Skipping College Is the New Dropping Out

Gen Z tech founders, conservatives are happier than liberals, and more in this week's digest.

Note: Next week there will be no digest due to travel, and likewise the following week in honor of the 4th of July holiday.

The Happiness Gap

Nate Silver posted an interesting graphic showing that conservatives are happier than liberals across the board. It doesn’t matter what demographic you look at.

This chart also shows how happiness does vary by demographic factor as well. More educated people are happier than less educated, and older people are happier than younger ones. It’s interesting that race and gender gaps in happiness are lower for conservatives than liberals.

Skipping College

Business Insider ran an interesting story about Gen-Z tech founders skipping college entirely.

Growing up, Tan believed the ideal path to becoming a successful entrepreneur was through Stanford (from which 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."

…

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, which says it has hired nongraduates 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.

Guild is blunt on his assessment of colleges: "My belief is that they're more like dropshipping 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. He argues that instead of forking over hundreds of thousands in tuition, 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. [emphasis added]

I’m all in favor of disintermediating colleges. My goal is that young people would not have to go to college in order to have a great career.

But we aren’t there yet. I notice in the article that we see people holding on to deferred admission to Stanford while they test the waters in tech life. They’ve got a fall back if it doesn’t work out.

Also, getting into a firm like Palantir provides an alternative credential that is legible to future employers or funders. I love the college as drop shipper framing. However, associating yourself with an existing high status brand is standard marketing technique. Choosing to make that brand Palantir rather than Stanford doesn’t change what’s going on.

I’m intrigued by the idea of reading the biographies of great founders. This is actually a Lindy move. In the past, studying the biographies in Plutarch’s Lives would have been a key part of a person’s education. This was a topic in my provocative podcast with classicist Alex Petkas.

Rebuilding America’s Small Towns

I always like to be able to tell positive stories, and what better story than one about the rebuilding of a small town fallen on hard times. In my latest column for Governing magazine I talk about a very interesting model in Van Wert, Ohio that’s being led by the local community foundation.

What Baker and the community foundation understood is that if something didn’t change, the town would stay on its trajectory of decline. Perhaps its greatest asset, its collection of historic downtown buildings that could never be recreated today, might be largely lost to decay the way the Home Guard Temple building had been.

In this environment, in a town that really needed investment, did it make sense to continue taking $100 million of the community’s money and investing it all on Wall Street? Van Wert clearly thought the answer to that was no, and the community decided to act. Baker says, “We were primed to own our destiny and to take a stand and say, ‘No one's waiting in the wings to save us. If we don't do this now, our community is not going to exist.’”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Sigma Game: Hypocrisy and Respect - One cannot exhibit the former and expect the latter

Johann Kurtz: When a progressive utopia burned, traditional gender role reemerged

Pirate Wires: Choosing Not to Have Kids Is the Real Quiet Quitting

The Atlantic: Conservative women’s lean-in feminism

Madeline: Dating in the Church - A perspective from a woman in Canada.

Gordon Brown: Parliament must reject the assisted dying bill - Brown is a former Labour prime minister and chancellor. He’s the son of a presbyterian minister, and while there’s little publicly said about what faith he might have himself, I think it’s reasonable to infer his background at least contributes to his views here.

NYT: The Mennonite Colony That Made a Deal With a Diamond Company - There’s a very stark contrast between how the Times treats tens of millions of migrants coming to the US vs. how they treat a mere eight white Mennonite families moving to Angola (a “colony”). Also interesting: I didn’t see any evangelical leaders and institutions jumping up to defend these immigrants.

Janan Ganesh: William F Buckley and the revolution that wasn’t - “He must have a shout as the most successful journalist ever..”

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from the Expat Prep Substack. I wasn’t familiar with it but it seems to be run by a person making preparations to expatriate if necessary. I have long said that the real indicator of American distress would be if significant numbers of native born Americans began to expatriate. I haven’t seen any indication of that yet.

New this week:

• Just Say "Thank You" - Don't self-deprecate when people give you a compliment.

• "The Market Doesn't Care What I Think" - We complain about the world, but the market proves our actions speak louder than our words

• My podcast this week is with sociologist Christian Smith about why religion became obsolete in America

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