For years, George Leef has informed us that college is oversold and presented evidence of a higher education bubble.
Don?t believe him? Perhaps you?ll listen to Peter Thiel, the man whom Bloomberg Businessweek says ?may be the world?s best-known venture capitalist?:
In Thiel’s view, the biggest threats to innovation emanate not from Washington but from a sector Americans tend to view as one of the country’s greatest strengths: higher education. His antipathy for its elite universities dates to his time attending one. In The Diversity Myth, Thiel predicted that unless they reformed themselves, institutions such as Stanford would face “massive and unprecedented displacement….New educational venues may arise and meet demands that are no longer being satisfied by the existing institutions.” Where once he subscribed to the idea that the system could be fixed from within, Thiel is now certain some students are better off opting out of it altogether. “A necessary condition for a bubble is that [something] is believed to be extremely valuable, but which very few people are thinking about,” he says. “And my only candidate for a bubble in the U.S. right now is education.” He continues: “People can’t do anything entrepreneurial or innovative or even nonprofit?anything that’s not safe and well-paying?because they have this mountain of debt. And so education is something that has become a retardant to technological innovation and progress, even though the common perception is the exact opposite.”
