The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [127]
“I’m concerned that schooling has actually changed over the last few decades, in a way where going to school has become much more detrimental than it used to be. The big reason is that it costs so much more, and people accumulate all this debt.
“It costs something like a quarter of a million dollars to go to a good private college. The state schools are not as expensive, but the costs are going up even faster because of all the government cutbacks. If you end up with a hundred thousand dollars of debt, that will powerfully, significantly restrain the kinds of things you can do afterwards. You will have to take high-paying jobs in tracked careers, and you will not be able to do something entrepreneurial. You will not be able to do something in the nonprofit world. There might be things that are just fun, or that are socially useful—there are all sorts of things that are valuable, but do not have a high payoff. And those are all getting really constrained when kids are coming out of school weighed down with all this debt.
“It’s significantly different from the seventies and eighties, when it was almost free—it was like a four-year party, and then you could go on to do other things. Maybe you still should have done something right away after high school. But there wasn’t that much of a cost to going to college. At this point, there’s a much higher cost to it.
“The broader goal of the 20 Under 20 program is to start a conversation about the role of education in our society, and to get people to think more about it. I don’t think there’s a problem with people going to college. I don’t think everyone has to become an entrepreneur. But I think given the costs involved, it’s actually important for us to think about this stuff earlier, rather than later.
“One of the strange paradoxes about education is that it’s actually become a way to avoid thinking. Speaking about my own example—I did not drop out of college. I grew up in Northern California, I went to Stanford as an undergrad, I went to Stanford Law School—seven years straight through college. I don’t have any regrets about having done it—I learned a lot, I met some great friends in the process.
“But I do have regrets about how automatic it was. If I had to do it over again, it would have been good to think about it more. I really didn’t think about it at all. Formal education has become a way to be on autopilot, and not to think about what you want to do with your life.
“One skill that is true of nearly all successful people, particularly entrepreneurs, is learning how to build a team and work together with people. This is very removed from what people learn in school.
“Maybe you learn that if you’re captain of a sports team or something, but outside of that, most of the things you do in school are competitive in a purely individual way, where it’s just you against everybody else. And most successful businesses are not just one person—they are at least a small team of people. People with different backgrounds, different skills. One of the most difficult and key aspects of business is getting people to work together. Not just on a well-defined game, such as in a football team. But on the ‘infinite game’ of building a business. [Thiel is referring to a book called Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James Carse, which distinguishes between ‘finite’ games, where the rules are well defined and stay stable, versus ‘infinite’ games, where the rules keep shifting and changing as you go along. Carse and Thiel suggest that most of the important things you would want to accomplish in life are infinite games, not finite games.]
“It’s the kind of thing our supercompetitive school system is not actually very well geared to do. People always have this Darwinist metaphor for business, where you’re in this ecosystem,