I don't think the article misses the point. He never says Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg should never have dropped out. He's just saying that dropping out should be rare. For the vast majority of people, it's not the right thing to do, financially. The "right people" will ignore all the discouragement and drop out anyway. People like Sergey Brin & Larry Page will drop out, with or without Thiel's investment.
"It's better to discourage than to encourage dropping out, so that it's done only for compelling reasons."
That is probably precisely the part that Thiel disagrees with you about. Who knows how many would-be Brins and Pages couldn't afford the risk?
No, the entire premise is in the title: Don't encourage kids to drop out. If they want to do it, they'll do it, and good on them for it. The last paragraph even argues against "extreme points of view" which would suggest that interpreting the article as "they say drop out, don't do it" is totally wrong.
> Where might we be if some of the 'usual celebrity dropouts' hadn't dropped out?
Worthless speculation. We'd be somewhere different, yes, but no less interesting and no worse off.
If I had a great idea and an investor was $100k confident in the monetization of it, I would probably drop out, too. The author's whole premise is that dropping out is universally bad and should be discouraged, and that staying in school is universally good. Neither are true.
The article also misses the point: Where might we be if some of the 'usual celebrity dropouts' hadn't dropped out? What if they had said, "I'll get a real job first, then work on my idea." The world might look very different.
Non-Ph.D. entrepreneurs and academics can peacefully coexist.
EDIT: I concede to gxti that my statement about the author's premise is false. I stand by my other opinions: The scholarship is a neat idea and will not convince most people to drop out.