Next generation of economists compete in the National Economics Challenge
CNBC's Steve Liesman and Tanvi Anand, Mt. Hebron High School senior, and Mehin Pandya, Mt. Hebron High School freshman, join 'Squawk Box' to discuss winning this year's National Economics Challenge, how they got interested in economics, and more.
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Inside Silicon Valley's anti-college movement
Before flying from his home in Pittsburgh to Stanford's annual gathering of incoming freshmen in late April, Sebastian Tan downloaded what might be the top book on Silicon Valley's required reading list: "Zero to One," Peter Thiel's treatise on building the future. It's "probably the best book I've read, and I've only read a few pages," Tan tells me over FaceTime. Growing up, Tan believed that the ideal path to becoming a successful entrepreneur was through Stanford (where Thiel has undergraduate and law degrees). Lately, however, he's been taken with an ascendant idea in Silicon Valley, proselytized by teenage founders and billionaire tech executives alike: The real future builders skip college. "There's such an opportunity cost of going to college. In the tech world now, things are moving so fast," Tan says. "If you're in school all day, the world just passes you by." That nagging feeling led Tan, some new friends he met at Stanford's Admit Weekend, and another 500-plus of the country's top standardized test takers, to apply for an internship at Palantir, the software and defense tech company cofounded by Thiel. Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship — a paid, semester-long role with a shot at a full-time job at the end — implores 18-year-olds like Tan to "skip the indoctrination" of college and "get the Palantir Degree." CEO Alex Karp, who holds a PhD in neoclassical social theory, has openly derided higher education. "Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect," he said on CNBC in February. (Instead, Karp said, you should read "The Technological Republic," his new cri de coeur on the "role Silicon Valley should play in the advancement and reinvention of a national project.") In April, Tan accepted his Palantir offer and deferred his Stanford enrollment to the fall of 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," Tan says of his decision. "You're learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It's just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce." College dropouts have long held a mythical status in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg all spent some time enrolled at a university before leaving early, and they've driven countless other aspiring founders to follow suit. Today, a perfect storm of economic, political, and technological forces is driving young people — mostly men, as every non-college techie I interviewed happened to be — to circumvent college entirely. For one, higher education has grown prohibitively expensive: In 2024, the average federal student loan debt was just under $30,000 for those who completed a bachelor's degree, and all-in costs for some four-year degrees have now surpassed half a million dollars. At the same time, artificial intelligence and related vibe coding tools have made it easier to become a founder, prompting venture capitalists from YCombinator to Andreessen Horowitz to declare it "the best time in a decade for college students to start startups." As the Trump administration weighs stripping $3 billion in grants from Harvard and redirecting it to trade schools, the technorati are questioning what higher education is even good for. "I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs they need to have," Zuckerberg said on comedian Theo Von's podcast in April. Then consider the social media-fueled fixation on getting rich young and fast, and college starts to look less like a stepping stone than a detour. The impulse to forgo college completely is the latest expression of Silicon Valley's anti-elitism, shaped as much by Thiel's long-standing disdain for higher education as the Trump administration's attacks on the Ivy League. "Per the Roman dictum 'corruptio optimi pessima' — the corruption of the best is the worst — higher education is the worst institution we have," Thiel quotes Latin, the kind of thing you'd learn at a liberal arts college, in a May press release announcing the latest class of his fellowship that awards college-dropouts-turned-founders $200,000. Never attending college is becoming a thing at big tech companies like Palantir: The company says it has hired non-graduates in the past, too. The phenomenon is also sustained by a swelling stream of founders who bailed on higher education to start companies as early as high school. Whether this generation of techies run a company or write code, they've made a lofty proclamation: Real builders have never sat in lecture halls. In his commencement address to Stanford's graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs said he had started each morning of the past three decades by looking in the mirror and asking himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" If the answer was "no" too many days in a row, he'd change course. You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society? JC Btaiche, founder of Fuse Energy Like many of the young men I spoke with for this piece, JC Btaiche tells me he's "pretty obsessed" with the Apple founder. In high school, he mimicked Jobs's practice every day for almost a year, looking into the mirror by his bed. "Every morning I'd be, like, 'I don't want to go to school,'" he says. "Life is too short. There's strong examples of people who have not gone to college who have done incredibly well." At some point, he stopped showing up to most classes. After graduating from high school, Btaiche decided not to attend college and founded Fuse Energy, a nuclear fusion startup, when he was 19. "You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society?" He tells me about college professors. "You realize a lot of professors were not — just went to a postdoc, became TAs — not really qualified to be teachers. "For me, it's very important to respect who I'm learning from," he adds. Several people told me they'd rather learn from builders than ivory towered professors. Adam Guild read Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" in high school to reverse-engineer the founder playbook. "If I can study how they became successful, that is a fast track to getting that guidance from people that have done what I want to do," Guild says. "Versus getting a bunch of theory that was taught in an MBA program." Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. The experience emboldened him in 2020 to start Owner, a restaurant marketing platform, which closed a funding round at a $1 billion valuation in May. 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." You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long. Shawn Schneider, 22, founder of Eldil AI 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.) Throughout America, falling male enrollment rates suggest that a rising number of men don't see their place in a university classroom. In 2023, college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds was down 1.2 million from its peak in 2011; men accounted for 1 million of those missing students, according to the Pew Research Center. 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." Harvard economist David Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what's good for the company sn't always what's best for employees. 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.
