TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is providing 24 high school graduates with $100,000 each to work on their own projects for two years. He selected them based on their project’s potential to save the world.

The condition for taking the grant is that they cannot go to college. Thiel believes they can learn and contribute more by working on their own things rather than sit in class:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

In conversation and as a philanthropist, Thiel pushes his strong belief that innovation has stagnated in the U.S. and that radical solutions are needed to push civilization forward.

The “20 Under 20″ fellowship is one such effort. Thiel believes that the best young minds can contribute more to society by skipping college and bringing their ideas straight to the real world.

College, as a concept, has a tremendous amount of potential for fostering innovation; there’s smart people all around you, the ability to easily learn about different kinds of things you’re unlikely to learn about on your own, resources to research, and time (if you’re willing to make it) to work on things.

That’s incredibly beneficial, but schools tend to find ways to mess it up. Universities like to describe themselves as institutions that take in children and output adult, life-long learners who are prepared to do anything. For most schools, though, that’s bullshit; what they’re really doing is forcing students to take courses they have no interest in and learn how they can get through courses with as little effort as possible, while receiving the grade they desire. School, for most students, isn’t about learning—it’s about receiving a degree.

So, until schools evolve, programs like Thiel’s are a great idea. Some disagree, however:

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Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and a writer for TechCrunch and Bloomberg Businessweek, has assailed Thiel’s program for sending what he sees as the message that anyone can be Mark Zuckerberg.
“Silicon Valley lives in its own bubble. It sees the world through its own prism. It’s got a distorted view,” Wadhwa says.
“All the people who are making a fuss are highly educated. They’re rich themselves. They’ve achieved success because of their education. There’s no way in hell we would have heard about Peter Thiel if he hadn’t graduated from Stanford,” he says.

Oh, really? Yet we’ve heard about all kinds of people in technology that didn’t graduate from Stanford, or graduate from any other college, for that matter. We’ve only heard of them because they created something incredible.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both dropped out of college. Somehow I doubt they, and the world, would have been better off by completing their degrees. The reason is because people in technology care less about what degrees someone has and more about what they’ve built. That’s a good thing.

This, of course, isn’t for everyone. It’s for the kind of person who’s self-motivated, who’s dead-set on creating something worth creating, on doing something worth doing—not someone who goes to college so they can get a degree and work for the same company their entire lives and enjoy a stable salary, and has very little interest in expending themselves into something.

The problem is, that kind of job is disappearing. We don’t need reliable, boring and stable middle managers with no ambitions besides getting home in time for primetime TV anymore. They’re not contributing much of anything. We need people who see the world a little differently, who see connections between things no one else sees, and thus can create great leaps forward.

Those are the people who are going to be in demand now, and those are the kinds of people Thiel is looking for. Good for him. Universities aren’t fulfilling their role and I’m glad to see someone is trying to.