  • Watch Peter Thiel discuss Rewards for Students to Drop Out of College, Democracy Failing As a Technology, Libertarians and Women, and take questions during his interview (3/23/11)- http://f4a.tv/e8PHHL

    MonicaApril 12th, 2011

  • Careared says:

    “Do they want to know how I spend my days, or are they just inquiring into my work situation?”

    They want to know your job so that they know your social identiy/social status. Whether you are rising (so that they can join you and rise to greater glory along with you) or falling (so that they can either help you to regain your former glory or avoid you so that they are not tarnished by your descent into non-jobness.

    After all, in America job = social class = identity = intrinsic worth as a person

    JPApril 27th, 2011

  • Two minor differences:I don’t think the bnlaket statement that People are not getting their moneye2€™s worth on education is quite correct. A couple weeks ago I also suspected that this was the case and did a very primitive calculation, looking at the average college tuition from 1990-2009 and the spread between the average salaries of high school and bachelor’s degree in that period. What I found very roughly was an expectation of an 1800% return on a 4-year bachelor’s degree investment in the early 1990s vs. an 800% or so expectation in 2009. There are many shortcuts to my calculation, but, on average, the expected return is still far from zero. Now of course high earners skew the average spread and choice of major is critical, as is college name. Thiel is probably completely right in spirit, and many liberal arts majors are in for trouble, simply assuming that things will work out and the future will be like the late 20th century. If there were a way for me to short college tuitions, I would (selectively). Those numbers just seem to belong to the pre-2008 economy and haven’t caught up yet.I agree that a slow-down in productive technologies contributed to the credit bubble, but don’t think that story is orthogonal to the left/right narratives. It is very much a narrative of free-market apologists. It may have the advantage of being true, but it is not a politically neutral stance.

    RadharaniAugust 19th, 2012

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