$100,000 to Drop Out of College

Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and one of the first investors in Facebook, is proposing a controversial path toward more rapid innovation. Today his Thiel Foundation announced that it was giving 24 people under 20 $100,000 fellowships to drop out of school for two years to start a their own companies.

Some of the recipients are leaving first-rate institutions like Harvard and Stanford to take the fellowship. In a press release, the foundation's head, James O'Neill, said that in taking the fellowship they were "challenging the authority of the present and the familiar."

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed," he told Techcrunch. "Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus."

Full NPR article by Eyder Peralta here