I don't think Thiel would disagree. He is talking about things that are not hard science/engineering.

Just because you need to educate yourself you don't need an education.

Thiel has no war against education. Nobody would argue against education. The argument is that there are better, or at least, alternative ways to get an education. That for some fields, the traditional college system is outmoded.

Education != college degree

Right, you don't need much education to successfully run a company and make shitloads of money from it, but you do need education (a lot, in fact) if you want to truly advance science or society.

You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking administrative and professorial class. When we outlawed IQ tests for employment, we became unable to train engineers and other high-IQ professions in house, as minds capable of doing these jobs are rare, companies need to pre-filter before investing resources. As universities are allowed to use such tests, we use education as a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, as we are outlawed from directly measuring these characteristics. Thus the education bubble.

Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering alternatives an act of war?

No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO, managers, etc.

> You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online.

That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online.

There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.

I think you're right that there is a sleight-of-hand in the modern higher educational system: given that most of the substantive knowledge is publicly available (e.g. I can download any textbook I want), they really offer something different than technical knowledge. I think that the real product is networks: if you attend a top university, you trade money to be placed with a bunch of very smart people with lots of social capital, and the credentials conferred upon graduation give you access to to other networks afterwards (professional, social, and more often than not, some hybrid of the two).

Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.

Agreed, that said universities could do things a lot better in many ways.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Twain