Peter Thiel Compares Elite Education to a Night Club With a Long Line
Tech investor Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, told an Aspen Ideas Festival crowd Wednesday that while highly regarded institutions of higher education claim to benefit society as a whole, the ultimate worth of the degrees they confer is actually inextricably tied to deliberate, ruthlessly enforced exclusivity.
If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we’re going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you’re really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that’s got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It’s branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum.