The NCAA'' s entire idea of the amateur college athlete may be at stake in the courtroom.
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Exactly what do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison share? They all made billions of dollars in technology. And they all left college. Now, a wealthy entrepreneur is paying other technologically skilled youths to follow that very same path. Peter Thiel is paying them to drop out or at least to “stop out” of college briefly to work on their interests. He and his Thiel Foundation have announced the first group of what they call 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows. He states: “We selected individuals on the basis of a combination of having shown extreme passion about science and innovation then having the drive to try to bring it forward in the years ahead.” There are twenty-four individuals to be exact, because a couple of tasks include more than a single person. Among the youngest is Laura Deming. At twelve she began investigating ways to extend human life. Now, at seventeen, she has actually already graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eighteen-year-old John Marbach simply finished high school. He wishes to make use of Web devices to bring classrooms into the digital age. He plans to go to one term of college before he starts his fellowship. Each of the fellows will get one hundred thousand dollars over two years to continue their research study. They will also receive aid from specialists. Peter Thiel has a lot of experience with technology start-up companies. He helped develop the electronic payment system PayPal. He was likewise one of the first investors in Facebook. He himself is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School in California. But Mr. Thiel says college has gotten a lot more expensive than when he went to school twenty-five years earlier. “You now have individuals finishing with a quarter million dollars worth of financial obligation and they wind up needing to spend years or decades paying the debt off.” The Obama administration is pressing college. It says over the next 10 years, nearly half of all brand-new tasks will certainly need more than a high school education. However Peter Thiel says lots of young people pick college for the wrong factors. “Talented, high school, exactly what do you do? You go to college. Excellent in college, exactly what do you do? You go to law school … Higher education ends up being nearly by doing this for not believing and preventing thinking about exactly what you’re going to finish with your life.” He says the young people he is purchasing will, at least, gain experience to take back to school if that is what they decide to do. For VOA Special English, I’m Alex Villarreal.
(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 30May2011).
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